Use the Free Book Promotion Feature as Funnel to Sell Your Other Books
December 02, 2021Categories: Marketing, Promotion, Sales
Pages & Platforms. The Podcast of HostingAuthors.com with Tyler Kirk
Pages & Platforms by HostingAuthors.com is your go-to podcast for everything an author needs to succeed when it comes to an author or book website. Join us as we break down essential strategies for building your author brand, growing your readership, and navigating the publishing landscape with confidence.
As many authors know, the real money starts to come in when the author has more than one title. This is because the cost to acquire a new reader is typically more than the profit that can be made on a single book. But simply having more than one title isn't the solution; building the sales funnel is.
Be on the reader's end of this and download my free ebook, The Journey. Experience how smooth the process is!
Perhaps you are the author of only one book. Don't despair. On average, this just means you need to work a bit harder or spend a bit more money getting your first book to take off. Even you never plan on writing any more books, please read on. Your second book doesn't need to be a novel nor a masterpiece; it just needs to be enough to whet the appetite of your readers while providing them a complete book—one with a beginning, middle, and end (no long teasers). This is easier than you might imagine. If you offer any other related products or services, like consulting, you don't even need a second book.
The Strategy
The idea of sales funnel is to acquire customers (in our case, readers) for as little money as possible while marketing higher-priced products and services to them. This part should be clear: It is much easier to get people to download a free ebook than it is to get them to pay for it. This is the foundation for our free promotion strategy. Here are the steps:
- Choose / create the book.
- Make sure your book's front matter or back matter promotes your other books, products, or services.
- Set up the book as a free promotion in your HostingAuthors.com account.
- Promote the book.
- Work your funnel (market to your readers who downloaded the free book).
The goal is to have some percentage of the readers who downloaded your free ebook buying your other books, products, and/or services.
1. Choosing or Creating the Free Ebook
If you are the author of a series of books (books in a series are related and often sequential), this is an easy one. Use the first book in the series as the free ebook. I know, you put countless hours into writing it, and it is far too good of a book to be free. Don't think of it as giving away your first book; think of it as lowering the price of each book in the series by a little bit, because the hope is that a good number of readers will end up buying the series.
If you are not the author of a series of books, but you do have multiple books, you will want your free ebook to be one that is related to your other books (e.g., the same genre), is either short or past its prime (i.e., not a great seller), and is a good representation of your writing. If you are creating an ebook just for the purpose of giving away, the path of least resistance is to write a short book—even a few pages will do. It is not about the length, but the quality. If you are a fiction writer, write a short story. If you are a non-fiction writer of a book with ten ideas, offer a condensed edition with just the highlights. Get creative.
Keep in mind that you do not need to offer this book for free everywhere. For this promotion, you just offer it for free on your HostingAuthors.com website. Amazon and other retailers won't mind because the promo link is a special link that offers the free download. If someone were to still visit your site using the regular URL, the book price would still be the same. You can see this by visiting my promo URL...
https://www.hostingauthors.com/books/journey/promo
... then visiting my regular URL for the book—the one that is linked everywhere and in the search engines...
https://www.hostingauthors.com/books/journey
This fact also takes away much of the sting of giving away one of your valuable books.
2. Add Front and/or Back Matter
Although your book is a book, it is also an advertisement for your other books. To make sure it is effective at being an advertisement, you need to make it clear what other books you, as an author, offer. You can add a list of your books before or after your main content, and let people know where they can buy them. I prefer using a single graphic:
Not that this shows my books, but more importantly, my website where people can get details of my books. If I had two or three books, I probably would just list them separately and include a short description for each. But more than that, you will annoy people... especially if your ads are longer than the book itself!
Another strategy is to include the first chapter from another book in the free book. Get them hooked! Make sure you make it clear how to read the rest of the book.
Include an "about the author" section with your website linked.
3. Set Up the Free Promotion in Your HostingAuthors.com Account
You do need a HostingAuthors.com paid account to do this free promotion (either paid option will do). This is because this strategy incorporates both the mailing list feature as well as the bookstore. I am assuming here that you have your bookstore set up already. If you need instructions on that, see https://www.virversity.com/course/hostingauthors/PS9Gw
STEP #1: Go to your bookstore in the author portal.
STEP #2: Click on the "Promotions" link in the bookstore menu.
STEP #3: Scroll down to the "Free Ebook Promotions" section and locate the book you want to be free.
STEP #4: Click on the box next to the book, then click "Next / Save."
That's it! There is no need to change your price. Your book will keep the original price when the special URL is not used, and only deliver the free ebook when the special promotion URL is used. You will find this special promotion URL under the checkbox of your book (the one ending in "/promo").
4. Promote the book using the promotion URL.
Now comes the tough part: promoting the URL. I won't go into details here, but there are many strategies for this—some free, some paid. We can certainly help you with this part at BookMarketing.pro.
When readers go to download your book, they will also be presented with all of your other titles available for purchase. Of course, they can just ignore these and download the free book, but the hope is that at least some readers will find one or more of your paid books interesting enough to purchase. You also have an opportunity to sell other versions of your free book. For example, you can give away your free ebook, but if you have an audiobook or paperback version of that book, it will show the price you gave it in your bookstore.
5. Work your funnel.
Everyone who downloaded a free copy of your book was required to provide a valid e-mail address. These e-mail addresses went into your master e-mail list (in the author section, "Misc." link). Here is where you can either copy that list into your own mailing service or software, or use our service and have us create and send the mailings for you.
I don't mean to breeze over this most important step, but how to work a funnel properly is beyond the scope of this article. Again, we are happy to assist you with this part at BookMarketing.pro.
Feel free to use the comments if you try this and let me know how it worked for you!
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