Wondering how you’re going to increase your book sales? You’ll get no cheap marketing tricks here. Joanna Penn of Creative Penn joined me to share hardcore knowledge nuggets that you have probably never heard of before.
While you may have positioned your book to promote your personal brand, have you used it to properly support your business? Your books can become multiple streams of income if you work them the right way. Here are six tactics to sell more copies and make more money off your books!
1. Watch Your Length
If you want to sell books as an income stream, one trick is to have lots of shorter books. You can create more digital shelf space and niche down with SEO book titles by doing this. Instead of writing one magnum opus, cut your ideas down into smaller books around 20,000-30,000 words. You can write more, get better SEO, and interest your audience with this tactic.
When you have shorter books, a series is a good idea. While commonly used in fiction, you can use this tactic in nonfiction as well. Using a series field means that when people buy one book in the series, they are more likely to alert the Amazon algorithm to recommend the next book in your series.
2. Optimize Your Title
Amazon is essentially a search engine for people who want to buy something. The best way to look for nonfiction book titles is to use your normal keyword search and then, search for these keywords in the Amazon Kindle books section. You want to make sure that your titles are keyword specific within Amazon to get the traffic you should be getting. If you have old books that aren’t selling, you can re-brand them with better keywords.
3. Create Box Sets
You may remember getting a box set of print books as a child. The ebook box set should be equally memorable. While some people buy individual books, binge readers will demand a box set, and it’s quite a different market. Drag a few books in a series together, rebrand them, and you’ve got another option on Amazon aimed for the box set audience. Even if you discount a box set, you’ll make more money per sale than you would have if someone just bought one book. You can also do this with other authors. Join with some published authors on a similar topic, and you can create a box set without writing all the books yourself.
4. Don’t Forget Backlist Books
A lot of people think you can only hit one of the big bestseller lists when your book is launched. The truth of the matter is, you can hit the list even a year or two after your book comes out as long as you get enough sales in a week-long period. It’s easier to hit the list with a previously published book because promotion tools like BookBub will only take your book if you have a certain number of reviews.
5. Rethink Print
This is the year that beautiful print is going nuts. With print on demand, your customers will order a print book, and one copy will be printed and sent to them. You just get the money! Think about getting print books for all your books to take advantage of this easy way to please your print readers. Unfortunately, bookstores don’t like to buy print on demand books. They generally want a wholesale price. To get around this, you’ll want to turn to IngramSpark. They are used by some of the biggest publishers in the world because their database is what bookstores and librarians use to search. If you use a press name when you do this, people won’t think you’re self-published. You can seriously double your sales just by being on this platform.
Are you an author? This is the year that beautiful print is going nuts! Think about using a print on demand service to please your print readers. #Youpreneur #BookMarketing Click To Tweet6. Know Your Audiobook Customer
One of the challenges you’ll find with audio books is pricing. Even if you self-publish your audiobooks, you have little control over price. Audible is run mainly on subscriptions, so you have to think about how much people pay for a subscription each month. The price of your audiobook is dependent on how many hours it is. The secret is, if you have audiobooks over 8 hours, your price will match the expectation of the Audible user. You can also create box sets for your audiobooks and make a profit here. The strategy for making more money from your book in its audio version is as simple as thinking about how much your audience spends per month versus the price of your book.
Chris founded Youpreneur® in 2015. He is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author of the bestselling books “Virtual Freedom” and “Rise of the Youpreneur”. He hosts our weekly podcast, Youpreneur.FM, as well as our annual conference, the Youpreneur Summit. Chris is based in Cambridge, UK.
