“Self-Publishing: A Series of Experiments + Endless Self-Promotion” By Poornima Vijayashanker
Last year I had self-published my first book: How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products. I took a lot of inspiration and advice from Charlie Hoehn’s post: How I’m Marketing My Self-Published Book and Nathan Barry’s book Authority.
The following post is primarily dedicated to promotional tactics I’ve pursued with both my books. While you might think that writing a book takes a bulk of your time, promoting it takes a lot more. Having a publisher doesn’t mean that you’re off the hook, so a number of the tactics I cover in this post apply to both camps.
If you’re new to self-publishing and you’re looking for mechanics behind self-publishing, check out my post: Strategies for Successfully Self-Publishing Your First Book.
OK onto promotion!
This year I wanted to explore a new theme around public speaking, and have been working on my second book: Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking, which I’ll be launching next Monday November 2nd.
You’d think that the second time around, things would just be easier. After all, I know what worked and what didn’t with my first book. I can just do the exact same thing and expect the exact same results, right?
If only that were true.
Within one year, things have changed dramatically, and I’ve had to learn to adapt pretty quickly.
Here’s a list of what I did last year, and their results.
List building. Last year I grew my list over the course of a couple months using Twitter + FB ads and driving them to sign up for an email course. The list definitely grew faster as I approached launch week.
ProductHunt. I had some trouble getting initial traction with the email course, but once I launched the book, ProductHunt was a phenomenal source of leads + sales. Read more about how I learned to use it effectively here.
Pre-order campaign. I did a pre-order campaign for 1-week to my existing list, and got a measly $1000 in sales. It was enough to prove that people were interested, but not enough to help cover production costs. Many people told me that pre-orders just don’t work, and that more people will buy during launch week. So I took their advice and waited patiently. They were right, launch week was a hit in comparison.
Sponsorships. I secured 6 sponsors in about a month via an email campaign, which helped offset printing costs.
Guest posting and podcasts. I spent a lot of time contacting prominent blogs, and writing up posts that met their criteria. It was a lot of additional writing, and while they were great for building awareness, they didn’t really generate the sales I was looking for. I only did a few podcast interviews, and saw similar results.
Email autoresponder. On launch day and beyond, I knew that new people would be viewing the landing page, and would be thinking, “I don’t have time for another book…” So I setup an email drip campaign with about 7 excerpts, and slowly sent them out to subscribers over the course of a couple months. This actually worked like a charm and still does, because it gives people time to get to know the material.
Speaking. I did a small tour before the launch of the book, and it didn’t really amount to any sales. But when I spoke after the book was out, I was able to sell the book right after speaking. My sweet spot for sales has been conferences with less than 1000 attendees. They are a lot more engaged and don’t have as many things vying for their attention. But Meetups proved to be a challenge, because people attend them for free, so they’re not really in a buying mood.
Amazon. I created a Kindle version about 3 months after the initial launch. I waited for the following 3 reasons:
1. Kindle requires special formatting (or rather no formatting), which takes additional time to produce. I only had enough time and money to produce a print version, which I translated into e-book in PDF format.
2. Amazon gives you 70% of sales if you sell between $2.99-$9.99, and 35% if if you sell for less than $2.99 or more than $9.99. They also have a KDP exclusive program, where they give you 70% of the sales. Regardless, you’re not going to make a whole lot unless you have a large volume of sales each month. Hence I anticipated the Kindle version would cannibalize sales, and that’s basically what happened. However, it did open up markets in countries where readers are price sensitive. The problem is I don’t have any sales data beyond where people are coming from, so I cannot interact with customers. I’ve had to wait for readers to reach out to me, and that’s been a really small fraction of customers.
3. Amazon grades your book’s relevance and interest based on the number of reviews posted. So I took the time to build up a good base by reaching out to people who had purchased in the first few months.
So what am I doing differently this time around?
Co-Authoring. Probably the biggest difference this time around is that I am co-authoring the book with Karen Catlin. This is Karen’s first book, but she’s been a quick study, thank you Karen! The other benefit to partnering has been reach. Karen has a wonderful network of companies who have helped sponsor the book, and invited us to come and speak once the book is out. Plus prominent people in the industry who are willing to promote it.
Pre-order campaign using a platform. Despite people telling me that pre-order don’t work, I wanted to give it a go again.
Why?
Well I’m no Eric Ries, but I noticed that he managed to raise $500K+ doing a crowdfunding campaign. So I decided to steal a couple pages from his playbook 🙂 This time around I used a platform called Publishizer.
The great thing about using a platform is that it provides social proof and a visual goal. People see other people are interested in the book, are purchasing it, and want to purchase it themselves. This was especially important with higher tiers.
Prospective sponsors saw that other people had sponsored and were keen to sponsor as well. I also created a video teaser with Karen, and ran the campaign for a longer period of time 1 month vs. 1 week. To keep building momentum, I created a lot of video content to promote the campaign, which I’ll talk about in my next point.
Videos content. Given the subject matter of the book: public speaking, I opted to do video content instead of doing an email course. I kept them very brief, less than 90 seconds, because people’s attention span wanes after that.
What I noticed was that some videos (despite their production quality) performed better than others. For example this video: How to Present Your Work Without Sound Self-Promotional has outperformed and continues to outperform this other video: You Don’t Need to Know Everything to Speak.
While the second has higher production quality the former gets to the heart of an issue we all struggle with: speaking about our accomplishments proudly. I’ve also played around with creating some sillier videos just for fun like this one, just to see what resonates with people.
Podcast interviews. Similar to the pre-order campaign, I decided to give this another shot, but focus on podcasters who have a larger audience that is similar to mine. It’s too early to tell the effects of doing this.
Speaking. I’ve spoken at a couple conferences already to garner interest for the book, and I’m set to speak at more this fall and next year. It’s quite a lot to manage to do one-off events and coordinate with organizers, so I’m working on putting together a tour to keep the momentum going.
Interactive Bundle. We had to whittle down the content to fit into a 300 page book. So I’ve taken all the extras and created an interactive bundle, which will provide bonus materials and ongoing content to support readers and be a part of their journey for a longer period of time.
Audio book. I won’t have time to produce this in time for launch, but I am considering launching it a couple months after because I’ve had a number of people ask me about it. I’m currently evaluating whether to distribute it through Audible or start with my own list first.
Amazon. I won’t be releasing a Kindle version during launch, and I’m still developing a strategy around how to best leverage Amazon, so stay tuned!
List building. I tried paid advertising on FB + Twitter, and having people on my list spread the word, but I’ve it’s been extremely slow. I think I’ve gotten a total of 200–300 signups through those channels. So I’m exploring other avenues such as partnerships to make this happen.
Press. Instead of guest posts, this time around, I decided to give press a shot, and hired a PR consultant. Most publications wait until launch, so I again I don’t have any results to share.
There are also things I have on my todo list like: testing out Instagram and getting testimonials from influencers. I’ve gotten some testimonials, but the more influential the person, the more likely they have a gatekeeper. So I’m patiently working on this.
Whew! OK are you still with me?
Great! The name of the game is experiment. I’ll do a post-mortem after the launch to share additional results.
Now I want to know, if you’ve self-published before, what experiments have worked for you?
And if you’re thinking of self-publishing, what experiments are you considering?
Please let me know in the comments below.
