A lot of people who write a book independently say they’re not interested in selling it—they’re just writing it for themselves. If that’s you, ignore this post.
If you want people to buy your book, here are the five most important things you need:
A following. The most powerful sales tool you have is your fanbase. Whether it’s 100 people or 100,000 people, you need to let them know about your book. Email them. Post on social media about it. Involve them in the process as much as you can. Invite them to launch parties. Give them free copies. Ask them to buy it, tell people about it, and review it on Amazon and Goodreads.
A professionally designed cover. The second most important sales tool is your book cover. Don’t design it yourself. Don’t get your friend to design it either. Hire an experienced book cover designer. I recommend 100Covers. Their work is fast, cheap, and good—a rare combination. Don’t think of your book cover as part of the creative act of writing your book. It’s not. It’s a marketing tool. A cover’s only job is to communicate the genre of the book and appeal to fans of that genre. Only a professional book cover designer knows how to do that.
Paid promotion. There are several book promotion sites that, for a price, will promote your book. These sites would be a good place to start. Stagger your promotions so they don’t all happen on the same day. Ideally, run one promotion every day or two to keep your book’s visibility buoyed for about two weeks—that’s how long it takes for Amazon’s algorithm to decide if your book has traction.
Ads. Unless you have an enormous following, you need to run some ads. Amazon and Facebook are the best places to run ads for books. You’ll have to test a lot of ads to see which ones work. You’ll need to spend hundreds of dollars to test every aspect of your creative separately: headlines, hooks, images, and copy. Isolate each element so you know exactly what’s working best to sell your book.
Give away your book for free. Nobody likes to hear this advice. In fact, they think it’s insane. It’s not insane, it’s essential. Give copies to select fans or anyone who can promote it. Make your ebook free periodically to increase visibility. Give away books in exchange for people getting on your mailing list. It’s worth it (see #1).
Bonus tips:
Publish an ebook and audio version, too. Audiobooks make up a huge percentage of book sales.
The above 5 aren’t just for self-published books. If you publish a book traditionally, you’d be wise to do all of them.
Have fun—you’re putting out a book! How cool is that!?
Great advice, especially about the book cover. As everyone know it's what a book is judged by.
All great points. As you know & ordered them, #1 is definitely the biggest, by a long shot. It's a Catch-22: you need an audience to get an audience.