Today we’re going to talk about how to organize a book promo, and why it’s a good idea to learn the best practices of book launching. What is a book promo push? When does it make sense to start one? What can it do for you languishing sales? How do you take advantage of your backlist and re-energize your catalogue? These are just a few of the questions we are going to tackle in today’s episode.
This site contains affiliate links to products that we have used and love, and that we think may be of help to you on your authorpreneur journey. We may receive a commission on sales of these products, which is how this podcast stays independent and free of advertising. Thanks for your support! Click here for a full list of recommended tools and resources.
Books we mentioned in this episode
- Take Off Your Pants! by Libbie Hawker
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- Full Time Author: How to build, grow and maintain a successful writing career that you love by Eileen Cook and Crystal Hunt (coming October 2020)
- Silver Bells by CJ Hunt
- Lord of Time by Michele Amitrani
Curious Jar Question to answer:
Do you believe in writers’ block?
(Got a question we should add to the Curious Jar? Email ideas@strategicauthorpreneur.com)
Complete Episode Transcripts
This site contains affiliate links to products that we have used and love, and that we think may be of help to you on your authorpreneur journey. We may receive a commission on sales of these products, which is how this podcast stays independent and free of advertising. Thanks for your support! Click here for a full list of recommended tools and resources.
Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 032: Promo Planning for your Book or Series
Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. I’m Crystal Hunt.
Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani. We are here to help you save time, money and energy as you level up your writing career.
Crystal Hunt: Welcome to episode 32 of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about how you can organize a promo push for your books.
So we’ll talk a bit about what that is how do you go about organizing one? How do you track your results and see if it was worth it? And then how do you use that information to go on and plan something even better for the next round? Go round first though, quick shout out, we are hoping that you’re really finding the podcast helpful and if you are, we have set up a handy new button. You can click it and buy us a coffee, which basically means you can contribute a little bit towards the costs of keeping the podcast produced and distributed and all of that good stuff coming your way with no ads in it. That is our goal.
So if you’re willing to buy us a coffee and just say thanks for hosting the podcast, you can go to buymeacoffee.com forward slash sap podcast, all caps, all one word. And you should find us there. Or you can visit the show notes or the strategic authorpreneur website. And there’s a handy little button with a yellow cup of coffee in the sidebar that you can just click and it will take you right there. It’s pretty cool tech. So what have we been working on besides the, buy me a coffee button this week?
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele Amitrani: I’m actually so excited to speak about today’s book, Crystal. This is something that I wanted to read for a very long time. And I’m going to get in a second on what I’ve been up to, but again, this deserves the primary prime spot. So the book of the day for you folks, I can see this on YouTube is a Take Off Your Pants! Outline your books for faster, better writing by Libbie Hawker.
And this super small book is really, I think, one of the best book on planning, if you will, that I’ve read, Without taking anything out of the others. I found this to be very to the point, very straightforward and I actually read it twice and I … it’s the very first time that I basically took the time to take everything that I underlined and put it in a file for my reference in the future.
It’s really that good. And it’s basically, long story short if you’ve ever read Save The Cat it’s like the approach is similar in that regard, but I found it a bit more straightforward and, I actually tried this approach. I don’t think I’m quite yet there, meaning that I’m not being able to use it yet I’m still a pantser, more than 50% of the way but really, it is that good and it’s super simple to follow. I think like you can finish it in one sitting 100%. Again, Take Off Your Pants: outline your books for faster, better writing is really, that good. So that’s why I want you to take time to recommend you this book by Libbie.
And regarding Michele Amitrani what has he been up to? Keeping data straight, today we are going to talk about one subject that I really like and, in the past few weeks, the possibility to actually test it but as we will talk about that, with, like re-launching some things, numbers and data are the really King or maybe the King and the Eueen of the duel and it’s that much important. So that’s why I’m basically organizing, spreadsheets and that kind of stuff, because I want to make sure that every single time there is a publication or a promo push, I have the numbers that I can understand how that publication or promo launch went.
So I’m very much in keeping the other straight, period and I’m doing this on the side of the writing, of course, because I always have my 12 by 20 challenge in the background. So I’m super excited to talk about, today’s theme. But before that, I want to know Crystal what have you been up to?
Crystal Hunt: I am working on the Full Time Author book, which is a nonfiction book in the Creative Academy guides for writer’s series. And I am co-authoring that one with Eileen Cook. So we have been working together to make you basically a giant manual that has, how do you build a career out of your writing?
So it’s not just, how do you build the business side or how do you, sell your next book or how do you find an agent it’s this interesting mashup of building a career over time that covers all different areas of things and how do you do it in a sustainable way that is customized to work for you?
That has been really interesting as we work together to write that, just looking at, there’s options for Indies there’s options for traditionally published folks there’s options for hybrid, and really causing us to examine our own writing careers and how we want things to go forward. That has been an interesting kind of poking at me in the background to re-examine how I do things and setting things up for the next 15 years of my writing career. And at the same time I’ve been planning the holiday promotional activities and booking things for fall promos. So Michele and I are both very on topic this week with what we’re working on and what we were talking to you guys about.
That has been a really good way to just dig into that stuff and see how is that going to work and, teaching a master class this week as well on taking control of your online author profiles. So that all sent me down this rabbit hole of learning, which was not so much based on books this week, but I watched several documentaries or docu-dramas actually on Netflix.
So I watched one called the social dilemma, which is about social media and its impact on our mental health and the ways that social media controls our behavior and things like that. So from a psychological perspective, very interesting. And from the perspective of building an author business plan and an author career and a lifestyle that you want to maintain over time it’s been just an interesting thing to think about as I try to decide how much do I want to be on social media, if at all, how do I want that to fit into my business model? Where do I want to connect with people and really looking at my 80-20 alignment or how I choose my priorities?
Where’s the 20% of activities that are going to get me the 80% of return on that time invested? And really analyzing how does social media fit into all of that? And where do I want to really connect with the people who are reading my book? So that is really what I was up to. I watched a couple additional documentaries as well.
I watched The Greatest Hack, which is about how social media is used to control voting in our beliefs and our behaviors and all of those things. And I also watched one called The Minimalists because part of creating the ability to have a sustainable writer career and actually minimizing some of your expenses and expenditures and shrinking things down to really just what you need means that you have to make a lot less to be able to be a full time author. And so looking at how do you move that dial so that all very interesting watches, a lot to think about a lot to process and just reflecting on what that other career will look like moving forward and trying to build that in a sustainable fashion as possible.
So all about priorities and how those work. So let’s shift over, we’re going to talk about our promotional push organization stuff. Michele do you want to dive in and just do maybe a little case study recap for us of what it looked like to organize a promo push? Cause you just did one of these and what are some of the steps involved?
Organizing a promo push
Michele Amitrani: Absolutely. I’d love that. I think like one of the first things that we have to ask ourselves is like: first, like what’s the promo push and then when it makes sense to make one. So as Crystal was saying, I had the privilege of organizing one I’m using the word ‘privilege’ because really, it is that it’s the possibility for you to launch again, your book or to just push more sales in a specific timeframe.
That’s what basically promo push is. When does it make sense? I think it makes sense in a couple of different instances. One of those instances is, when you’re basically seeing numbers, languishing, going down, sales wise, that does make sense. But also if you are a different point in your author career, let’s say that you now have a trilogy, but the first time you really release and push the title, there were maybe two books or one book.
It makes sense then to release, to make a promo push of the first, second and third book. And there are a number of different strategies on how to do that, depending if you have a standalone or a trilogy, or if you have six books or eight, we’re going to dive in on that a bit more, but this is I think the most important thing to consider Crystal. It is: Why am I doing that? When does it make sense? And what it is basically it’s you trying to sell a bunch of books at the same time in a specific timeframe. And, again, Crystal was mentioning, my experience, and, what I did, now a few weeks ago … One year ago, it was a one year in a few months ago I published a Lord of Time, which was my first, book written directly in English Anglo-Saxon market. Now that book was published for the first time in on August 2019. So we’re talking about around one year ago and I decided for the one-year anniversary I wanted to do, a promo push.
So I decided to organize one. The first problem is that really I never ever had organized one of these book, promo push in a meaningful way meaningful. And I’m gonna explain to you why I’m saying meaningful. When I hint at the word meaningful, I’m saying sitting down for a couple of weeks, even more, and really understanding what do you want from this book push?
Because there are a number of things you can get. Do you want visibility? You want the velocity and volume in sales? Do you want maybe to garner as much new newsletter subscribers as you can? You want to push one book for free to get the segment and the third of the series to be bought?
What do you want to do? And my answer to that question was I just want to see what happens when I do my first book promo push. So I just, I was just curious to see basically how that would happen. But at the same time, my objective was of course, to sell as many books as I could and at the same time to learn as much as possible on the process.
So when does organizing a promo push make sense for me? It was the one-year anniversary that triggered that, I wanted to see it was an excuse let’s call it an excuse for me to try that. So there was no like strategic date attached to that. It was just plain curiosity. But one thing that, I want to say before passing the ball to you Crystal is that it really taught me a number of things and one of the things that, I think resonated the most with me, is not as much important how many books you are selling in that timeframe is the amount of experience you are getting off the experience of the book promo push. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but it’s basically, I went to … so (I think of this as) I paid a university and I basically enroll in a course how to make a book promo push, and I’ve learned a number of things. So the costs for that book promo push was like the cost for this university, invented course. I’ve learned a number of things, and we’re going to talk about that a bit more, but before doing that, I just wanted to ask you Crystal if there is any other instances for you when organizing a promo push makes sense and if yes, which one are those?
Crystal Hunt: Yes, there are a couple situations where I would use an organized promo scenario. So one common choices to do that when you’re about to release a new book. So if I have, let’s say it’s book five in the series that’s going to be a new release, I would organize a bunch of promo around the older books in the series building up to that launch so that when my book goes live there’s as many people as possible who are hitting the point of read through to be downloading it. If my author rank is pushed up and I am more visible on a sales platform, it’s going to mean more people are finding that new release and it also just helps generate some additional revenue and breathe some life into the earlier books in your series, which are all good things. For me often, it is around a specific new launch in that series. Sometimes it’s actually calendar based. So I have a lot of holiday romances and I have one book, Maybe that is actually happens right around Valentine’s day. And I tend to organize a promo around Valentine’s day.
I have some books that have a touch of magic, and so there’s a little bit of witchy action going on there and so I will organize a promo around Halloween. And so you can do themed holiday based promos as well and some people just do one every three months as part of their, a lot mentor allowance in the KDP program where you can, if you’re in KDP select, you can choose five, discounted days or seven free ones.
Do I have the backwards? I think I have that backwards.
Michele Amitrani: Yeah. It’s basically five days if you want it to be free, and seven days max if it’s a countdown deal.
Crystal Hunt: So yeah, other way around. So yes, anyway, you get one or the other, every three months inside the KDP select program. So you are able to offer discounts.
A lot of people will also set up a big promo campaign if they are going to have a BookBub featured deal, because one of the things about organizing and promotion is you want to try and create either a sustained kind of flat line of good sales over the longest possible period. Or you want to have an continually going up a path or on your book sales. So what will happen if you just have a BookBub featured deal as a giant spike in the middle of that and nothing else around it, the algorithms are not overly fond of that. They prefer to support consistent and sustained growth over time.
And so you want to make sure if you’re getting a BookBub deal or something like that you are planning some other promotional activities around that. And so it can be a good time to make sure you have organized some other promo sites to be sending out in addition to BookBub so that you can basically maximize on all of that.
Another time when you might do that is if you are taking a run at being on a USA Today bestseller list, you are going to need to sell as many books as you possibly can inside of a seven day period and you need to be wide so that’s something to notice you actually can’t become a USA today bestseller, if you are KDP exclusive.
So just be aware of that when you’re organizing your promotions, but a lot of people will organize a run at the USA today bestseller list around getting a BookBub featured deal, and then throwing everything they have at organizing a big sustained but concise, marketing period where they will have one week where they just throw everything they can ads wise and promo wise at getting as many readers as possible to download usually a heavily discounted book, during a specific week long periods so that they can try to hit that list.
Now, what did you check for when you’re trying to schedule a promo?
Things to check when scheduling a promo
Michele Amitrani: There’s so many things, too many things. I want to think of this as like a kind of a chess board and the way you set your pieces is going to depend on your strategy and on what you want to do and how you want to, let’s say beat your opponent.
So again, my first time objective was to learn, which is not, if you think about that, a really specific goal, but you will be served well if you have that goal in line and in mind. And this is basically referring to what we were saying before, when it makes sense to organize a promo push. What’s your goal? What do you want to get out of this? But once you figured that out, how do you really go about and organize it? So the way I did it was by sitting down and using a Google spreadsheet basically, and, trying and realizing which timing wise I was going to use for this promo push. Was it going to be three days? Five days? Fourteen days? Seven days? The choice in the end landed on the seven days and I’m going to explain why seven days and not fourteen or two. Once you decide the data, you also have to check to make sure that there are no conflict if you are, booking a promo side, for example, with a particular date. So let’s say that you ever organize a Kindle countdown deal, but for some reason, you have started that promo deal on September the fifth, when actually that promo runs and starts from September the fourth at a specific timeframe. Some of these book promo sites will remove your book if they check and your book is not discounted by that time. So that is why is that important for you to choose a data, pick a calendar if you are old fashioned guy like myself, really a people one and realize, okay, so this is what I want to do on September the fifth. This is what I’m going to do on September the ninth, and decide according to your plan. Organizing the promo push it’s so much more than that.
I basically told you about me organizing it with Google spreadsheet, but also Excel and the reason why I did that was because I’m a visual kind of person. So I need to see this stuff, in order to understand where I’m going and where I’m at. I can’t do that things from the top of my head.
I need to see that. And so what I did was, okay, I want to do this promo for seven days. And seven days is because I decided to do a Kindle countdown deal for seven days, which is basically the maximum allotted amount of time Amazon gives you, if you are enrolling in Amazon KDP select to promote your book.
The second question was like, okay, I know the week and I know the timeframe, how much is he going to be my book discounted for? So it was 3.99. I decided, okay, I want to make this a no brainer to anybody so I want to place it as a 0.99. So really it’s like an impulsive buy almost, and so I did that.
Because my decision was based on no-brainer they don’t have to think about that, they just need to click and also because I’m a virtually unknown person and so I giving them the possibility to discover my writing, was for me enough, if they just bought the book. The beautiful thing of making this choice is that once you have them in front of you, you can then organize how exactly you’re going to direct the traffic on every single day.
So the way I promoted my book on the first day, it’s completely different from the way I promoted it on day six and seven, completely. It seems like a completely different kind of book even, and we’re going to talk about that a bit later on, because before going over there, I wanted to ask Crystal because you brainwashed me into using the Excel and Google sheets, way more that those are important, but know it’s always seems to be like a step ahead of me on the organization tool kind of thing so I’m sure you might have something more to say before we move on about, actually organizing the promo push and choosing the days and the dates, what would you do?
Choosing dates for the push
Crystal Hunt: Yes. The first thing I did of course, was make a spreadsheet.
So I always use my calendar program and a spreadsheet to plan all of these things. Now, lucky for you I know everybody does not have the same passion for organization that I do, but we have put in the show notes the link to the spreadsheet template that you can actually use to plan your promo and to track all of your results and all of your submissions and everything else to the sites that you’re applying to be part of.
So check the show notes, download the resource, and then you can customize that to fit your own personal needs but that is a really helpful place to start. You are going to make a lot of different decisions during this planning process, and you’re going to have a lot of moving pieces to track, and you’re going to have some things that you need to keep track of date wise and so it’s really important to make sure that you do have it all written down. It only takes you forgetting one little piece to make it all, not count for anything. And so it’s really important, you don’t want to waste your money and you want to get the maximum bang for your buck that you can. And so that’s one of the ways to do it is by staying organized.
But what you have to do first is decide what kind of a promo are you going to do? Are you going to offer your book for free? Are you going to offer your book for 99 cents or 2.99? If it’s a box set or a longer book or a nonfiction, the price points are all a little bit different and how do you decide which is the better option? One of the things that you can use to decide is looking at what are your goals? Are you doing it to build revenue from that specific book that you are selling? If that’s the case, then you probably don’t want to do a free promo if there’s nothing else for them to read and buy after they finished that one, because you won’t actually earn any money off that.
So that is a different proposition. It is the first book in a series and your goal is to attract new readers to your series that will hopefully buy book two and three and book 17 eventually, then you may want to do a permafree or do a free promotion, as your primary focus. One thing I have to say I have noticed after following a number of promo sites and also doing a number of promos myself, is that you get way more uptake when it is a free book.
So if what you’re looking for is volume or new eyeballs and new readers into your book series, then doing a free promo is definitely the way to go. If you are running and promote to try and get a whole bunch of people, to read your book and to get some reviews, then you probably want to run a free promo because what you need is people who don’t know you to go ahead and get the books, right? And they aren’t going to take a chance on somebody they don’t no for those higher price points, which it sounds ridiculous to refer to 99 cents is a higher price point but when you are on a deal site where everything is either free or 99 cents, the 99 cents ones are expensive. And what that means is that people are going to scan through the deal email, they’re going to download all the freebies and often, they just don’t get to the ones that they have to purchase because you get an email every day from most of these sites and you can download dozens of free books a day.
So really if what you’re looking for is free books, you’re not as likely to choose the purchasing option. And so I have always found effectiveness wise because I have a series that doing the free push was much more effective and combining it with either a new release, which was at a more regular price, or combining it with a discounted price across the series, which is bringing me to something else that’s very relevant, which is there is a relatively new, it’s been around for a couple of years, but a lot of people didn’t know it existed and I’ve actually not tried it yet so I’m excited to take it for a spin, but David Gaughran in his course Starting From Zero, does a great job of breaking down how to organize a promo, which is using the series promo functionality that some sites are offering, which is where you can promote an entire series.
So if you have, let’s say multiple books, let’s say you’ve got five books in your series. Book five is gonna be a new release, maybe books two, three, and four are discounted and book one is maybe if per permafree or on for free for a couple of days, you can actually push traffic to your series page, and people can grab your entire series at once, which is effective for a number of reasons.
One being there aren’t 297 ads for other people’s projects on your series page. So that is attractive from an attention keeping standpoint and also if people buy a bunch of the books in your series at once, they’re much more likely to read through the books and not just leave them languishing on their reading device with a whole bunch of other things that they downloaded for free and may never get around to, because what we all know is we want them to read our books, but even more, we want for them to join our mailing list from the link at the back of one of the books that they loved and we want them to leave a review on the books that they loved and people will not take those actions if they never get to the point of actually reading them. So if you can convince them to buy more than one at once, then your chances of making that work for you are much better. One of my favorite strategies for doing this is actually doesn’t even require a promo site you can do it just using your own mailing list and I have what I call complete your collection a week, a couple of times a year, where I make all of my books, 99 cents usually before I bring out a new release. So I’ll make everything 99 cents and I’ll say, okay, if you’re missing anything in this series, grab it now.
And then people can buy what they’re missing for 99 cents. Then I do a little follow-up a couple of weeks later that saying, Hey, if you grabbed some new books and he likes them, you could leave a review over here, and then I organize a promo site push around the new release time once I’ve boosted up all the reviews on my books and I have everything just the way I want it, because what you will learn very quickly is that if you don’t have a lot of good reviews on your books yet, if you’ve got a new title that doesn’t have too many reviews, you either won’t get accepted by the promo site because a lot of them require a minimum of 10 to 2o and a half or four, a four or four and a half star reviews as a starting place you just won’t get accepted if you don’t have those. And even if you do get accepted, people won’t really click and buy your stuff if they don’t have that social proof that says a lot of other people liked it.
So just be aware that before you are ready for a promo, you need to make sure you have maximized your sales process, so your blurb needs to be on point, your cover needs to be excellent and on genre and ready to convert people to click through and check out what your story is all about. And you really need to make sure that those reviews are there and solid.
Now let’s say I have all that in place, I’ve got my reviews, I’m feeling good about everything I’m feeling ready to go. How do I find sites? How do I even know where to submit to and which ones are good?
How to find sites and know which ones are good?
Michele Amitrani: So there are a couple of things you can potentially do. One of those things is what I do is following the people that suggest the best site because they try them.
So there are a couple of, gentlemen that we have mentioned more than once, like David Gaughran and Nicholas Erik boat. They have sections on their website where they keep constantly a list of promo sites that they tried them and they keep it updated. So when I had to organize my promo, I went there and I was trying to see which one of these promo sites would work for me.
This is the one of the way you can find it. Another way you can find it, if you can go on a forum or Facebook group and ask around, just ask other people: look, there is this Book Barbarian. I never heard of it, but I know that you write fantasy, have you ever used it? And actually you’re going to get a lot of different kinds of answers.
[00And I will say from the average down of that answer, you will get a pretty good idea on how many downloads you could expect at particular price range that you have that book, Don’t trust too much I would say, what they say these promo sites on their website because it’s not always true and I can say that because they experienced, a couple of times.
So ask your peers what they thought of that, particular promo sites. Because the other thing that changes very fast, except for BookBub, probably, is that these promo site efficiency, It changes on a weekly to month basis. So what worked five months ago doesn’t work that today. Again, with the exception of the king. That seems to work every single time, at least you’re going to break even with that.
That’s basically the vibe that I got from the people that I ask. So basically it boils down to do your homework, but I would definitely say go over a website like the David Gaughran one and Nicholas Erik’s because these guys, they keep those lists updated. Ask around, the third thing and this one is the one day is going to be a bit more expensive, but it’s also the most important for you is to try. So once you have gathered all the data, you just have to pull the plug, you have to try it. You have to see how it goes. And so I did that and I now know with data in my hands, which one of these promo sites worked for this particular book, that was a Lord of Time, in my case. You will never know 100% before never, ever. And another thing you will not know is that maybe something happened in the week you booked your promo side, maybe I dunno. For example the forests in Los Angeles get burned out or something like that, it’s happening and so it gets the attention of people.
Those things are you can’t control. What you can control is the data gathering and also the asking the bit. And I will say for me, these three are the three main sources of reliable ways of finding promo sites. Do you have any more of the Crystal?
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think there are a couple more really good breakdown articles that just list a whole bunch of options. So be sure to check the show notes, we’ll put links to the best ones that we refer to ourselves. I think it’s really important to always go for the most genre specific options that you can. You’re really trying to be conscious of what are you doing two you’re also bought when something gets sent out to a whole lot of people. You want to make sure that it’s a relevant to your audience. The closer the matches, the more likely you are to sell enough books or to give away enough books to really make that worthwhile for you. We did gather up a whole bunch of different promo sites and put them into the planning spreadsheet for you.
So one of those pages in that sheet is a huge list of potentials, but go through them, they are not in order of preference you need to go through and pick out the ones that you think are the best fit for you. The prices for the promo sites range a lot. So I think that’s something to really think about as you’re committing is what is your budget for your promotion?
And what are your goals in terms of number of people that you want to reach? You might want to test with some of the lower priced ones before you send out to one of the larger ones to make sure that your cover and your blurbs and your number of reviews is actually converting to sales. Some are free. If you have a free book, some don’t charge you at all to be included. You just have to apply sometimes a week or two weeks or three weeks or even a month or two beforehand so you do need to do a bit of planning in advance, but for the ones that you’re going to pay for it, you might want to do that one of the ones where it costs 5 or $10 first, before you build up to the, some of the more expensive. There are lots that are in the sort of 40 to a 100 dollars range. And then of course there is BookBub, which is the, I’ll call her the queen of the book promo world. And it might cost depending on your category as much as $600 to $1,200 to be featured as a feature deal. And those are for free.
The good thing is there is a chart on the BookBub featured deals that actually tells you exactly how many readers are in that sub category. You can choose which market you’re applying for, and you can see what the average number of downloads is for a free title or a 99 cent deal in your category.
And that will really help you to figure out, how would your book do and how much could you expect to make back and how all of that works. But you do have to submit to BookBub, there are lots of rules about how you go about doing that and when, and I think most authors talk about being rejected about 40 times for every time that they’re accepted.
So do not be heartbroken if you do not get this on your first try, you can resubmit, I think once a month and assuming you have gone through and made sure you actually fit the criteria, then you should be applying on the regular assuming that is part of your strategy until your moment arrives. Now, how many should you use?
How many of these different sites should you include enter promo Michele? What are your thoughts on that?
How many sites should you enter for a promo?
Michele Amitrani: I would say, for my specific case immediately when I decided to design this promo was I needed to have a budget. So for me, that was the, I think the best thing that I did, because like with that number in place, after that I can start taking decision.
So my budget in this case was very small just 200 Canadian dollars and I couldn’t go over that. The number that I use, I didn’t use it on top of my head. It’s just, It’s just the same number that I spent one year before. That was the decision. That is exactly how much I spent. I wanted to see if there would have been a difference in revenue and in downloads, and that was useful because then at the end I could actually do sort of A B testing, not perfect, of course, but something that gave me an idea of how that would work in a bigger scale.
So this is, I will say something that is important for you to consider: there is no right number. It’s just what you can afford at the particular time in your career and I will say when you are organizing this promo, you are, the maximum thing that you can do is an educated guess.
You will never know for sure how many downloads you will have. So one of the other things that kind of saved me was reminding me my yearly mantra, which is over there, even written on my whiteboard that says: have zero expectations. And I think this was especially true with the promo, because I was expecting more downloads than the first time. It actually turned out to be a bit less, but I made a bit more. So not having expectation or at least where human, we always have expectations, but have less expectation, helped me keep my mind cool. So when I started seeing, okay, this is not accepting what I expect but it’s fine because I should remember that I can control the number of downloads.
You can just control how many books sites you of course apply to and how many of them they accept you and then you can spread the, spread them out in that week, five days of three days. But to Crystal’s question, how many you should submit to? Again, I stick to my previous answer as many as you need.
In my case, I booked half a dozen promo sites, because that’s what I could afford, but that doesn’t mean that my promo effort ended with that. I used the promo side as one tool. Then I use them in combination with other things, for example, my Facebook page and my newsletter and forum and writer’s group, that was part of. So I created an integrated promo push and the traffic came from four or five different venues, not only the promo sites and actually one of the most beautiful things was seeing that the most of my downloads didn’t come from the book sites at all. It came from the newsletter at the time that I wanted them to come. And I showed Crystal my backend dashboard one of my strategy was from day one I wanted to try Nicholas Erik’s strategy of increasing sales.
And that was awesome to see how I was able to achieve that. So if you see the snapshot of my seven days, you will see that it’s except for the first couple of days, it’s steadily increasing. And that’s because I was able to direct the traffic at the moment I wanted to, because I booked the stronger promo site at the end of the book promo and because I reminded my newsletter that the deal was about to end, on the last day. So you can actually have the power, to redirect the traffic when and how you want to, if you have tool like a newsletter we didn’t discuss about that a lot Crystal, because we already spoke about your sector a number of times before, but I just wanted to say that was maybe one of the best teaching that I add from this experience: your newsletter it’ still the most important asset when it comes to making sure that your people know when they have to buy that book. And why am I saying all of these, to you now? You will recall that I said that, I was curious to see this promo push, how it will go. And the reason was because I was trying to check this strategy by Nicholas Erik.
And actually I saw that working in a way I didn’t realize possible. One of the things that happened compared to one year ago is that thanks to this strategy I was able to get Lord of Time on a higher chart position than one year ago, even though as you know when you just, publish a book, you have more visibility thanks to the 30, 60, 90 period timeframe. I basically went over that and I prove that if you are diligent and you do your homework and you use that tactic, that strategy, you can actually see your book climbing up the chart and one of the best results that I got was that, with a Lord of Time, this is not like big numbers, but just because I want to illustrate with the most transparency that I can.
One year ago with Lord of Time I couldn’t breach even the first 22 thousands on Amazon US. But this time I was able to break that wall and reach the first 19,000. Again, it’s not a lot. We’re talking about 20 to 22 books per day. It’s basically nothing, but it’s something that proves you, that if you are strategic about this, and if your objective is visibility, you can nail that down.
And this is proven even better because on Amazon UK, I was actually able to get Lord of Time for a day or something like that on the number one of the Christian Fantasy Chart. And that’s, again, something that never happened before. Again, this is not to say that it’s a great achievement, but it’s something I was not able to achieve one year ago because I was strategic about the way I stacked my promo sites, newsletter and sources.
One of the things that I actually wanted to ask you for is, so before I forget, I said like a couple of ways you can and should do, you should go about this promo site strategy kind of stuff. But when you go about, and, organize the promo push, how do you basically understand, I have to do this on the one, two, three, and four.
How do you keep all of these data straight without getting crazy? Because we spoke about revenues, keeping data, we spoke traffic, about charts. It’s already five things and I didn’t even get started. Like I don’t want to get them confused so your job is to make their life easy.
Crystal Hunt: So that’s where the spreadsheet comes in is there are columns for each day, there are sections for each day and you can fill in all the information. What you are trying to do is achieve that stable or rising kind of curve that we talked about. And so one way to do that is by making a bit of a math puzzle about what is your anticipated reach for the different channels or promo sites that you’re using on each of the days.
And so you are trying to balance that out a little bit. So let’s say you have four promo sites. One says, they’ll get you a hundred thousand people, one says, they’ll get you 200,00o says 300 says 400 you want to match those up so that you’re getting roughly the same amount of reach for each of the days.
Or if you have, maybe a couple of the promo sites are much more genre specific than others, and that usually will indicate you’re going to get more uptake on those ones. So you may want to put them later in your promo. And that may also help if you’re trying to set your also boughts. One of the things I didn’t mention is one of the reasons to run a promo like this is if you’re also boughts got scrambled, maybe you released your book and you didn’t even know what else bots were or why you should care.
And you told all your friends and family so now you’re also bots for your, fantasy novel have like, how to cook pasta and how to speak Italian and all of these other things in them that are not necessarily genre appropriate also boughts because your friends and family love you, even though they don’t usually read your genre.
So if you’re trying to fix that and clean that up, you can use a carefully targeted promo adventure to actually try to get the right readers in enough volume to override your initial also boughts which we’re not going to teach Amazon who was the right audience for your book. So that’s another reason why you can use it and if you can use this spreadsheet to help you do that, to figure out which places to start with when, and I think there’s a couple different ways to use these, and I have the first time I did, I actually did a bunch of promo, I have a Permafree first in series. Silver Bells is free and has been since like 2014, but I can still make it work for me by testing out promo sites with it.
If you’re testing to see if sites are effective or not effective and how well they work for you probably want to do that one at a time, because if you have two or three sites scheduled for a single day, you are not going to know which sites worked for you. So if testing and data gathering is your primary purpose you might want to schedule them as what you think will be the least effective to the most effective cause you want to be gradually building over time, but maybe you spread it over two or three weeks if you’re dealing with a Permafree book and you slowly build up that organic traffic and you just make notes and maybe you schedule one every two to three days because not everybody opens their email the same day. And then you can take notes of which ones are working for you and then when you go to organize a big push to help with a launch or something specific, you’ll have a better sense of which of those sites are a good fit for your audience and which ones resulted in how much response from your folks. So that is really helpful.
Also when you do get to the point of having a big list, you may actually want to spread out your own mailing list over time. Because what I discovered when I tested all these different sites, it was very early on so I didn’t have as many reviews as I have now and my covers were a little bit more off genre at the time. What I found was I got decent uptake, but not huge from the promo sites, but my mailing list action was very good. And so that sort of skewed everything. So you may want to spread out your mailing list over time. And remember also, just because something didn’t work two years ago or last year or even three, three months ago, if you have 30 more reviews now than you had when you last tried it might be worth giving it another shot. So don’t give up if it doesn’t work the way you hoped the first time focus on what can I learn from that experience? Make notes for yourself of exactly what happened and what you would do different next time, because you can pretty much guarantee you won’t remember it clearly when it comes around to trying that again and really just keep moving forward and keep experimenting, and if what you discover is that the promo sites don’t work for you and your newsletter list is gold then you pour all of your energy and your budget into growing your newsletter list. So resources are available at strategicauthorpreneur.com.
Come visit us, find the episode, and you can download that magical spreadsheet and you’ll find the links to all the resources that we do talked about as always, and make sure you get yourself on our mailing list because each week we’ll send you out just one thing to help you along your journey. But before we go we have the curious jar, which is sporting a fine purple ribbon now, which is a pretty serious upgrade from last time. I am going to stick my hand in here and you are going to tell when to stop.
Do you believe in writer’s block?
Michele Amitrani: Stop.
Crystal Hunt: Okay. Wait one word to put the jar. All right. Okay. Do you believe in writer’s block? That is our question for this week. Do you believe in writer’s block?
Michele Amitrani: I have the answer to that. The answer, my answer is no, with a capital N and O. NO. I never did believe that I. I don’t remember exactly which author said this, so I’m not gonna quote anybody, but I think this person said, ‘the writer’s block doesn’t exist. It was invented by a guy in California who didn’t know how to write’. I think, went away something like that. I’m not sure why from California maybe he didn’t like folks from over there, but yeah, basically what I’m saying is I don’t believe there is something like that. I do believe, writing is a muscle and I know Crystal has a bit of a different opinion on this.
For me, I should say. For me writings it’s like training a muscle. So if I don’t do that every single day, I know that I’m going to get less fit. So for example, yesterday I didn’t write and so I’m feeling it. I don’t like it. It’s a feeling I really, I can’t, I can’t put a finger on it, but it’s I feel a bit more, for example, I like to gym a lot and I want to train and workout. When I don’t do that, I feel like I missed out on something.
But I do know that there are other people, for example, binge-writer, they will write like a lot more than what I write on a daily basis, in maybe a week or in a month. So what I usually do on average, I would write two to three hours per day, consistently always, no matter what, except for like yesterday and a few other days, or if I’m sick. But, I don’t believe in the writer’s block because there is nothing like that.
There’s nothing like that. Writer’s block is something like” this is the pen, now I can’t write, but that’s impossible. You can write shit. Sorry about the word, but you can still write, there is no block nobody’s blocking you from writing. And that’s something that, even, like the fantasy author, Neil Gaiman said something similar.
He said a lot of people saying I’d rather block. I can’t write, what do I do? There is no such thing. You can always write something. You can write an email. You can write a Facebook post, if you have eyes and you have a hand you can’t have writer’s block, that’s basically my opinion on this subject.
You can have a moment in your life in which you don’t have ideas or fresh ideas. That’s why I like to challenge myself and writing different genres when I can and if I can. But I said this many times in the past, at least for me, writer’s block is an imagination and, it’s an excuse to be lazy again. not talking about you to care about me. If you have ever listen to me say something about writer’s block in that moment, I’m being lazy. I’m not doing my work. So there’s, that’s basically the answer to the question for me. What do you think Crystal?
Crystal Hunt: I’m going to answer this as a psychologist. So I think that writer’s block is a term we use for a syndrome of other things. It is not one thing. I think it is an easy answer for people, like you said to point to: Oh, I can’t read, I have writer’s block, but I think in order for that to be useful, we actually have to look at what’s going on.
So it may be that you have fear around finishing a project because of what that will mean in your life if you do. It may be that you, you are feeling stuck because you feel like you should be prioritizing other things in your life because of what society or your friends or your family tell you’re supposed to care about and be working on.
It may be that you are actually physically and chemically burnt out because burnout is a real neurological state of being and, burnout can come from other areas of our life that spills into writing. I think we shouldn’t use it as a reason and to feel bad and constantly harp on the fact that we’re not writing, but it’s an indicator that you need a break. If you are actually stuck and you are burnt out, then in order to heal sitting there feeling bad about not doing what you think you should be doing, is not how you get out of that.
So I think that’s something that’s important to keep in mind is that if you have had, or trauma or loss or other things going on in your life, and you have reached a point of clinical depression or actual chemical burnout, that you need to look at how to heal yourself first, and then you can come back to writing.
But I think it is really important to be aware of it from a health perspective, if it’s like: Oh, I’ve got writer’s block is just a really good excuse to not do something that’s a little bit different from somebody who has maybe made a career of this, been doing it for years and has hit a wall because I do think that is a real thing. And something that we don’t often talk about as writers is that you have so many parts of your creative process and so much that goes into feeding the well. There will be times when you are not actively writing and that is okay. You don’t have to be producing every single day to still be a writer.
You may be in an information-gathering phase, you may be in a world building phase and that is all right. So I am the not so strict parent when it comes to this, because I don’t write every day and I don’t believe that you have to write it every day to be a writer. I do have 40 books so obviously I do get around to the writing at some point when the moment is correct but I do think it’s important for people not to spend all of their time, sucking the joy out of being a creative person and feeling guilty or bad, or like you’re doing it wrong if your process is different from someone else’s.
So I do believe in things that cause us to not be able to write in particular moments.
Do I believe in writer’s block as the answer to all of those things? No, because I don’t think it’s helpful. I think it’s like diagnosing somebody as ‘sick’ is not useful because we don’t know what caused it, we don’t know how to help them, we don’t know anything about what would be useful to help them move forward, but I do think it’s useful to use as a conversation starter about, okay let’s dig into why you think you’re, we’re stuck. Let’s look at that. Is it really that you don’t want to be a writer? And that’s okay too. Is it really that you don’t want to be a writer as a job? Because let’s face it, that’s just fine.
You can be a writer as a hobby and love it and do it whenever you feel like it, just like putting, picking up a knitting project which is different from having it as a full time business, so it’s really good to clarify exactly why you want to be a writer and what role you want to have that take in your world in your financial situation, in your business model.
But yeah, I do think it is an interesting discussion starter for sure and guaranteed to divide every group of writers you ever throw into a room and sparkle all kinds of interesting discussion, to find out. So your mission should you choose to accept is in your next writing group or when you gather with other writers online ask them, if they believe in writer’s block. And we would love to hear if you believe in writer’s block, so you can share your answer to the question in response to the newsletter that comes out or anywhere in the comments that you have listened to this show. Yeah.
Michele Amitrani: And also for show notes, links to resources that we mentioned and coupons or discounts on the tool we love, please visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com also remember that, as any kind of venture from creators, we do, like seeing our work reviewed. So if you can do that for a podcast in any of the platform you’re listening or watching to us, we will be forever grateful.
Crystal Hunt: Be sure to subscribe. So you don’t miss out on our next episode where we’ll be talking with Lyrebird developer, Jose Sotelo, who is going to take us behind the scenes of our robot voice doubles as we affectionately refer to them. So we will see you next week.
Michele Amitrani: See ya!