Market your Book, please 🥹

No matter what sort of a book you write, deep down, you want people to buy and read your book. All the I-don’t-care-about-the-numbers flies out of the window when you stare at your sales dashboard. You want that number to rise.

The simplest equation I can offer for this is:

Book sales = (traffic x conversion ) x attitude

Book sales = (attention x buy now) x attitude

Traffic is the number of clicks coming to your book’s sourcing page. How many people came to your single page website and your distribution channels? You will have to market your book (not you necessarily) aggressively using organic marketing and paid advertising.

Organic marketing is when people discover your book on their own. They walked into a bookstore, a friend recommended your book, amazon recommended your book, someone gifted your book to them, they saw your Social Media post about something within your book, etc. You can get this organic process happen inorganically by paying for advertising.

You can have all the attention in the world but if nobody purchases your book, that’s effort down the drain. Your organic and inorganic marketing has to convert to sales. The only way to do this is to write a persuasive ad-copy for your marketing and a strategic blurb for your book.

If you use the keywords and select the categories properly, algorithmically speaking, your book will be positioned well because the platforms make money when your book makes money.

If you handle the aesthetics for mass-market distribution via a professionally designed cover, you are only upping your odds.

The multiplicative factor here is your attitude. Have a positive outlook, your sales will compound over time. You have to entice readers to keep buying your book for at least 10 weeks. Use whatever means necessary. Don’t be dissuaded by the naysayers.

There’s one more component to the equation which isn’t easy to manufacture - virality.

Do people recommend your book i.e. the word of mouth?

How good is your book?

Do people create content based on your book i.e. value delivered?

How understandable is your book?

Do people ask for more books i.e. reader trust?

How did you end your book?

The best-seller equation

Book sales = [{traffic (attention) x conversion (buy now)} x attitude] ^ virality

A book becomes a best-seller when it attains a form of virality. Virality leads to exponential sales. We can also call it the network effect. People simply start sharing why they enjoyed your book. That gets more people interested in the book. It turns into a chain reaction of sorts.

There are so many books that went viral on Social Media years after the books were published solely based on the content within the book. Tropes, value-addition, and good (understandable) writing is what appeals to the masses. People read, like, share and gift your book.

This ☝🏽 is difficult to manufacture. We as readers love a lot of books but we only talk about a few books over and over again. These books could be dubbed as viral books - books people love to talk about. Colleen Hoover and Xiran Jay Zhao are good examples of viral authors. I cannot give you a secret hack to going viral. I can offer advice 👇🏾

I can also debunk the word best-seller a bit. If you followed along the anti-trust trial by the Department of Justice in the USA which halted the potential acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House, two of the big five publishers, you'll have a rough idea of what I mean.

90% of the total titles sold by two of the biggest, most reputable publishers in the world sell less than 2,000 copies. Go back and check how many of their books are titled as best-sellers. The keyword here is the genre.

For some genres, 1000 books sold is a lot (eg.: business autobiographies) and for others, 100,000 books is not enough (eg.: YA fantasy/romance).

The thing is, the book market is still largely unpredictable. What bigger publishers do to manage this is they trigger a procedure.

• They send advance copies (ARCs) to reviewers, influencers, booksellers, and librarians, several months ahead of launch, in order to test the reception of the book among people who read and understand readers.

• They leak something or publish a teaser to get a mild buzz going in the book-communities.

• They gauge the excitement within the tight-knit book publishing community.

• They prepare the PR package.

• A marketing budget is assigned to the book.

I have seen books go viral because people who received the ARCs started raving about the book. The FOMO around the book builds up. People line-up to pre-order the book. Donna Tartt, Sally Rooney and Madeline Miller saw this happen to their books. There was a marketing machinery behind them but most of the audience excitement was real and based on the quality of their work.

Some books just go viral randomly. See Adam Silvera and J. K. Rowling books, for instance.

Ultimately, the virality can be engineered a little bit. The rest is completely up to the readers.

Increase your Odds

Look, you will hate me for saying this but I believe it is true. Writing is a skill. It improves with time and experience. Good writing often contains good thinking. This, the ability to think well is a gift most of us develop with time and practice.

So, write more than one book. Publish it if you want to but write as many books as you possibly can. Take feedback. Learn. Save up to hire editors and a marketing bundle when you are ready with your magnum opus.

To bring it back to the numbers, 98% of traditionally published books don’t sell a million copies. Their authors still keep writing. So can you.

Build a backlist of books. When Dan Brown went viral with the Da Vinci Code, the books he published before came handy. Dan Brown’s initial books were promoted and marketed by his wife Blythe Brown. They kept at it and sold around 10,000 copies before his work went viral. Then just one book, the Da Vinci Code sold 80 million copies (as of 2009). The rest also sold well. In total, Dan Brown is estimated to have sold 200 million copies of his books.

Quality always sells. Up your odds with quantity.