Author's Face Many Book Marketing Challenges
The challenges to marketing a book continue to rise in lieu of the massive number of titles that are now flooding the marketplace. Last year close to 300,000 unique book titles were published by traditional book publishers. That number is dwarfed by the number of books published by self-published, print on demand “POD” and ebooks that totaled 2.7 million titles. Wow, with traditional publishers just averaging 2000 copies per book and less than a 150 copies for the alternative publishers we are seeing tsunami of titles vying to find a readership and failing big time, in fact failing 99% of the time. So is marketing a book with an aggressive, traditional marketing campaign the right strategy? Not really because the costs are too prohibitive for the given results. Let’s break down some of the traditional direct marketing approaches for marketing a book and weigh the potential risk/rewards to the author looking for marketing a book techniques.
So how about a Direct Mailing Marketing Campaign for marketing a book? Let’s say you buy 5000 names at 20 cents a pop from a list broker and then add the cost for copy production, the actual mailing cost plus the setup fees and now you have spent nearly a thousand to two thousand dollars. With direct marketing response rates between 1% and 2% you’ll get may be an extra hundred copies sold from your 5000 piece mailing. It will cost you almost ten to twenty dollars to market each book you sold, not exactly great numbers nor does it make economic sense.
How about traditional print advertising such as magazines and newspapers for marketing a book? Unfortunately, traditional print is having readership problems and the costs are prohibitive as well. A simple small display ad could cost thousands in a suitable magazine or newspaper. A response rate of 1% would be a home run and that means out of a 100,000 views you might sell an additional thousand books. All of this from an ad that cost you thousands which is at best a losing proposition for marketing a book via traditional newsprint.
How about a Pay Per Click campaign such as Google AdWords for marketing a book? Costs vary wildly depending of the specific keyword that is applicable to your book and the present competitive demand for that given keyword. If we assume you could do marketing a book at the very low-end of PPC for a keyword, let’s say 20 cents, you still would have some challenges. A thousand clicks will cost you $200 and if your web site converts at an unprecedented rate, remember you can’t direct link to your Amazon page without running afoul of Googliath, then you can expect to sell a fifty extra books. That might work for you if you self-publish and this is really assumes you phenomenally convert but if you’re only getting a royalty you just lost money! In reality it’s hard to get quality, qualified clicks from book buyers!
To add to your lack of options for marketing a book even if you have a little cash you will find that traditional book marketers are really looking for campaigns that will total a few hundred thousand dollars before taking you on as a customer, making it definitely a big boy’s game. So it’s not just publishers that have failed but so have book marketers for the little guy.
So how do you go about marketing a book? The solution: BookIM and its affordable proactive SEO and Web 2.0 book advertising campaigns! Research the cost of marketing a book here and then compare to BookIM!
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