Welcome to the 120th episode of The Author Hangout, a podcast designed to help authors, especially self-published and indie authors, with marketing their books and improving their author platform. Authors struggle with various aspects of marketing and we are here to help!
Book Launches & Pay-Per-Click Advertising
In this episode, we interviewed bestselling author, Gregory Diehl. He shared insights on how he turned books in two different genres into bestsellers. He also gave tips on using Amazon ads to help get even more sales for his books.
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Episode Resources:
- FREE: The Ultimate Author Checklist for Online Book Marketing
- Gregory’s Website
- Gregory’s Author Page on Amazon
Featured Quotes
“They became my early reviewers, of course, and they became my early promotors. The way I tend to write, at least, either you don’t get it at all, or you really, really like it. So the people who really, really liked either of my books were very eager to share that with other people. That became enough of an initial thrust to get it up there in the Amazon rankings, and at that point it was mostly about playing around with the pricing, keeping things as cheap as possible, at least to begin with – $2.99 for at least the first month, even though the first book was fairly long; it was about 65,000 words, which certainly justifies a higher price than $2.99, but I intentionally kept it as low as I could at first because I didn’t even care about the revenue at first. I just wanted enough people to read the book and get it sustainably successful.”
“The biggest thing for me right now is pay-per-click advertising. I don’t meet a lot of other authors who are using this, and I think many of them don’t even know that Amazon has a pay-per-click platform where you can set up your ads and you can track how many people click on them and set your cost per click, and then you see how many people actually bought the book after clicking on it. If you’ve got a mathematical, analytical mind, you can track exactly how much it’s costing you every time somebody buys one of your books. And if you experiment with enough different ad variations, you can figure out ones that sustainably get people to buy your book. It doesn’t require a lot of social networking and advertising. I think that’s what most people focus on; they spam the Facebook groups and say “Buy my book! It’s amazing! It’s 99 cents only!” That’s not good salesmanship no matter how you look at it.”
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Other Episodes
Get caught up on the other episodes of The Author Hangout that you may have missed:
- Ep 145: “Million Dollar Book Business”
- Ep 144: “Network Net Worth”
- Ep 143: “Learning to Hack Learning”
- Ep 142: “Making Of The Perfect Optin”
- Ep 141: “Coaching Breeds Author Success”
- Ep 140: “Gumroad for Authors”
- Ep 139: “Above The Noise”
- Ep 138: “Goal Setting Check-in”
- Ep 137: “Relying On Others”
- Ep 136: “Honest Conversations on Book Marketing”
- Ep 135: “Recognition of Hard Work”
- Ep 134: “Improving Kindle Book Rankings”
- Ep 133: “Making Money Fast?”
- Ep 132: “Book Marketing & Book Launches”
- Ep 131: “Authors Answers: How To Get Book Reviews”
- Ep 130: “Author Answers: Author Street Teams”
- Ep 129: “Author Answers: Using KDP Select or Not”
- Ep 128: “Traffic, Subscribers, and Sales”
- Ep 127: “Book Marketing Tips from Experts (Part 7)”
- Ep 126: “Media Interviews & Book Marketing”
- Ep 125: “Book Marketing Tips from Experts (Part 6)”
- Ep 124: “Goal Setting for Authors”
- Ep 123: “Author Answers: Social Media Engagement”
- Ep 122: “Speaking, Podcasts & Mailing Lists”
- Ep 121: “Authors Answers: DIY Blog Tours”
- Ep 120: “Book Launches & Pay-Per-Click Advertising”
- Ep 119: “Author Answers: Choosing Comparison Titles”
- Ep 118: “Writing as a Career & Audiobooks”
- Ep 117: “Self-Publishing & Book Launches”
- Ep 116: “Podcasting for Book Marketing”
- Ep 115: “Author Answers: Best Marketing Activities”
- Ep 114: “Book Launches & Video Marketing”
- Ep 113: “Writing Faster, Marketing Smarter”
- Ep 112: “Book Marketing Momentum”
- Ep 111: “Building Book Launch Teams”
- Ep 110: “Book Launches and Distribution”
- Ep 109: “Email Lists & Facebook Live”
- Ep 108: “Facebook Ads for Book Marketing”
- Ep 107: “NaNoWriMo, Writing, and Marketing”
- Ep 106: “Book Marketing Success & Failure”
- Ep 105: “Telling Stories & Reaching Readers”
- Ep 104: “Connect With Other Authors”
- Ep 103: “Maximizing Your Book Marketing”
- Ep 102: “Audiobooks and Book Marketing”
- Ep 101: “Author Email Marketing Automation”
- Ep 100: “Looking Back, Looking Forward”
- Ep 099: “Maximizing Book Promotions”
- Ep 098: “Meta Data Is Your Brand”
- Ep 097: “Kindle in Motion & More”
- Ep 086 – How To Create an Irresistible Opt-In Incentive