How to Sell A Book, if you’re a robot

Over the last couple of weeks, we thought about how to sell books the traditional way – print books sold through physical bookstores. The short summary: you try to amass retail footprint (via your publisher’s sales team) then create a real density of awareness once you have it. The lethal catch: if you don’t capture that footprint in the first place, there’s essentially nothing that can be done to achieve sales thereafter. 

Today, we turn from a world of tweed, pipe tobacco and hardbacks… to bits, bytes and algorithms. 

This email (and the ones that follow) are of particular relevance to anyone self-publishing their books, but I think they’re ALL of relevance anyway. No ambitious author should be without a mailing list under their own control. And the other tools we’re talking about are so basic to modern digital selling that you can’t afford to ignore them. And, to be blunt, plenty of trad publishing companies who ought to know better are still poor at digital selling. You won’t be able to understand or modify those failures unless you understand the territory. So: listen up. 

The big question today is: 

How, in theory, do you achieve huge sales via Amazon? 

Yes, I know that other online bookstores exist. But they’re so small in comparison with Amazon that they barely count. Kindle Unlimited alone is about equal in size to all other non-Amazon e-stores combined. So, I’m going to focus on Amazon. That’s where the sales are. 

And… the answer to our big question is easy. It’s: 

1. Achieve strong, steady traffic to your book’s Amazon page; and
2. Ensure you have strong conversions once readers get there. 

I’m not going to talk about Part 2 of that very much. In a nutshell, you need a blisteringly good book cover. You need a strong blurb. You need to accumulate some reviews. You need a sensible price (which means a low one. My Fiona series is self-published in the US. The first book in the series normally sells at $0.99. The other books sell at $4.99.) And – have I ever mentioned this? – everything of course needs to be perfectly in line with your insanely strong elevator pitch. You all know what a strong Amazon page looks like, because you’re familiar with it as readers. Create that. 

So let’s turn instead to Part 1 of the question: an altogether harder and more thought-provoking question. How do you drive traffic to your Amazon page? 

The biggest source of traffic 

Before we start to answer it, I want to call your attention to the phrase “strong, steady traffic”. What does that mean exactly? Also: who cares? If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right? 

But no: that’s not right. That arithmetic is totally wrong. 

Because the biggest source of traffic to your Amazon page will be… tiny drumroll… Amazon. 

Amazon’s websites have more book-buying traffic than anyone else, by far. Amazon knows exactly who amongst their horde of buyers is likely to buy your book. Further, Amazon has any number of ways to advance or drop the visibility of different pages. For example, a really popular book page might feature on: 

• An overall bestseller list.
• A sub- or sub-sub-bestseller list. (You can sit at the top of multiple lists.) 
• A “customers also bought” selection attached to books by other writers in your genre.
• The home page for certain users. (So, if you’ve bought a lot of romantic comedies from Amazon recently, you may find that your Amazon home screen fills with various other rom-coms for you to consider.) 
• A hot new releases list.
• Emails to selected users (i.e., readers in the same genre.) 
• Search pages, where the search term is in some way relevant to your book. This could even be for another author’s name. So if I enter “Gillian Flynn” as a search term, Amazon will first display some books by GF and then start to suggest books that it thinks GF-type readers are likely to enjoy. 
• And so on… 

So, the best way to get traffic to your book’s Amazon page is to get Amazon itself to boost your page’s visibility. Essentially, you want to make sure that Amazon’s algorithms and robots to decide that what they most want to do is feed traffic to your book page. 

But how?

Strong and steady 

To answer that question, you need to know two things. 

The first is that Amazon’s bestseller lists are extremely sensitive to short-term movements. A classic bestseller list – the NY Times list, for example – reflects the total volume of weekly sales, and is updated once each week. Amazon’s list, by contrast, updates every hour. What’s more, the sales you’ve made in the last 24 hours account 50% of your total ranking. The sales you make in the preceding 24 hours account for the next 25%. The prior day for 12.5%, and so on. 

That means Amazon is electrically sensitive to quite small movements, in a way that the NYT list is not. 

That said, Amazon’s little robots know that a one-off spike doesn’t mean too much – it could be an email blast that gets a flurry of sales and nothing more before or after. 

So, the Indie Author Hive Mind (which is exceptionally smart, by the way) says: 

• Work to secure sales over 4 days, not 1. 
• A little longer than 4 days is probably better – say 5-7 – but that does depend on how much marketing oomph you can bring. 
• Ideally, you’d have a gently sloping increase in sales over the period – so aim for something like 100 / 110 / 120 / 130 in terms of sales progression. (I mean these as indicative units, not specific book sales. A brand-new indie author would be doing very well indeed to shift 400+ books over four days.) 
• If your sales tools are still in their infancy (i.e., no mailing list, smallish ad budget), then do what you can. I’d suggest that getting some sales on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4 would be a reasonable aim, with anything splashy you can manage coming on Day 4. 

You’ll note that this advice will NOT maximise your peak bestseller rank. If you wanted to do that, you wouldn’t just try to get your sales compacted into a single day. You’d ideally try to have them squashed into a single hour. And yes, you’d have the pleasure and satisfaction of a salesrank you can boast about to your dental hygienist. But you won’t get as many sales overall as if you follow the plan here. And sales matter more. 

What happens next? 

So let’s say you follow the plan, and achieve that gently sloping uptick in sales over 4-7 days. What then? You’ll have exhausted your mailing list. Your ad budget will be empty. What next? 

Well, what next is – Amazon. 

If you do this right, at about the four-day point, you’ll see a sudden surge in sales as Amazon takes over the marketing. Its tiny little underpaid, non-union bots are essentially saying, “OK, author-human, we’re convinced that this book of yours is worth marketing, so we’re going to start marketing it ourselves. We’re going to sift through the MILLIONS of readers who come daily to our website, and we’re going to show your book to the ones most likely to buy it.” 

That sounds exhilarating – and it is. But the exhilaration (and the sales) won’t last forever. New books come onto the market, new sales surges are manufactured, those underpaid little bots are fickle – FICKLE, you hear me? – and they will start flashing their glossy metallic ankles at other books and other authors instead. 

So, over a period of about 30 days, you’ll see sales tail off to a base level… then probably dwindle further as time goes by. 

You’ll do better in that 30-day period (and maybe extend it a little) if your Amazon page is all seven shades of fantastic: Amazon will prefer to send readers to a page that ends up in sales. You’ll also do better if readers read and enjoy and finish your book. (How does Amazon know if you finish your book? Because it collects data from a gazillion Kindles.) But nothing lasts forever. Your sales surge won’t. 

The arithmetic of sales 

Earlier in this email, I said: 

“If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right?” 

You can now understand why that logic is flawed. 

If you trickled those sales out over two months, your popularity on Amazon would almost certainly never rise to a point where you tickled Amazon’s bots enough to get them involved. So your expected sales would indeed be 1,000 books, or something similar. 

If you took the one-off surge approach, I think that Amazon would respond, just not in a very powerful or sustained way. But still. Books sold? More than 1,000 anyway. 

And if you took the slow and steady over 4-7 days approach? You’d easily generate enough sales to get a really good blast of love from Amazon and you’d see lovely, organic sales for week, after week, after week. That’s where you’ll really make the money. That’s also why smart indie authors are perfectly happy if their Week 1 ad campaign makes exactly zero profit. It doesn’t have to make a profit in week 1. It has to make a profit in the somewhat longer term. The approach outlined in this email tells you how to go about doing that. 

“Now look, you blithering idiot, you gibbering phytoplankton, you lumpen mass of curdled whey – why won’t you answer the ONE QUESTION that I really want you to answer?” 

I expect that most of you will be thinking along these lines – or a politer version anyway. Because of course, it’s all very well setting out the theory of how to apportion your traffic to Amazon, but how do you secure that traffic in the first place? 

I’ll answer that question in some detail next week, with deep dives into a couple of further areas after that, but suffice to say that there are lots of things that don’t work: 

• Twitter / X
• Instagram 
• Blogging 
• Blog tours 
• Organic Facebook traffic (probably) 
• Boosted Facebook posts 
• Amazon ads 
• Traditional publicity, of the sort that Big Publishing uses. 

Some items on this list might be surprising: how could Amazon ads not increase sales on Amazon, for example? The answer is that Amazon ads may increase sales in a low-level, evergreen-type way. They are not well adapted to the kind of surge marketing I’m talking about here. I also think that Amazon ads tend to work better as a phase two option: that is, once you have already generated some good book sales through other sources. 

Or again: how could trad publicity not work, since it works perfectly well for trad publishers? And yes, of course it does: but they have a huge physical retail footprint. Trad publicity is pretty much hopeless for generating digital sales on demand. The two worlds – physical bookstores and all things Amazonian – are largely separate in terms of sales approach. 

So I’m only going to focus on three tools, but they’re all important: 

• Promo sites 
• Facebook ads 
• Author mailing lists. 

That’s it. That’s what lies ahead. 

If you’re trad published, then knowing about promo sites is valuable, in that publishers should – these days – think of them when it comes to boosting your ebook. Author mailing lists are critical for everybody. And Facebook ads? Well, it will be essentially impossible to profit from them if you’re trad published. But indie authors will rely on them heavily – and I do think that trad authors just need to know what their publishers could be doing, and in many cases ought to be doing. You can’t even have the conversations, if you don’t understand the territory.

*

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Selling Strategies

An unusual task this week. Simply: 

• Do you have experience of a selling strategy that really didn’t work for you? 
• Do you have experience of one that really did? 

You might be talking about something that your publishers conceived and executed for you. You might be talking about something that you did yourself. Either way, let’s hear about it. When you’re ready, post yours here.

And? 

Yes: writing books is hard. Selling them is harder. But let’s also not forget that loads and loads of books do get written and sold, and authors make money and find readers. Just this week, for instance, our very own Becca Day has published her latest thriller, The Woman In The Cabin, to rapturous reviews. 

So, this is a hard task, but not an impossible one. Avanti! 

Til soon,

Harry