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I was emailing with Tim O'Reilly last weekend about the recent success of our Inbound Marketing book (on Amazon, it spiked to #17 overall and #1 in business), and he asked me what we had done to market it and what we would recommend to authors writing books. This is what I sent him back...
1. Remarkable
First things first, your book has to be remarkable. No amount of Marketing 2.0 mojo is going to get you to climb up the charts unless your book is worthy of the remark's of the Internet denizens on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, in blogs, discussion forums, etc. I "think" our book is remarkable because after 74 reviews, we are still sitting at 5 stars on Amazon. I can't find other books with that many reviews still at five stars (although I'm sure there must be some out there).
2. Content Factory
In 2010, it is not enough to just write a book and be done with it -- "build it and they will come" no longer applies even if you have a remarkable book. You need to build a content creation factory that lasts for a lifetime, with books providing the high points in that content process. While writing a new book, you should be blogging about your ideas and getting feedback from the marketplace -- get people to feel part of the process and they will help you promote it when it comes out. When getting ready to publish, you should increase the content production to include lots of blog articles, guest blog articles and an eBook or two. When launching, keep blogging, guest blogging, start speaking and do as big a webinar as you can muster.
3. Optimize
All of that content that you are creating actually needs to get optimized for three different places: search engines (SEO), social media sites (SMO), and Amazon (AEO). To see how your content does in terms of SEO and SMO, check out Website Grader. To see how your book does in terms of AEO, create an account for yourself on Book Grader and check out the information in there. The most important way for your content to rank in Google is the number of high-quality inbound links pointing to it, and it turns out it is the same thing for Amazon where you want as many high-ranking books in Amazon to refer to your page from theirs. The chart below from BookGrader shows the other books on Amazon referring to our book and their Amazon rank. Amazon ranks its 8million books once an hour with the top seller being #1 and the bottom seller being 8million.
4. Promote
You need to get good at promoting your content in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. If you have just dipped your toe in and not seen much mojo, go ahead and jump in up to your belly button. The key here is not to just chirp in these social media sites and not to sell your book too hard, rather it is to engage in the conversation and promote the remarkable content on your blog that will pull people in and eventually convert them into book buyers.
5. Reach-building
Think about each piece of content you create as an opportunity to increase your reach -- email addresses, blog subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans and LinkedIn group members. The more content, the better your content and the longer you've been creating content, the deeper reach you have. [It used to be about your email list, but now it is about your broader reach as more and more people are blocking out emails.]
6. Reach-nurturing
Once you have a big reach, you should nurture it with emails and social media messages to let them know about the upcoming book, your new eBook, your webinar, etc.
7. Analyze
Analyze which types of content (short blog articles vs. long blog articles vs. news-y blog articles vs. videos vs. eBooks vs. podcasts) are converting the most visitors and contacts (reach) on your site. Also analyze your sources (e.g. nurturing campaigns vs. Google vs. Twitter vs. Facebook, etc). Based on that info, double down on what converts, and pull away what doesn't convert.
Bonus Tips:
1. Amazon makes your book available 2 weeks before it is available in bookstores, so if you are planning a big launch, you might want to wait 2 weeks after it shows up on Amazon.
2. Amazon does not stock many copies of your book, so if you are good at inbound marketing, you will likely sell out. In a way, you almost need to train Amazon to stock more of your book. If we had it to do over again, we would have done our big concentration of force and mass launch about 4 weeks after it showed up on Amazon.
3. Concentration of force and mass is important. When you see it spiking, try to hit it hard. There are successive tipping points that you want to push through that give you more and more sales. For example, if you launch it and it doesn't do much, your Amazon rank will be really high (high is bad), you will not rank on any of their best-seller lists, and no other books with high ranks will refer to your book. If you do well, your Amazon rank will be low (lower is better), other books with high ranks will refer to yours, and you will start to show up on some of the best-seller lists. Our book hit a tipping point this last weekend where it was ranked #17 overall on Amazon and #1 business book on Amazon. Typically it ranks in the 300's and ranks #1-#2 in categories like Web marketing, ecommerce, and retailing.
3. We have put a considerable number of calories into trying to figure out actually how many books are sold every week and have determined that it is just really hard to get that number. After lots of furrowed brows followed by some deep breathing (in through the nose and out through the mouth), we are just giving up on trying to figure out how many we actually sold.
4. Negotiate as big an advance as possible as it provides a strong incentive for publishers to promote it for you.
5. Don't rely on your publisher to do all the heavy lifting -- do the stuff mentioned in this article if you want it to sell.
6. Thank as many people as you can without being cheesy in the book itself and mail it to all of those people when the book comes out. Your publisher can help you with the mailing.
7. If you can afford it, do something like Seth Godin did for a charity when it comes out.
8. If you want to sell a lot of books, release it in October. If you are just in it to try to be a best-seller, then release it the week after Christmas -- there's an arbitrage opportunity there.
Many thanks to David Meerman Scott who talked us into writing the book and taught us much of what we know about the book business, to Rebecca Corliss who helped us with a lot of the legwork, and to Shannon at Wiley. If you want to learn more about the step-by-step process of how to do this stuff, pick up our book (yes, that was a shameless plug).
- Brian Halligan
Inbound Marketing Kit
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