Advertising a book with low sales

Hey,  

Today's topic of The Morning ACOS comes from, Randy, who asked, how do I advertise a low sales book?

This is a fantastic question and one I know many authors struggle with. So today, I'm going to break down how I would tackle this challenge.

Your book sells your book.

First of all, it's important to remember that any form of advertising or marketing is simply there to drive relevant traffic to your books.

Your book needs to sell your book. Conversion (i.e. sales) happens on your book product page. And the elements of your book product page that directly impact conversions are your:

– Book Descriptions

– Book Covers

– Reviews/Ratings

– Titles and Subtitles

– Pricing

– Look-Insides

I call these. elements of your book product page, your foundation. Without this foundation in place, no amount of advertising is going to sell your book.

And you need to make each of these elements of your book product page the absolute best they can be. I wrote a free growth guide on this very topic you can read here.

Start With Facebook Ads

Once you have your foundation dialed in, it's time to start driving traffic to your books.

The Amazon Ads algorithm uses sales history as a key metric when deciding if and when to show your Ads.

So, if you haven't sold many books recently (at least 2-3 per day for the past 1-2 months), Amazon Ads are going to be difficult to get moving, because you don't have much conversion data (i.e. sales and borrows) and Amazon is more interested in showing Ads that have a track record of making sales, because there's a higher chance of these Ads converting into revenue for Amazon and the author.

The Facebook Ads algorithm, however, isn't taking any sales history into account. All it's doing is driving as many clicks as possible to your book within your available budget.

And if you can start making sales from your Facebook Ads, this is going to improve your sales history, which will improve the performance of your Amazon Ads, because they now have more conversion data to work with and more inclined to start showing your Ads to more readers.

Bringing Amazon Ads into the Mix

Once you're making daily sales from your Facebook Ads, it's time to add Amazon Ads into the mix.

But start slow!

First of all, begin with an Automatic Targeting campaign to start gathering data.

Next, start a Category Targeting campaign to cast a wider net and show your Ads across 1,000's of books in relevant categories/genres.

Then, begin running your own keyword and ASIN targeting campaigns.

In the beginning, you may have to bid quite aggressively with your Amazon Ads to get initial traction.

If your Facebook Ads are consistently selling books each day, and your Amazon Ads start selling a few copies each day, the snowball effect of that is your sales history will continue to build, resulting in more organic visibility, sales and borrows, as well as better Amazon Ads performance.

There are of course many different nuances that go into this, but the above strategy is where I would begin.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

– Start with Facebook Ads to build up sales history

– Add Amazon Ads into the mix once Facebook Ads start converting

So, if your book sales are lower than you'd like to see them, I hope the above gives you a good starting point and will get you moving in the right direction.

To Your Success
– Matt