How to Sell A Book, if you can sail faster than the wind

It’s a fact:

A racing catamaran can sail faster than the wind – over twice as fast, indeed, under perfect conditions. (Don’t believe me? And yet it’s true, I tell you, true!)

Something like the same effect – only better – is achievable via mailing lists. Still better: this email is just as important to trad-publishing types as it is to indies. Almost more so: this is the one part of your marketing destiny that you can, and really must, control.

So:

Let’s say that you hustle and bustle your way to 1,000 names on your mailing list. You’d be pretty pleased with yourself if you did that, no?

And let’s also say – fantasy land, here – that you put out a book launch email which secured a 50% success rate. That is, half of all those you emailed went out and bought your book. (That’s not impossible, but it would be very good. Anything 30% or better would be excellent.)

So, you’ve just sold 500 books. Let’s say you’re offering a launch promo price of $2.99 for the ebook, which means your royalties are (roughly) $2, so you’ve just earned $1,000 from your 1,000-name strong mailing list.

I mean, that’s good, right? No one hates $1,000. But you’ve had to go to a lot of effort to secure it. Maybe your time and energy could have been better spent elsewhere?

Not so, my furry friend

But that’s not so. In an earlier email, I told you that Amazon responds quickly and powerfully to signals which tell it that a certain product is selling well.

Now the beauty of email is not especially the volume of sales that you can generate. The beauty is that you can generate those almost precisely when you want. A launch-type email will generate essentially all its sales within 24 hours and, honestly, within about 6-12 hours of sending.

So, the way to think about those 500 sales is that they allow you to manipulate the visibility of your book on Amazon’s system. If you generated all those sales within 2 hours, you might lift your overall bestseller rank on Amazon.com to perhaps 200. (In the UK, you’d do even better, with a peak rank of under 50.)

Now, as I told you in that earlier email, you don’t want to do that. You want to space your sales out over 4-7 days. So, for example, you might send your launch email out in waves, aiming to secure roughly 100 sales/day over 5 days. That will give you a lower peak rank, but will send a much strong signal to Amazon. Your email will get Amazon’s bots active on your behalf, and they’ll take over the marketing for you.

The result of your email to 1,000 eager readers could easily be sales of well over 5,000 copies over the next 1-4 months.

Phooey to catamarans. You and your mailing list can sale much faster than the wind.

None of this is theoretical. The summer when my wife and I had our second set of twins, I was due to launch a book. Our first set of twins was not yet two and my wife and I… were pressed for time.

So, my launch strategy – the whole thing, not withholding a single thing – was:

1. Send an email

That was it. There is no ‘2’. I didn’t tweet. I didn’t blog. I didn’t flap around on Facebook. I didn’t float zeppelins over New York or hire PR people at $1500 an hour.

I sent an email, that was it. And to about 1,000 people at that.

But those people liked my book and bought it. And my visibility rose. And Amazon saw my book happily a-selling and marketed it further. Over the next few months, I sold over 5,000 copies. My mailing list more than tripled. The other books in the series also sold much more than before.

I’m not saying this was a good, rational, well-planned launch – it was not. But it worked. Indeed, it was the success of that spectacularly lazy campaign which told me just how much power there could be in self-publishing.

How to build your list

The basic way to build your emal list is:

Sell your ebook – via promo sites (covere d here ) or Facebook (covere d he re)
In the front and back of those ebooks, you place a call to action, which says, “please join my readers’ club”. (You will never say, “please subscribe to my newsletter” unless you truly don’t want anyone to sign up.)
Now, nice people don’t especially want to sign up to a readers’ club unless they get some kind of reward. So, you offer the reward that this particular group of people most wants: namely, another story, written by you, and involving the same world and group of characters that they’ve just enjoyed.
Naturally, people then sign up to your reading list, which they do by heading over to your website.
Once they’ve signed up, you need to give them the book that you’ve promised. You simply automate that process using an automated email system (I use Maile rLi te) and Boo kfu nnel, a firm which solves the problem of how to get your ebook onto someone else’s device.

A helping hand

Now, yes, there is something circular about my telling you to build an email list to sell books… but you need to sell books to stock your list.

I hope that the emails on promo sites and Facebook ads covers that issue, at least a bit. (This is a flywheel. It’s hard to get it to start spinning. But once it’s going, it’s hard to stop. The first 250 names on your list are the hardest.)

Additionally, though, there are sites whose purpose is specifically to help seed those lists. You can check the various options for yourself, but the current champ in this area is Book Sw eeps. The emails you’ll get from that source won’t be as good as genuine organic signups from people who have bought and read a full-length novel of yours, but they’re not bad – and a darn site better than nothing.

Some specifics

One email isn’t sufficient to outline how to build and use a list – there are whole books that cover the territory in detail. But here are some starting points:

First, offer plenty of opportunities in the front and back of the ebook to sign up to your list. That’s not being shouty – it’s being appropriately helpful to your readers. Just like if you were building a website, you wouldn’t place just one link to a key page. You’d pop that link anywhere that users might find it helpful. You need to follow the same logic in your ebook.

Second, the webpage (on your website) where readers sign up to your club is very important. The key thing is to make it unbelievably obvious what you want your reader to do and that means removing all distractions. My own signup page is h e re: note the complete lack of a top menu or, really, anything to do on the page except sign up.

Your free gift needs to be a nicely produced ebook. It doesn’t need to be long – anywhere from 7,500 words to 15 or 20,000 words seems about right to me. But apart from length, in every other way the gift should be first rate. A proper cover. Proper editing. A proper story – and one that comes straight from the world of the characters your reader has just enjoyed.

(If you happen to enjoy crime stories, and would like to experience the whole sign up procedure, then b e my guest. It’s that process which you are going to replicate.)

Third, you mustn’t think of your mailing as a way to take stuff from your readers. The mailing list is a way to build relationships. Once you’ve done that then, yes, around launch, it’s perfectly natural to say, “Hey, do you want to buy my latest?” But put relationships first, then asking second.

So, the first email that goes out to readers on my list offers the free gift (as promised), but the second one offers a second free gift – a pure surprise. I also tell readers a bit about myself. I tell them roughly what to expect in terms of emails from me. Hopefully, by that point, readers like my books that little bit more than they did before and – admittedly only in a tiny way – they feel like they have a teensy bit of relationship with me. Fostering that relationship is THE most important thing in your authorial career… beyond – of course, of course – writing quite excellent novels.

And fourth, you do, I’m afraid, need to kill people – and surprisingly often. Every email list will, over time, fill up with people who NO LONGER OPEN YOUR EMAILS! That shows shockingly poor taste, I agree, but it will happen. And you need to get rid of those people. Murder is one route. Simply removing their emails from your list is another. (All email list providers have simple tools to enable this.) The more dead wood you have on your list, the more likely your emails are to get dumped into Junk email or similar. You must avoid that fate. A small, highly engaged list is better than a large but baggy one every time.

Big Publishing and mailing lists

I’m not going to get into a huge digression here, but suffice to say that it is a Foolish Writer who gives up control of their mailing list to Big Publishing. I have seen some ugly car crashes take place under those circumstances. Even if you plan to be a bestselling writer working under the care of Big Publishing – especially then, in fact, you need to own and operate your list yourself. Aside from your books themselves, that’ll be the biggest asset you have. Don’t give it away.

And that’s it

You sell books.

People sign up to your list, get their free gift, get some welcome emails, experience the joy of a relationship with you… and are fully primed to buy your next book when it comes out.

Amazon will notice that burst of sales, and will reward you for them in the multiple – feeding your pocket and building your list in the one and same sweet process.

That’s the joy of the list – and the thrill of sailing faster than the wind.

Next week

This series of emails comes to a close next week, with thoughts about mindset… and plumbing.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Query Letters

We’ll keep things simple this week as well. Any chunk involving physical action – a fight, a car crash, a fall, an accident. Anything like that. 250 words please. And exciting, of course.

Pop your excerpt here.

Till soon,

Harry

PS: This email has been running faster than the wind on Townhouse here. It’s pretty sure it can see its own backside looming up in the windshield.

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