Book Marketing

Half of Amazon Book Sales are Planned Purchases (from Forbes.com)

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Half of Amazon book sales are planned purchases, according to Forbes–meaning that by the time people get to Amazon, they already know what they intend to buy.

This statistic doesn’t surprise me; it backs up what common sense indicates–that people visit websites with a mission. Not many readers “browse” online retailers looking for suggestions the way they might browse shelves in a bookstore. By the time they get to Amazon, they likely have titles written on a post-it note, gleaned from some other source (word of mouth referrals, Goodreads, book reviews in newspapers, magazines, or blogs).

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What We’ve Been Up To

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Note: This post was first published on 563media.com.

We’re having a good couple of work weeks here at 563. A 5-day test run of Google ads we wrote for one client sold 49 eBooks. (That’s 10 eBooks a day; very respectable.) After the test, we wrote a custom landing page to boost conversion on one of the ads. We’re curious to see how that ad performs now that it points to a page specially designed to answer Google users’ questions.

This week, another of our clients is outperforming The Perks of Being a Wallflower on Scribd.com. Perks is a paid placement with a major movie tie-in; our client’s book is a debut novel from a small publisher. Its success is due largely to good old-fashioned Twitter networking and persistence.

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Platform Building Done Right

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platform building - Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

As a writer and consultant, part of what I do professionally is advise authors how to use the Internet to build their platforms. In publishing parlance, “platform” means the total number of people you can reach about your book. It’s the sum total of readers, TV viewers, podcast listeners, email and blog subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, attendees at public speaking events and readings, stalkers, and so forth.

The theory is, the bigger your platform, the more buyers you’ll have. Also, your friends will have friends, and they’ll have friends, and so forth, kicking off a word-of-mouth effect and reinforcing your relative influence (because the more people who appear to be talking about you, the more popular and important you must be).

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