Note: You have voted with your feet. This is the final issue of my Book Marketing Tip of the Month. Thank you for your support since 2007. I will continue to send announcements of interest, such as where I’ll be speaking and people who want to offer you things of value, but for more of my book marketing wisdom, I suggest purchasing a copy of my award-winning seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers.

Lessons From a Book Launch, Part II

The recent launch of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green was my second time mounting a campaign to get online sales in a concentrated timeframe; I also did this in 2003, with the release of Principled Profit.

And much has changed in seven years. Back then, Amazon.com was a lot younger, and was moving a whole lot lower volume of books. It took a relatively small number of sales (low three figures, as best as I can determine) to break into the Amazon Top 100. I got all the way to #83 back then, and #12 for business books. As best as I can figure, that campaign seven years ago put my book in front of about 200,000 people.

And back then, the industry noticed even a one-day spike on a single retail site.

Not anymore. Over a nine-day period, I probably sold considerably more books this time than I had during the one-day blitz in 2003. I certainly reached a much larger number: approximately 988,000 (it would have been nice to reach a million, being so close). And while I got all the way to #6 in the Environmental category, I never got past 27,000 overall, and I never made the slightest dent on the Business category list. And from what I’ve heard, sustained strength over a week or two is considered a much better indicator than a one-day spike.

Yes, it’s possible that if I had only one day for the campaign, I would have gotten perhaps twice as many orders as I did on any single day during this nine-day attempt–but I think the top 100 for overall sales would have still been far, far out of reach.

And my editor at Wiley warned me against trying. One-day sales on one site are not taken seriously by the industry anymore, she said; too many people are doing them and the novelty has more than worn off. These days, you want a sustained push across multiple retail channels and multiple days.

My original goal was to reach five million people with the campaign, and I think I would have if I had had greater participation from the people I asked to participate. Only about 10 percent of the newsletter editors and bloggers I contacted chose to join the campaign (which is actually an amazingly high percentage by typical direct-mail standards, but because many of these people are folks I’ve built up a relationship with over many years, I’d expected closer to 35 or 50 percent–maybe that was unrealistic). Some people “don’t do product launches,” some wanted more time to ramp up, some wanted a better compensation package, some didn’t see the notices in the flood of e-mail (a few of those I was able to convert with a last-minute push via Twitter), and some simply didn’t respond. And some may have not found the sales page on the commissionable upsell offer sufficiently convincing; I’m just revising it.

I’m thinking about doing a second push, and reaching out again to some of those folks. But it’s quite a bit of work. I did this campaign on my own, rather than hire a consultant at $9500 to $15,000 (another thing that’s changed; the typical price in 2003 was around $1000 to $1200, and I still did it on my own). With today’s high prices for this sort of campaign, I doubt it would be worth the investment for most authors, unless they have specific ways to leverage their fleeting best-seller status.

If I did do another one, I’d start recruiting three or four months early, send updates about every two weeks, and be sure to give people a way to opt out of the list (I did receive a few complaints, even though they weren’t actually subscribed to anything. And I cheerfully took them off the list when asked.)

Still, I have to say, it was very nice to email my publisher that the book was a #6 category bestseller on Amazon, and to e-mail again that there were over one million exact matches for the book title on Google. Neither would have happened without the bestseller campaign.

Shel Horowitz’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (co-authored wit the legendary Jay Conrad Levinson), still comes with over $2600 worth of bonuses, no matter where you buy a new copy. One of the bonuses is a two-month trial membership to Shel’s membership-based learning community, The Clean and Green Club.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2010 at 4:26 am and is filed under Book Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.