“It’s a simple Numbers game. You can sell books, but you’ll very likely end up paying more to advertise than you’ll make back in royalties.”
The Great Book Advertising Death Spiral
What about advertising? Can you “buy” your way into giant book sales with ads?
If you’ve got very, very, VERY deep pockets, the answer is…probably yes.
Throw a few hundred thousand dollars into advertising and the small percentage of people who buy in response to the ads just may add up to a big enough number to sell a lot of books and maybe even hit one of the big print bestseller lists. In fact, I know of one book marketing consultant that won’t take on a client who has less than $150,000-$200,000 to spend on launch promotions, because that’s “what it takes” to promote your way into the bigs.
Granted, you’ll likely never come close to making that back in royalties, but most people who drop that kind of money on promotion aren’t in it for the royalties. They’re either in it for notoriety or to drive any number of indirect revenue streams, like speaking, consulting, TV, media and product sales.
But…can book advertising work for the bootstrapping newbie author?
Answer, not likely.
Let’s look at three examples, traditional print display ads, direct mail and online pay per click ads.
Conclusion: Display ads = book marketing fail.
Print 5,000 mail pieces for 25 cents a piece and add in 25-45 cents in postage/mailing house fees (5,000 X (25+25)) = $2,500 on the low end).Total spend – $4,500-$5,500.Now, if you have an insane conversion, which in direct response, would be 4%, that would translate to 200 books sold, leaving you with $200-$400 in royalties on your $4,500-$5,500 spend.
Conclusion: Direct mail = book marketing fail. (FYI – It MAY be possible for certain direct-response savvy publishers to make money with direct mail, because their economics are very different than yours.)
Let’s start with $1,000 to spend and choose a set of relevant keywords that people would be searching on to trigger our ads to show. We want our ad to be in #2 or #3 position, because click rates drop a lot after that. And, let’s just use my book, Career Renegade, as an example to make it easier. We’ll use keywords like “career change, do what you love, laid off, job hunting, self help.” The first thing we discover is that these are massively competitive keywords to bid on, so to even have ads show on the first page of search results will cost anywhere from 25 cents to $5 a click. But, for the sake of optimism, let’s use the lowest possible number–25 cents.
At 25 cents a click, $1,000 gets 4,000 clicks. But, here’s the thing. You can’t just send those people directly to your amazon.com or bn.com book page to order. That’s called “direct linking” and google will shut you down for that. So, you have to send them to a landing page you create that then sells them on clicking a link to amazon, bn.com or any other place.
Again, let’s be hyper-optimistic here and assume your landing page is so rocking, it converts a mindblowing 20% of your 4,000 visitors, sending 800 people to your book page on amazon. Then, once on that page, a whopping 20% convert, yielding 160 sales. Total royalties are $160 to $320 on a spend of $1,000.
[There actually is one potential strategy may be viable for certain full-size, hardcover books, but it takes some work to set up, it’s a bit complicated and you’ll have to put a lot more than $1,000 at risk to pull it off. So, I’m not even going to go into that strategy here.]
Conclusion: Pay per click = book marketing fail.
So, it’s seeming that, for the average author, straight up advertising is a losing proposition. It’s a simple numbers game. You can sell books, but you’ll very likely end up paying more to advertise than you’ll make back in royalties.
But, there’s one other huge con to selling books through advertising...
It’s a one-shot-deal transaction. You’re not building a community, a list a relationship that will let you actually know who’s buying your books and be able to reach back out to them over time.