As you have by now realized, writing your ebook was just the first step. Far from the case of Kevin Costner’s cornfield, you’ll have to do more than craft it to get people to come. You’re going to have to market it too. If your talents run more toward authoring than selling, you’re going to have to get up to speed on the latter if your book is to have any chance at widespread appreciation. To help you get started, here are five strategies for boosting your ebook sales.
1. A Good Cover Will Sell 100 Thousand Words
As much as individuals are admonished to avoid judging a book by its cover, people do so—every day. The cover is the window to the contents of your book. With that said, a nice design will go a long way toward getting people to buy it. Keep in mind: you want the cover telegraphing exactly what’s in the book. Employing a fabulously designed cover with no relevance to the book is actually worse than offering the book with a poorly designed cover. If graphic design is beyond your expertise, find someone for whom the opposite is true to do a cover for you.
2. Diversify Your Distribution
Even with your own website, you’ll want to offer the book in as many different places as possible, rather than counting on your marketing efforts to bring buyers directly to your site. While your title will likely be surrounded by hundreds (if not thousands) of others on a site like Amazon, the traffic generated by the larger site will give you a better opportunity to be discovered. Having a number of different venues to get your ebooks into readers’ hands simply makes good sense. While Amazon is the logical online stop, there are number of others, including Scribd, OverDrive, Baker & Taylor and Gardners.
3. Experiment with Pricing
One of the best things about publishing an ebook is the price of production is more or less the same whether you sell one copy or 100 million. As you sell ebooks on your own website, spend some time varying the price points at which your offerings are presented to see how much difference pricing makes. You’ll find a sweet spot at which customers are willing to purchase without a great deal of secondary consideration.
4. Solicit Reviews
People tend to trust other people more than advertising. A strong review will absolutely boost sales of your ebooks. In most cases, these cannot be bought, so you’ll need to cultivate relationships with people who are considered thought leaders in your genre. Seek these people out and give them free copies of your book so they can read it and post about it to their followers. Bear in mind, giving your book away free on your website is frowned upon by many of the sellers with whom you may be trying to pair. In this case, you can use your social feeds to promote the book and offer bloggers sneak previews.
5. Offer a Guarantee
Satisfaction assurance is a powerful tool when to comes to selling any product. If a buyer believes they can get their money back should they experience dissatisfaction with a purchase, they will be more likely to engage in experimentation. Of all of these five strategies for boosting ebook sales, this is one your customers will really appreciate. Yes, some people will take advantage of your generosity by reading the book and returning it. But the volume of sales you’ll generate with the guarantee will easily outpace the number of usurpers.