How to Get Paid Twice for Selling Your Book
This is a pretty simple tip that will take you about 15 minutes to implement, and–if you’re not already doing it–it will nearly double what you’re making from each book sale. It’s so simple that I’m always shocked to visit author web sites and find out how few folks are doing it.
Ok, now that I’ve sufficiently built up your anticipation (go ahead and wipe the saliva from the corner of your mouth), I’ll spill it:
Sign up to be an affiliate of an online bookstore that sells your book.
What the heck is an affiliate?
It’s a bit like working on commission for your favorite bookstore, only all the “work” is done online. Affiliate programs work like this:
You place a special link (it’s special because it’s coded with your affiliate ID) on your web site. That link goes to a certain page on the merchant’s site (such as the page where your book is for sale). If a visitor to your site clicks on the affiliate link and then buys the item from the merchant, you earn a percentage of the sales price. If that visitor wanders away and buys something else on the site (something you didn’t link to), you’ll still get a cut. If they buy several things, you’ll actually make a few dollars.
The percent you earn varies from merchant to merchant, but expect at least 5%, and some programs will pay as much as 8%. Add this to your royalty, and you can nearly double what you’re earning from the sale of each book you personally promote and sell through your website or blog.
How do you get started as an affiliate?
First you need to decide which affiliate program you’re going to join. Though many booksellers offer programs, I recommend Amazon. There are a couple of reasons:
1. Amazon is huge and just about everyone who shops online has an account there (which means their credit card information is already stored so it’s quick and painless for them to buy your book).
2. They sell a lot (and I do mean LOT) of other stuff, too, so you might rack up additional earnings. (I’ve been an Amazon affiliate for a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of unrelated items in my earnings reports. Their free-shipping-for-purchases-over-$25 deal does a good job prompting people to buy more than just one book.)
Now that I’ve sold you on Amazon (alas, I don’t get a commission for signing up affiliates), it’ll be pretty easy for you to get started. If you’re comfortable adding links to your site yourself, it’ll probably take less than 15 minutes to get signed up and get that first link on there. You can get started at:
If you’re set on going with Barnes & Noble or another bookseller, just head over to the company’s site and look for a link (often in the footer) to their affiliate program. Alternately, do a search for Merchant Name + affiliate program on Google. Not all merchants have affiliate programs, but the major booksellers do.
Once you’re signed up, sprinkle those links lucratively throughout your site. My experience tells me that text links added right into the content of the site earn the most clicks (and ultimately the most sales), but you’re certainly welcome to try some of the picture links as well.
How to Use Your Blog to Establish Yourself as an Authority
I always enjoy checking out author blogs. You never quite know what you’re going to find. Day-in-the-life kinds of posts are frequent, with entries along the lines of “I wrote this many words today, I just got back from this book signing, and the cat won’t get off the keyboard.” That sort of thing is pretty standard. Of course, there are some more memorable blogs out there from the fiction authors. Actually, they’re written by the authors’ main characters (who knew that a band of unlikely heroes hell-bent on thwarting the evil sorcerer’s plans has time to whip out the laptop and find a wi-fi connection?).
I’m not going to pass judgment on the character blogs. They’re probably fun to write, and while I doubt they’re going to bring in hordes looking to buy books, they’re a nice way to give potential book buyers a preview of your characters and writing style.
On the other hand journal-style blogs don’t really serve any purpose insofar as marketing your book goes, especially for non-fiction authors. (I’m not saying you can’t keep a journal-style blog, but you might want to make that one for friends and family and create another one for selling your book.)
Once you’re a celebrity, people may very well want to know what you had for breakfast and what kind of progress you made on your current project today. Someone who isn’t’ a reader (yet!) and just came to your site… probably doesn’t care.
So, what does that potential reader want to see?
If I’m looking to buy a book–and it doesn’t matter whether it’s fiction or non-fiction–I want some hint that the author knows his or her stuff. I’m buying this book for one of two reasons: I want to learn something or I want to be entertained (maybe I’m really greedy and want both).
Before I plunk down my money, I want to believe you can deliver.
Yes, I’ll probably read reviews at Amazon to help me decide, but what happens if you’re a new author and you don’t have many reviews yet? (And the ones that are there are blatantly written by friends of the author.) How else can you sell me on your book?
Yup, it’s your blog.
Your website is where you tell me what your book can do for me. Your blog is where you make me believe that.
A blog is a wonderful opportunity to establish yourself as an authority in your field. Whatever niche you wrote your book on, you should be blogging about.
If your book is on dieting, your blog is a great place to tell me about quick but healthy snacks, recipes I can try, inspirational stories of folks you’ve helped, etc. etc. etc.
Does your book focus on business and explain how I can retire a millionaire? Then in your blog, tell me about how you made your millions, make up a survey that has me measure my financial progress, offer tips on investing.
Include information that can genuinely help readers before they even buy the book. And don’t be afraid to give away the good stuff either! (See my post on Giving Away Your Best Information to Sell Your Book). This is away to build a potential reader’s confidence in you. Your blog is your chance to make everyone believe you are an authority on that subject and your book has information people need.
Fiction authors, I haven’t forgotten about you.
Your blog is also your chance to establish yourself as an authority in your area. Keep the day-in-the-life-of-my-main-character blog, but create an author blog too–one that convinces people you know your stuff and your book is sure to entertain.
Let’s say you’re a mystery writer. There are a number of ways you could convince me that you know what you’re talking about (and therefore probably write a decent tale). Consider any or all of the following:
- Give tips for budding mystery writers on the fundamentals of the genre.
- Review other mystery authors’ novels.
- Give tips on getting published or writing a first novel (lots of readers are amateur writers who dream of being published too!).
- Debunk myths and offer interesting facts that are in some way related to your story (Can you really kill someone with a well-placed bash to the nose? What is the oldest known poison? How long does it take for rigor mortis to set in?).
These are just a few ideas. I’m sure you can brainstorm more. Just remember that the idea is to establish yourself as an authority on the topic. Whether you’re selling information or entertainment, people want to buy from the best!
Going on a Book Tour? Promote the Event Online
AuthorsTrack is a new site that keeps track of book signings and other author events across the United States. Visitors can search for upcoming events by state, so even if they haven’t heard of you yet, they might see that you’re coming to a bookstore near them, and head on over just to see what you’re about.
To get your book tour dates listed on the site, e-mail the site editor (address is listed at the bottom of the company’s front page) for information.
Why You Should Stay Away from Search Engine Submission Companies
You’re an author looking to promote your book. You’ve just put your new blog or website up, but you’re not getting any traffic. You see an advertisement that suggests (ok, shouts) that you should sign up with a search engine submission company that will submit your site to all the search engines to make sure they “see” it. What should you do?
Run away. Run away fast.
These companies will take your money, and they don’t do anything you can’t do yourself. In fact, you don’t even need to submit your site to the search engines in order to be found.
All of the search engines have little bots that mosey around the web “spidering” sites and taking note of new content and indexing (or including) new sites in their database.
Yes, these bots can visit a site because someone has submitted it to the search engine, but they automatically go from site to site via links anyway.
In order to have your site found automatically, there’s only one thing you need to do:
Get at least one link from one other site that is indexed in the search engines.
Just about every site you know of is going to be indexed by the major search engines, but it’s easy to double check. For example, to see if the site is indexed in Google, type site:URL (i.e. site:www.thenameofthesite.com) into the search box. As long as you see the site listed on the results page, you’re in business.
You can use this same method to check and see if your site is already indexed.
Let’s assume it’s brand new, and you’re not in there yet. How do you get that first link to your site?
We’ll talk more about methods of getting free links later, but for now, just find a friend with a blog, website, myspace page, etc. Make sure your friend’s site is indexed via the method above, and then ask him or her to throw up a link to your new site. (Heck, ask everybody you know to throw up a link to your new site; you’re trying to promote your book after all.) If you have your own blog or another website that is indexed, you can add a new link to your book promotion site on your own.
Shortly, the search engine bots will find your new site, and automatically include it in their index. There’s no reason to pay anyone to submit your sites to search engines.
Now, whether or not you’ll get any visitors to your site is another matter. To learn how to get more traffic, watch for posts on keywords for authors, search engine optimization, and other web marketing tricks.
Why Your Keywords Should Be in Links to Your Site (Part V: Keywords for Authors Series)
In the last section, Part IV: Using Keywords on Your Website, we talked about how to optimize your home page for the keyword you selected earlier. Now we’re going to talk about how getting links from other sites can increase your placement in the search engine results.
You see, what you do on your website is only a part of the search engine ranking equation. What also matters is other sites’ reactions to your site. If no one’s linking to you, your site can’t be very important, now can it? (That’s the way Google sees things anyway.)
One of the key ways to boost traffic and increase your search engine rankings is to increase the number of links point to your site.
There are ways to go about getting links (without paying anyone) and we’ll discuss that more in the future. For now, just worry about the links that are already out there to your site, the ones that are from friends, family, co-workers, etc. (all the folks you’ve cajoled into helping your promote your book).
When you read these links, what do they say? (The links are the actual clickable text, and that’s called the “anchor text” in the biz.)
Do they say your name? The name of your book? “Click here”?
Ideally, you want as many of those links as possible to use your keywords. This is especially true if you’re trying to do well with Google (and you should be, since it is by far the most popular search engine–they can deliver the most traffic to your site).
“Click here” doesn’t help as much as a keyword related to your book.
If I’m trying to come up highly ranked in the search engines for “fantasy books,” I might ask a friend to blog about my site and write something like: If you like fantasy books, please visit my friend’s site. Fantasy books would be the clickable link.
When the search engine sees your keyword in a link pointing to your site, it’s going to think your site is about your keyword. It’s going to think people searching for your keyword on the Internet want to go to your site.
If lots of sites link to your site using that keyword, you’re going to rank highly for the term. Don’t worry about every single site linking to you with “fantasy books” or whatever your term is (in fact, that could look a little unnatural to the search engines), but it’s definitely a worthwhile goal to make sure some of the links say that.
When you combine the keyword optimization you did on the front page of your web site with the keyword-rich links coming into your site, you’ll start to see improvements in how your site ranks for those terms. The closer you get to the first page of search engine results (and the closer you get to the top of that first page), the more traffic you’ll get to your site. And more traffic should mean more book sales.