Book Promotions for Self Publishers - Do You Have To Pay to Play?

About this video

Dale asks whether self-publishing has become pay-to-play. He contrasts the business about five years earlier — when authors could ‘shotgun’ or ‘spray and pray’ one-off books into hot niches, profit heavily from organic sales, and get by spamming social media and gathering reviews — with today, where hot topics still matter but brands and authors who go deep in a niche win, Amazon has tightened review gathering toward organic reviews, and its algorithm has become more sophisticated. The difference-maker, he says, is relevancy, determined by impressions, clicks, buys and engagement/activity, above all whether a book sells and drives revenue for Amazon; one-off authors with no audience are disadvantaged when they expect Amazon to bring them customers. Paid promotion buys the traffic that feeds those relevancy signals. He rates Amazon Advertising (formerly Amazon Marketing Services) as the best pay-to-play option: simple, cost-effective if cost-per-click stays low and keywords are relevant, and served to a warm audience already on Amazon to buy, with budgets as low as the $5 per day he describes. Facebook and Google ads, by contrast, reach a cold audience not there to buy books, need more work and retargeting, and can consume money regardless of outcome. BookBub’s newsletter placements are very hard to get, stringent and pricey, with mixed success stories in his telling, though its CPC ads reach warmer book-buying traffic; he says he has not tried BookBub himself. Other promo sites for free or 99-cent deals are hit-or-miss. His conclusion: paying is not a necessity, but it helps, established advertisers have an advantage, and authors should test one avenue at a time, starting with Amazon Advertising.

Key takeaways

• Relevancy — impressions, clicks, buys and engagement, led by actual sales — is what Dale says drives Amazon visibility.
• The old spray-and-pray model of one-off books in hot niches no longer works as it did; deep-niche brands now win.
• Amazon Advertising is his top paid pick because its audience is already on Amazon intending to buy, unlike cold Facebook or Google traffic.
• BookBub newsletter placements are described as stringent, hard to land and pricey; other promo sites for free/99-cent deals are hit-or-miss.
• Paying to play is not mandatory but is an advantage — test one promotional avenue at a time rather than running them all at once.

Episode details: published April 18, 2019 · 12:04 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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