The Paperback Podcast – Ep 9 – Time Effective Ways To Sell Your Books

Shownotes:

Today’s episode is going to be super helpful for any authors who struggle with managing their time, or who want to automate more of their workflow. I’ve mentioned automation here on the podcast a couple of times now, but we’ve never really ventured into ways that you can implement automation for yourself.

Today, that’s what we’ll be doing—I’m going to be sharing some book marketing methods that will save you time and energy by reducing the amount of manual work you need to be doing, and automating systems to sell books for you.

Let’s dive into it shall we?

 

1:98 – An Automated Sales Funnel

So any kind of automated funnel can work to sell your book—and you can do these really well through email marketing. It usually works best if you offer something free in exchange for them joining your mailing list. Make sure this free thing actually benefits them—it could be the first three chapters of your book, or a free novella, etc.

Once they are warmed up, you can pitch your book that’s for sale—and this should be the obvious next step. They like the first book, they get the second one. Or they like the first couple of chapters, they buy the rest of the book to see what happens. Makes sense, right?

Having a funnel like this in place means you don’t have to manually sell your book to every person who stumbles across you—you can set this up just once and automate the freebie so that it’s constantly getting downloads, your list is constantly growing, and it’s resulting in constant sales. Even when you’re sleeping!

The next method I want to share today is…

 

2:35 – Pre-Scheduled Social Media Posts

We all know that posting on social media is important, but it’s the actual manual process of coming up with a post, writing it out, and hitting publish that can be overwhelming.

This is why I like to plan my social media content in advance and schedule it ahead of time—it means I’m doing the bulk of the work when I’m actually feeling motivated and creative, and it gets posted at the right times too.

It’s really easy to schedule content—you can actually schedule posts straight to Facebook pages and groups without paying for a program. There are also a couple of free programs out there for other platforms, but I like to use Planoly and Co-Schedule for everything else.

The third method I’m sharing today is…

 

3:34 – Mass Emailing Announcements/Promotions

Imagine this—your book is live in the Amazon store, and you want to tell as many people as possible.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to email everybody the email message at once—and this doesn’t have to take hours of manual email processing. By building an email list ahead of time, you can schedule this message to go out on the right day to a list of thousands of people. Imagine how powerful that would be for your launch week sales? And with minimal effort on your part too—after all, we already talked about how you can build your email list on autopilot!

You can use Mailchimp to send emails to massive lists at one time.

The next method on my list is…

 

4:18 – Using CTA’s (Calls To Action) In Your Content

If you’re going to be putting content out there, why wouldn’t you add a CTA? There’s very little reason to be creating content if it doesn’t have a purpose—and whether that’s to build brand awareness or to convert leads, it’s critical that you’re telling people what action to take next.

The really cool thing about content is that once it’s created, it can be found forever at any time. It can also be shared, repurposed, and reposted. So by having a CTA that clearly tells people what you want them to do next, you’re enabling people to be redirected to your book sales page at any given time, without you having to manually be there to tell them where to go.

The second last method I’d like to share today is…

 

5:01 – Street Teams

Street teams are very handy to have—if you’re not sure what they are, they’re basically a group of people who have been supporting you or your novel and want to help you promote it prior (or post) release.

If you do it right, street teams can be very automated because you have all these people working on your behalf to help get the message out about your book in various ways—and all you have to do is tell them what they need to be doing. This can be as easy as sending them a task list, or a weekly email, and you can even schedule this to go out automatically upon them joining the team.

And finally, the last method I have to share with you today is…

 

5:38 – Visual Marketing & Book Trailers

When you’re building an online presence and brand, you have a lot of virtual space where you can be promoting your book visually—Facebook headers, pinned posts, YouTube book trailers, Instagram story highlights… the list goes on.

There’s a lot of places that people will look at more than once when they visit your profile, so if you’re succeeding in drawing attention back to you on a consistent basis, you’ll also succeed in ensuring they have the release date embedded into their brain with visual marketing. Plus, it’s a proven study that people need to see an offer 7 – 8 times before they will even consider buying it, so the more you can get people seeing your book, the more chance you have of earning a sale.

 

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Those are all the time-saving book sales tips I have for you today—which one did you like the sound of most? Will you be implementing any of these? I’d love for you to come follow me on Instagram and let me know!