OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
I love answering your questions and I'm always happy to share what I've learned on the journey, but recently I have been receiving the same question over and over again, namely,
“Help, my book isn't selling. What can I do?”
Most of the time people include a link to their book on Amazon and I can see immediately why they aren't making any sales, because although I'm an author, I'm a reader first and I've been shopping for books on Amazon for years.
My Amazon #1 bestselling book, How To Market A Book covers everything in details but the following checklist will also help you identify your problem and solve it quickly.
I have also included lots of links so you can find all the extra material on this (ever-growing!) site.
[As always, these are not rules, because there are no rules in this crazy, fast-moving self-publishing world. There will also always be outliers who get away with not doing any of the following, but these will at least help with some guidelines!]
1. Is your book available as an ebook?
99% of indie authors will not have print distribution in physical bookstores, and I would postulate that all the success stories we have heard in the last 2 years about indie authors and huge sales have come from ebook sales, not print.
Print books can be a good idea if you have specific reasons around wanting print. I decided against print but in 2013, I changed my mind, returning to print editions for all my books.
BUT/ if you want to sell a lot of books online, then make sure you have an ebook for sale as well.
There has been an influx of ebooks (and print books) self-published in the last year, as well as traditional publishers beginning to re-issue backlists digitally. I've heard a lot of people complain about this so-called ‘tsunami of crap', but personally, I believe you can surf the wave and make good sales even if you're starting now. The ebook market is growing globally as new countries come online and even within markets like the US and UK, ebooks are becoming more widely accepted.
So first off, get your ebook published.
I use Scrivener for formatting in Kindle, ePub and Word formats and then I publish on Amazon KDP, Kobo Writing Life and Smashwords or BookBaby for the rest (US citizens can use B&N Nook PubIt as well.) It's not hard if you spend some time with the various help pages.
2. Has your cover been professionally designed?
Book buyers still shop with their eyes. If people make it to your book sales page and your cover is terrible, they will not click the Buy button.
Don't use a painting your child did or that you did yourself. Don't DIY based on a YouTube video. Don't assume you can make a professional cover.
Do research your genre on Amazon and take screenshots of books that stand out in a good way.
Do take pictures of books you like with fonts and designs you like.
Do check out the ebook cover design awards at TheBookDesigner.com to see some great covers and some truly awful ones. Then hire a professional cover designer, give them that information and work with them to create a professional cover.
If you don't have a budget for this, then work extra hard until you have that extra money. Seriously, I believe this is non-negotiable if you want to stand out in the crowded market.
3. Has your book been professionally edited so it reads well?
I am passionate about the value of editing and editors, especially for new writers, or books in a new genre.
You should edit your books until you can't stand them any longer, and then you should consider hiring a professional editor to help you take it further, because you cannot see your own words after a point because you know the story so well.
You need other eyes, preferably professional eyes who will critique you honestly and tell you where the problems are, especially if the book is truly awful – and sometimes it is (and that's ok because you can write another one).
Stephen King in ‘On Writing' says to rest the manuscript for a while, so put it away and when you have some distance, read it again. You may be horrified by what you find but better now than when it's out there in the world. Here's some more articles on editing and my recommended editors.
If you can't afford a pro editor, then you can try using a critique group of readers within your genre, or join a group like the Alliance of Independent Authors to network with other like-minded authors in order to network and potentially barter your skills. Bartering shouldn't be underestimated in the online world.
But definitely do not publish your book if only you and your best friend, or your Mum, have read it.
4. Have you submitted the book to the right categories on the ebook stores?
Sorry, but not everyone will like your book.
You may think that everyone will, but they won't. You might not want to put it in a box or a genre or a category, but you have to because that's how readers find it. The category/genre reader has expectations and if you don't ‘fit' they will be disappointed. That's not to say you need to follow any specific rules in your writing (let's not get into that now!) but when you load it up to the distributors you do have to choose which categories and tags to use and they need to be meaningful.
You need some distance from your book in order to do this, but consider where your book fits within the online bookstores. This means deciding on the categories, tags and keywords associated with your book.
It's also important to match reader expectations and the promise of what your book delivers with what your book is actually about.
There is no point having a book with a swirly, girly pink chic-lit cover in the horror section of fiction. It won't sell, however good it is.
There are some scammy sites out there that will tell you to aim for the categories that will rank the best in order to have a Bestseller on Amazon. That's just silly because your book won't match the expectations of the readers and even if you get a bump in sales, it will completely dry up very soon.
You can choose a category that fits your book AND is easier to rank in, for example, I use categories Action Adventure and Religious Fiction. I rank occasionally for the former and consistently in the latter. That's optimization, but it is still true to the book and to the reader's expectations.
If you're struggling with this, choose 3-5 authors your book is like, not what you want it to be like, but what it is really like. That will help you find the right category.
A great book on categories and Amazon algorithms is David Gaughran's Let's Get Visible.
5. Have you optimized your Amazon sales page with a hook, quotes from reviews and other material?
I have seen some Amazon sales pages with not just typos but terrible grammar.
Some of them make no sense at all. Some are just the back blurb with no review quotes or other things that might draw a customer in.
Basically you need to treat the product description like a sales page. People will not buy your book if your description is badly written or hard to understand because it's an indication of the quality of your book. Here's another great article on 11 ingredients of a sizzling book description.
If you want to see a fantastic example, check out CJ Lyons Bloodstained which continues to rock the Kindle charts. That product description seriously rocks. CJ also explains all of this in our ProWriter Marketing course.
You can format your sales description with colored headlines and other funky HTML by using Author Marketing Club's Premium service (which also includes a fast-track way to find appropriate reviewers).
6. Have you priced your book realistically, or at least tried different price points?
It's important to say on pricing that no one has a clue how to price ebooks and authors are having success at many different price points. Check out this great article on The Passive Voice and the comments below to get an idea of the widely different levels of pricing and success.
However, I had one author ask why his debut novel wasn't selling, and when I checked his sales page, the ebook was priced $11.99. It was his first novel and he had nothing else for sale.
However good your book, however marvelous the cover, your first novel is unlikely to sell at that price. Most ebooks are under $9.99, and a lot of fiction is under $7.99, with many indie books being under $5.
The 99c price point still has some power even after the algorithm changes but you might go somewhere in between, changing your price with promotions as well. I have my books at $2.99 right now so I make $2 per ebook. You get to set your own prices but there's no way you'll sell much at those very high prices.
7. Have you written, or are you writing another book?
Sure, there are some breakout successes, but most indie fiction authors making decent money right now have 5 or more books. For non-fiction authors, you can expect to make your money on back-end products and services and not book sales anyway.
The more books you have available, the more virtual shelf space you have, the easier it is for people to discover you. Plus if a reader finds one they like, they may buy them all so you make more per customer.
I was as guilty as anyone of trying to hype my first novel, because it took so long and I thought it was a precious snowflake. I still believe you have to hustle those first thousand sales with everything you have, but my sales and income jumped when I released the second novel with very little fanfare because I already had an established presence on Amazon and they do a lot of marketing for you when you have multiple books, e.g. emails to people who bought your last one.
I am also fascinated by the rise of novellas and serials as a way to create more books, more quickly. Hugh Howey is a great example of someone who wrote novellas in different series and then continued the direction of the stories for the novellas that took off, Wool being his most famous and lucrative. I am definitely moving into this model in 2013 in between longer works.
8. Have you done some kind of promotion or marketing to let people know it is there?
Again, there are no rules and in fact, everyone has different results from different marketing tactics. Some hit a mega-success with none at all, but I do think that you need to hand-sell your first 1000 readers because they won't just appear out of nowhere.
Remember: Marketing is sharing what you love with people who want to hear about it. You don't have to be hard salesy, scammy or nasty. Just be authentic and share your passion.
If you need some starter tips, you should definitely be building your email list from your own website and also from a signup at the back of your book.
If you do that with book one, you will have at least some people to market to with book 2. It's a start, and it grows over time. This is my only non-negotiable recommendation for authors, because you never know what will happen with all these sites we depend upon for sales. If they disappear, or the terms we publish under change, then your email list of fans and buyers is all you have.
I also believe that social media can sell books, but it is a slow build over time and you have to have other goals than just book sales, e.g. networking with peers and other authors. It's not instant sales so you can't rely on it. The whole author platform thing is massively useful in so many ways but it is only one aspect of book sales.
If you have some budget you can pay for promotion, but be targeted and track results.
The biggest leaps I had on the Amazon charts were from paid promotional pushes on sites that market direct to Kindle readers. I have used Kindle Nation
Daily, Pixel of Ink and BookBub and there are new opportunities all the time. I more than made my money back but the rankings were worth it. Prophecy hit the Action Adventure list above Lee Child! (of course, it dropped away but the screen-print is worth gold!)
Free is still a great option, especially if you have multiple books, as it means people can discover your work with no risk. Fantasy author Lindsay Buroker talked about this in our interview where she revealed that the first book in her series is permanently on free with her other books at $4.95. You can do this by making your book free on Smashwords and eventually Amazon will price match it.
9. Have you asked for reviews, or submitted to review sites?
There's been a lot of scandal about the sock puppet reviews but reviews are still critical because they give your sales page social proof and they feed into the book site algorithms.
I give away a lot of free books to people who might like my genre and ask that they leave a review if they like it. No hard sell, no pressure, no expectation. This is easy if you have built up a list from the last book, or if you have built a platform and in fact is one good reason to do this. Traditional publishing has been doing this forever so it is not a new or a scammy tactic.
Remember that not everyone will like your book and not everyone will leave a review, or a good review, but it is a start. [And remember, don't respond to bad reviews!]
You can also contact book bloggers or Amazon reviewers to get more reviews. This is hard work if you do it manually, but you can use the Author Marketing Club's Premium service to short cut the process by finding reviewers for books like yours.
You can also listen here to Rachel Abbott in this interview talk about how this strategy got her to #1 on Amazon.co.uk.
10. Are you working your butt off?
Generally, I'm an even tempered type of girl, but when I get emails from people asking why they're not successful and they've done nothing on this list, I get a little annoyed!
Especially when this site has over 700 free articles on writing, publishing and marketing and there's 75+ hours of audio for you to learn from for free. Oh yes, and a 57 page Author 2.0 ebook on all this.
That's all available for free, but I also have a book you can buy for less than the price of a coffee – How To Market A Book.
There is no excuse not to be educated, even just from this site.
I absolutely believe that you can be a great writer and make an income from writing.
I have to believe that for you because I believe it for me, and I have left a stable job and steady income to take a chance on being an author-entrepreneur. I've been on this path since 2007 when I decided to write my first non-fiction book, so I am 5 years into working my butt off to change my life.
But writing books is not a get rich quick scheme.
I look at authors like CJ Lyons, Scott Sigler, Chuck Wendig, Joe Konrath, Bob Mayer and so many others and I know they are working their butts off every day writing and getting their work out there. The recent success of Sean Platt & David Wright in landing a Serial deal with Amazon is because they work incredibly hard at writing all day, every day to produce new content for their market. They are my heroes.
These guys are pros and they know it takes hard work to get there and hard work to stay there.
So please, if your book is not selling any copies at all, go through this checklist and honestly evaluate what you have done and how much effort you have put in. Please also share this with other people who may be asking the same question.
I'd love to know what you think, so please leave a comment below. What other tips can you give for people who aren't selling any or many books?
Images: Bigstock Help button, Bigstock Buy Me button, Bigstock price tags, Bigstock hard work ahead.
Dennis Blanchard says
Something you said in your post jumped out at me Joanna: “Book buyers still shop with their eyes.” Just this morning I was discussing this very topic with the other author in our home, Jane Blanchard. I was speculating about the shopping experience one has when walking around a bookstore.
When one enters the store, there is usually a few tables or racks of the latest and greatest books, and they usually have a higher price. I tend to bypass those and go to the genre specific area that I’m interested in, such as humor, computer, outdoor adventure, etc. When I arrive there, I usually stand back and scan the books on display. There are always a few that are face-out (the front cover) and the majority are spine-out. For me personally, those spines end up being even more important than the cover. Why? It may be the first notice I ever take of that book. Maybe I’ve never heard of the book or author, so, unlike the cover, that author has to grab me with their title and maybe even their name.
That isn’t much to work with, but I’ve purchased many books over the years with just such an initial relationship. I was telling Jane that Amazon and the other online vendors might do well to consider software that emulates that bookstore experience. The human eye and mind is able to scan a huge number of similar items very quickly. Online book shopping is tedious because the vendors show a book cover, synopsis and pricing data with the book, so one can only see a few books per online page. Why not show the books just as we see them in traditional bookstores? Once the eye spots something of interest one could hover over it, or click on it for the cover and more detail.
Other times, shoppers might remember just a partial title or author. They scan the isle, using this partial information to find a book they’re interested in.
This may seem a bit off topic, but it goes back to what you were talking about in your post about covers, and how important they are. Just thought I’d throw out these thoughts, maybe some savvy software programmer will pick them up and run with them.
Thanks for all you do for your fellow authors, we’re all indebted.
Dennis “K1” Blanchard
Author of Three Hundred Zeroes.
Joanna Penn says
Thanks Dennis – I agree that we need some kind of browsing mechanism – when I am looking for the next book to read, I often browse the Top 100 in a category on my Kindle which gives me about 10 per page, in black & white right now, so it is not the best environment to browse. Amazon is partnering with Waterstones, the UK high street book store in the next month, so I expect to find my Kindle browsing somehow partnered with the store 🙂
Ross Mountney says
An inspiring and valuable post as ever Joanna, thank you. I was a bit chuffed to discover that one or two of the things you suggest I’ve already started with my new book http://rossmountney.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/a-funny-kind-of-education/ but thanks to you at least I now have a direction! Thank you.
Linda Adams says
Wrong categories can make a huge difference, because they do mean very specific things. I had an indie writer ask me for a review because I write and read action-adventure thrillers. That means I’m expecting a certain type of book — not necessarily action in the first chapter, but it should imply that there is a lot of action coming. He was billing himself as a fantasy/action thriller. I read the first couple of chapters posted as a sample. It was pretty clear it was a fantasy/detective. I’m guessing he billed it as an action thriller because it had a big action scene at the end. I turned down the review because I would have given it a bad review for not being represented properly.
Linda Adams – Soldier, Storyteller
Joanna Penn says
I agree Linda, I get very disappointed if the book doesn’t turn out as billed – the expectations are set when you choose within a category. I guess that’s one benefit of literary fiction, there are less specific expectations – but then for you and I, there are no explosions either 🙂
Sue Wang, Connect2Self says
Thank you for the practical and pointed tips on selling our books. I especially appreciate the working our butts off tip. Good measure of how we are doing.
I am a new writer and all 10 tips helps me to know that I am on the right course.
Patricia Longthorp says
I am so green with regards to marketing therefore this information is invaluable to me. I even struggled opening a Twitter account and am not sure at all what to do with my Facebook Author account. My ebook “No Aliens or Swear Words – Just a Dozen Good Stories” is out there via Bookbaby and has sold at least three copies! I will keep trying. I think it is something to do with me being 68 years old. No probs with the writing but the technical stuff is hard, so thanks for this post.
Joanna Penn says
Hi Patricia – if you start at the top of the post, you will see how much of this does not involve blogging or social networking – you can get the basics right on Amazon and pricing etc, so the other marketing can come later!
Randi Kreger says
My four non-fiction books have sold almost 700,000 copies over 12 years for a few main reasons: I know my audience well and my books help solve their biggest family problems. There is no substitute for knowing your stuff and (if it’s non-fiction self-help) having solutions that work. My personal opinion is that the first thing to do is look at whether you have a good product compared to the competition with the right distribution–marketing 101. And the most important factor is the value of the product, not social media. I find that people tend to overlook that, and they are not the best judge of whether or not their book is any good. Ask your readers.
Joanna Penn says
Thanks Randi – and the lifetime sales number is a great one – thanks for sharing! People get so obsessed with monthly numbers, they forget that over time, the numbers grow. Congrats on your success. A good product is always #1 for sure 🙂
Jae says
Amen to it all, but especially the part about book covers. I’ve seen horrible, horrible book covers from indie authors on the Twitterverse. They offend me both as a graphic designer and an author. I cannot stress enough to my circle of friends the importance of getting a professional cover—in fact they’re probably sick of hearing it from me.
Thanks for the other advice as well. I’m not sure if I’ll end up doing self-pub or not, but I certainly intend to use your post as a reference if I do. Very well done!
Joanna Penn says
Thanks Jae, and I am a tireless advocate for pro cover design 🙂 I think it is absolutely critical!
Ester Benjamin Shifren says
Thank you for this remarkable wealth of information. I am waiting for my preview books at the moment and hope to be in full publication with CreatSpace within a month. It’s taken years of work and research to reach this stage, and yes, it is hard work, but the adage, “No pain, no gain” really holds true. I intend to publish my e-book with KDP select almost immediately, and will pitch it around $6.99. My print book purchase price will be $15.00. It was worth all the effort in the end, and I’m looking forward to holding my book— “Hiding in a Cave of Trunks”—when it arrives, and will do all that it takes to market it. Thanks to you, I will now be better equipped.
Joanna Penn says
All the best Ester.
priya narendran says
Hi, I am about to publish my first novel. Thank you for all your advice on book marketing. I have found it really useful.
Elin Gregory says
Hi Joanna,
Thanks for a very informative article. I’m published with a small press so some of your suggestions – book covers, pricing, how my work appears on Amazon and other sellers sites – are out of my control. However I’m doing some of the rest of it, allowing for very limited time/budget, and will try some of your other suggestions.
Juno says
Hi Joanna
Thank you so much for this excellent website, which I have only just discovered and am steadily working my way through. I’ve written a novel – erotica, started long before the Fifty Shades hiatus began! – and have an agent. She has submitted it to 13 ‘traditional’ publishers in the UK and all have rejected for completely different, and as the agent says, subjective reasons. Now we are looking at publishing with Kindle Direct. My agent is still absolutely behind it, and is also representing me for my other, non-erotica work. But my worry is that if 13 publishers have said “no” and picked holes in it… will anyone want to read it? Wondering what your take on this situation would be?
Many thanks, Juno
Joanna Penn says
Hi Juno,
Check out the “long tail” model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
Basically, publishers have to make a lot more money than individual authors so they will only pick up books that will make them lots of money, that are a sure thing. But indie authors can exist in the long tail, where we can sell to a more niche audience and make them happy and also make a living. If I sell 50,000 books I am very happy, but that’s not good enough for many publishers 🙂
As an indie, your readers are the ones who make a decision as to whether they like it – and you can find your own niche. Check out Kitty Thomas, erotica author, who is a full-time indie-author doing very well – or she also writes under Zoe Winters – her blog is full of useful info and her life as an indie. It can definitely be done (but not with just one book, so get writing!)
All the best, Joanna