Join Me As I Coach an Author on Book Marketing!
Welcome to a different kind of post today. This week, I'm really excited to share information from a coaching call that I did with a member of my Creative’s Content Club marketing community. A couple times a year, I survey my club members for their feedback, and one of the prizes this time around was winning a coaching call with me. The winner was kind enough to let me record this and share it to this YouTube channel and my podcast, and I’m also going share some of that with you here.
If you want to see or hear more from this call, click on the button below for the corresponding YouTube video or podcast episode.
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In this call, we talked about key topics for marketing, such as should you have a website as a creative. We talked about SEO marketing strategies, like when is it the right time to do Facebook ads? Do I need to be blogging as an author? What happens when you're a multi-passionate creative and you have two different genres or two different niches? In this case, this wonderful member was both a fiction and a non-fiction author. We also talked about launching two different offers and how to navigate that on your website and all of that good stuff.
If you are a creative who wants support like this, here is a link to the waitlist for the Creative’s Content Club, where you can ask me questions like this every single day in our private Facebook group where I go live monthly to answer questions and chat through things. I go live again a second time every single month to give feedback directly to you on your marketing content.
Let's dive into a few highlights from the coaching call.
Shelby: What do you want to talk about today? How can I help you?
Nidhi: So today I have a couple of questions regarding author websites. I am an author who's just starting out. I think it's been a couple of months—8 months—since I started my journey. And so, I have one book out. That's it. The next one is going to launch on August 1, so that's exciting, but I wanted to know if I should divert more of my time to building an author website.
I do have one, but I would say it's quite rudimentary. It's just there. It's like a skeleton, and I haven't spent much time adding any content there. So, how important do you think an author website is for someone who's just starting out and doesn't have much of a following? Because you need traffic to divert it to the website, right? It's not just building the website. You need to get the traffic there. So, how important do you think it is?
Shelby: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it is important to have an author website, but the amount of content that you put on it kind of depends. I would say more on your genre. For non-fiction, for example, I think that there is a benefit to having a little bit more to your website in terms of your expertise and potentially even some blog posts to get some search engine traffic going.
Whereas with fiction, it's a little bit different and not quite as important that we have a really built out website early on. But I do think, in terms of having a long-term author career, it does show that level of professionalism. Whenever you have an author website, you have a clean branded landing page for people to go to. I think at minimum having an about me section, having a book section that talks about what your books are about, and then—if email marketing is a part of your strategy—to have a lead magnet and a sign-up on your website as well. So, I’d say those are the key pieces.
Nidhi: And do you think it's important to blog regularly on that website, or is it okay if we just have all the important information about our books and about us there? Because blogging requires a sufficient amount of time, right? You can't just post nonsense on there.
Shelby: Totally. No, I don't think you need to. Unless that is something that you feel is a strong suit for you that would bring in traffic. And there are authors who do blog successfully, but it's something that they enjoy doing. So, if it's not something that you want to promote and do on a regular basis, no. If there are certain topics that you feel like your audience is searching for often—and I would think this would apply more to your non-fiction book—it might be worth putting up a few articles and just letting them sit there long-term on your website. I have some blog posts from a couple years ago that bring in regular traffic, and it's not something that I update regularly either.
So, that's something to consider. But blogging is not a big part of my strategy. It's not a big part of a lot of author strategies today. So, no, if it's not something that you're interested in doing, you do not have to do that regularly because it does take time for, you know, a blogging career to set off.
Nidhi: Also, can we use it as a newsletter lead magnet where you post a snippet of your weekly newsletter as a blog and then you can say, “If you want to read the entire thing, you can sign up for the newsletter.” Would that work?
Shelby: Definitely. I think that with that it just needs to be enticing enough for people to want to click and read. It depends on the format of your newsletter, because if you're giving a lot of it away for free, it might have the opposite effect where people are like, "Oh, well, I can get most of it for free on her website, so I don't need to sign up." So I think it depends on how you frame it. If you just make it the intro and then really encourage people to subscribe to get all of the benefits of the topic that you're writing about, then yes, that can definitely work well. I've seen some authors do that successfully.
Nidhi: Okay. Now speaking about distribution . . . so as an author who doesn't have much of a following, do you think it's better to stick to KDP Select, which has 70% royalties, or do you suggest going wide with multiple platforms?
Shelby: Okay, that's a good question. For non-fiction, we typically see more paperback. And then for fiction, with your new book, you'll probably see more ebook. So, I think it's worth testing both. And I know that this isn't a super helpful answer, but I do think it's worth it because some authors see so much success going wide, and then other authors see 99% of their sales are Amazon through KDP, and so it's worth it for them to do KDP Select.
I think that there's benefits to KDP Select as a new author, being able to do the free ebook offer, but I don't think it's worth it to always be discounting our work and or giving it away. But as a new author, that can really help get some initial reviews and get some fans of your work who are interested in reading more.
With my first book, I put that for free when I had little following and got a few hundred downloads, I think, and got some reviews out of it. So, I think that's a benefit to KDP Select. And then you can always change your mind after the 90-day window and go wide and see what happens. But there are people who don't want to buy on Amazon anymore for their own personal choices. We can potentially reach more readers going wide as well, right?
Nidhi: I think I can try that strategy since I'm going to have two books released now. My first non-fiction book has been in KDP Select for a while, but again, since I was a newbie, I didn't even know how to stack the promos. And I was like, I'll do a promo this month and then I'll do a promo next month. Now I know better.
Shelby: Yeah, I think that's a great strategy. Go for 90 days like we talk about in the Creative’s Content Club and see what happens. See what your audience is responding to, and then you can make up your mind from there if you want to stay in that or if you want to go wide.
Nidhi: Amazon does promote your book for a specific amount of time after it's launched, right?
Shelby: I don't think that there's a policy they have on that, but if you are sending traffic to your book upon release, it does have a better chance of being shown more widely. There are different strategies. For example, some people will recommend getting as many people as possible on day one to check out your book, whereas others will recommend try to do it over time, like over the first couple weeks of release. If you were to release a book and not really market it or promote it, I don't think that they would really boost it much.
Nidhi: Does the CTR matter, or does only the number of clicks matter? Like how many people are coming and visiting your book's page versus how many people are actually buying uh the book? What influences the algorithm more?
Shelby: They do want to see people converting and buying compared to the number of clicks or views you're getting on the page. That overall conversion rate is the number of people who bought divided by the number of views the page is getting. So if a page is getting thousands of views—maybe you're running ads to it or you had a viral video—but no one is buying, that would look to Amazon that the right traffic isn’t being sent or the book description or cover isn't high quality enough to get sales.
So that can negatively affect the algorithm as well. But it's also good data for us if we are running ads and we're not getting conversions or we have a video do really well that's about the book and we know people are going to the page and they're not buying. That's a good indicator for us that something's off with it.
Nidhi: And one last question. So, out of all the ad promoting platforms—I've tried Amazon and Book Ads—I didn't see much success with those things. The only one I haven't tried is Facebook. What has been your experience with regards to Facebook ads?
Shelby: I really like Facebook ads. I mostly run them for my marketing business, however, I've worked with a lot of people who run Facebook ads directly to their books and I've run them to my books in the past as well, and it can definitely be really successful.
But my recommendation is getting your organic content nailed down first and experimenting with your organic content, seeing how your audience responds to the regular posts that you're making on Facebook or Instagram before putting money behind it. Now, if you have a budget and you're okay with spending money on ads to see what works without testing first, that's fine, too. But typically, the people that come to me don't have huge ad budgets. And so I recommend that we try organic first and get some posts out there about your books and see what resonates most with people, what's getting the most engagement or interest first.
Nidhi: Awesome. Thank you so much!
I hope that sharing this call with you was helpful and that you've walked away with a few different tips from Nidhi's questions. These are the kinds of conversations we're having all the time inside the Creative’s Content Club.
Thank you so much for reading, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!