What are you doing today toward promoting your book? What did you do yesterday? You’ll find that book promotion is sort of like a snowball. The more energy you put into it—the more results you will see. But with book promotion, sometimes the effects of your efforts aren’t apparent right away. I believe that’s why some of you lose your momentum.
We expect to be rewarded on the spot for our efforts. We don’t like to wait days, weeks or months for a sale; we want it now! Yet, so much of book promotion is on a hurry up and wait basis.
I got an order for books today through Amazon.com. Yeah! But I don’t know which of my promotional efforts are at the bottom of this order. Could it be from people who read my blog, who followed me at Twitter, who attended one of my talks, who saw some of my articles, who read about my book in one of the many other books that list it as recommended reading? Maybe these customers are people I met in a casual setting or are friends of my clients.
How long have these customers been waiting to order my book—did they just hear about it or have they been sitting on ordering information for months or years?
Certainly there are many, many scenarios when it comes to the motivation and actions of customers. In most cases, you never find out what prompted the sale.
Authors used to track books that they promoted through mail order, ads or even articles by using different codes on their ordering information. You can still do this to some degree. Just add a different letter to your post office box number for each specific promotion. Or add, “Room 1, 2, 22 or 44” for example, in your ordering address. You’ve seen that done, haven’t you? Now you know that when you are required to add “Room 300” when you order a bottle of hand lotion from an ad, this is probably a code the company uses to find out which of their advertising is working best.
This process if more difficult today when your contact information generally consists of a link to your website. Tracking sales in today’s world of technology is a tough one. That’s why I will probably never know who ordered my books through Amazon this morning and where they learned about them. I can, however, add a field to my order form at my own website and ask customers to tell me how they heard about me, this site or my books. Not a bad idea. We do this on the SPAWN membership form.
In the meantime, another one of my articles appeared in Freelance Writer’s Report this month. This may generate book sales or bring me a client, but I realize that it might not happen immediately. As authors with books to promote we must always be projecting into the future. The promotional efforts you expended last month or three months ago may still have some energy in them—you might still see some orders come in from the article you submitted to a magazine in your topic or genre. The promotion you did two weeks ago might still be resonating with potential customers. Continue promoting every week in order to turn that potential customer into a customer. And conduct some promotional activities today in order to attract customers tomorrow.
Learn more about book promotion in my book, The Right Way to Write, Publish and Sell Your Book.
http://www.matilijapress.com/rightway.html.