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Say what?
I just wanted to public my book on Amazon
and who knew that promoting your book
could be so stinking dangerous.
We're gonna talk about that in today's episode
so stay tuned.
Imagine winning $5,000 for your self-published book.
Get more details from our sponsors,
the North Street Book Prize competition,
later in this video.
Hey, I'm Dale L. Roberts, a best selling author
as well as a self-publishing advocate
who wants to show you how to publish books that sell.
Now, according to the Kindle Direct Publishing help page
on promoting your book,
they actually have a few suggestions
and some things that you need to be very aware of.
In fact, they say this, "After publishing your book,
"you'll want to promote it to prospective readers.
"You can promote your book yourself with email,
"websites, and other outreach."
Okay, after the doom and gloom of what I entered here
as far as the beginning of this video,
(Dale growling)
I don't want my account shut down
so the nice thing is they've actually kind of thrown
a softball pitch at you here
and they're gonna show you nine ways
of promoting your book
that aren't gonna get you into trouble.
Number one, Author Central.
Author Central is like a hub for you as an author.
You have to actually go set up an account,
in fact, I actually have got a full video series
about Author Central and how to get it all optimized
and set up for yourself.
There's a link down inside the description down below,
but either way, Author Central is a great way
to really showcase who you are as an author
and all of the products that you have available
on the Amazon platform.
Number two, Amazon advertising.
Now, I've said this time and time and time and again
that Amazon advertising is the dead simple,
cost effective way of promoting your book
and unlike other platforms like Facebook ads,
or Google ads, or any of those other ones,
there is a cold audience over there.
Whereas on Amazon, you have a warm audience,
people that are willing to part ways
with their hard-earned money to purchase products
and hopefully that product will be yours
and Amazon advertising is the way to do it.
I'm gonna tell you that it is not easy.
It is not something you're gonna learn
just by clicking a few buttons.
This is gonna take some time to learn
and tweak as you go and I always recommend
these two things,
and it is start low, go slow.
And that means start low with as far as
a cost per click and average spend per day
and go slow, meaning that don't worry about having
to get massive results in your first few days
of a campaign.
Heck, it might take upwards of about 90 days
for you to curate information
on what's best on the platform?
How does your book best sell?
What's the specific ad campaign?
And then tweak it from there.
Number three, free promotions.
Okay, so this is a KDP Select exclusive only for ebooks.
So, this does not cover print books.
So, you very got the KDP Select program that has
the free promotions for your ebook
and you have to be enrolled in that,
meaning that you have to be exclusive
to the Amazon platform and you can have
that free book promoted for up to five days
across all the Amazon platforms.
Now, you're probably scratching your head going, whoa,
wait, hang on a second, this is to promote my book?
I'm giving it away for free?
Well, the intent is to get as many customers
to download your free book during that time
and hopefully leave a review,
maybe share it with somebody and encourage more people
to come in and buy it.
And the beautiful part is,
if you get a massive volume of free downloads,
Amazon kind of sees a little bit of trust in you
in that they feel like, okay, there is proof of concept
in this author's book so we're gonna go ahead
and give it a little bit of a push.
It used to be a bit more severe
as far as how much you could be pushed
from a free book promotion.
These days it's not quite as effective,
but it does work nonetheless.
Number four, Kindle Countdown Deals.
Again, this is a KDP Select exclusive.
With the Kindle Countdown Deal you're allowed
to have up to seven days in the U.S. and U.K. only
and what you can do is drop the price of your book.
So, let's say you're set at 2.99,
you would drop it down to 99 cents
and you would still get your normal royalty
of, say, 70% if you're put at 2.99.
But, when you drop it on down there,
what it's gonna do is it's gonna put a timer
on your book on its product page,
creating a sense of scarcity and getting more people
to purchase your book in time
and also, you're put into a very special category
for Kindle Countdown Deals during that time
and hopefully get pushed up there
and served to more people.
I am really big about Kindle Countdown Deals
and if you promote it just right
and bring in enough eyes to your product page
during this promotion and get enough purchases,
Amazon is going to push you to the moon and back.
I've had quite a few books, especially in my fitness genre
that I did a number of years ago
that really did well with Kindle Countdown Deals.
Number five, Kindle ebook pre-order.
Instead of just pushing the publish button,
might I recommend that you put your ebook on pre-order.
Now, keep in mind, this isn't available for print books,
it's only for ebooks right now.
You're probably saying, well, why do I want to do pre-order?
The beautiful part of a pre-order
is it gets it to where you can drop the price
a little lower, generate interest for the upcoming launch
and have people invest at that lower rate,
bolster your rank in the Amazon best seller ranking system
and get it to where you're more discoverable.
In short, pre-orders are the best way
to hype the release of your upcoming ebook.
Number six, buying and gifting ebooks.
On their page, they actually say this,
"Run a social media giveaway, gift your books to readers
"at an event, or send copies to newsletter subscribers."
So, they want you to buy copies and gift them out
to potential readers or even some of your followers.
I've often heard some people say
that this is not something Amazon wants you to do,
but it is in black and white,
they say exactly that you can do this
and they encourage you to do it.
Number seven, lending for Kindle.
Okay, so here's kinda the cool thing,
I like this.
Every now and then when I'm coaching somebody
and I mention a book about, say, self-publishing
or marketing and promoting, or something else like that,
and I know sometimes authors are strapped for cash.
So, one of the greatest ways for me
to really get the information to them,
or at least get them to sample why I like
a particular book or the information I got from it,
I get to lend that Kindle ebook to them
and it's just a simple thing of just me going over
and allowing somebody to borrow that.
So, I can just grab a person's email address,
throw it in there, and Amazon sends them a notification
they can borrow the ebook no.
Here's the thing is, when you do lend a Kindle ebook,
you will not be able to read that ebook
while they're doing it.
And I think it gets it to where you can lend it
to two weeks at a time and you can lend it out
as much as you would like.
Now, there is an option, I believe,
inside the KDP dashboard that when you get ready to publish,
you can actually deselect this option
to allow people to lend,
but unfortunately it eludes my brain here right now.
I think it's on maybe page three of the upload process.
As soon as you enroll into the lending program,
unfortunately there is no backing out of it
to my knowledge.
Number eight, share with Kindle instant book previews.
So, let's just say that you're really enjoying your book
or you've read this particular book before.
You can go to the product page
and there's an embed feature
just below the check out process
and you can actually select that
and go over to a website that you might have
and embed that onto your website
and it'll share that book and why you like that.
So, this is kind of a cool feature
and here's a little bit of a bonus tip,
if you are a part of the Amazon Associates program,
you can actually use this embed feature,
along with the Amazon Associates program.
So, for instance, you would embed it on your website
with your Amazon Associates program code.
If somebody purchases by way of that embedded feature
on your website, then you get a percentage of the sale.
That's including the royalty.
So, you get the royalty and you get that percentage
of sale from the Amazon Associates program.
Before we get to the very next step,
I wanna share with you a way that you could $5,000
for your self-published book
through the North Street Book Prize competition.
Winningwriters.com presents the sixth annual
North Street Book Prize competition
that is a competition strictly available
for self-published authors like you
and it's available through six different categories
including mainstream literary fiction,
genre fiction, creative nonfiction and memoir,
poetry, children's picture books, graphic novel and memoirs.
So, if you have any of those,
you may want to go ahead and enter it to win.
They have over $12,500 in prizes.
To get yourself entered for the competition,
head on over to our link at winningwriters.com/dale.
The deadline is June 30th.
Number nine, sample chapters.
Otherwise known as the look inside feature.
So, someone's going to go ahead and go to your product page,
they would left click on your book cover
and it would look inside your book
and it does upwards of 10% of your book at a time.
There used to be a point that you could actually reach out
to them for the see inside feature
and actually change how much they were showing,
how much, how little, it didn't matter, whatever it was,
but you could reach out to them and tell them,
hey, do this much.
But, now I think it's just fairly static.
It's just 10% of your book they'll make available online.
So, if you've got 100 pages, it'll allow customers
to see the first 10 pages.
I would really recommend that you make the most
of your first 10% of your book
and make sure that you're putting some calls to action
to visit your website, subscribe to your email newsletter,
and maybe even push some of your other books
so that way when someone opens up your book
in the see inside feature,
this is just another way of, not only promoting that book
and getting people to buy it because they read 10%,
but also promoting other offerings that you have
in your author brand.
But, hey, that's not the only way
that you can sell more books.
In fact, Amazon really equipped you with other tools.
In fact, they give you 10 ways to market your book
and I talk about that here in this very next video.
Why not go right to the source.
If you wanna sell more books, get them to tell you exactly
how to do it.
I'll see you in the very next video to hear more.