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Time is your most valuable resource. You can always earn more money to add to your budget, but you can’t earn more hours to add to your day. You must learn to make the best use of the 24 hours in each day.
The time you spend promoting your book is time you’ll never get back. On the other hand, if you don’t spend time promoting your book, no one will read it because they don’t know it exists.
So how can you market your book effectively and spend less time doing it? And what would you do if you had extra time each day?
In this article you’ll learn three principles that will free you to spend more time with your family or writing your book. These are powerful principles. Please use them for good.
To understand how to work less and get the same results, let’s review Vilfredo Pareto’s discovery.
The Pareto Phenomenon
In the 1800s, the economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that 20% of the population made 80% of the money. Once he noticed this 80/20 distribution of income, he started seeing the principle demonstrated in other aspects of society. In agriculture, 20% of the pea plants produced 80% of the peas, and in modern sociology where 80% of women pursue the top 20% of attractive men.
You’ve probably heard about the 80/20 rule. But did you know the rule also applies to marketing books?
Authors tend to get 80% of their sales from 20% of their marketing efforts. This means 80% of your book promotion activity is, more or less, wasted. Once you understand this 80/20 breakdown, you’ll start saving yourself a lot of time.
Here are 5 steps to help you spend less time marketing without hurting your sales.
Step 1: Measure
As John Wanamaker said in the 19th century, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” If John Wanamaker would have been able to measure his advertising better, he would have been shocked to learn he was probably wasting closer to 80% of his money, and he would have known which 80% it was.
If you can’t measure your marketing, you can’t find out what is working and what is not. Many traditionally published authors are exhausted by marketing because they have no way to know which of their marketing activities worked. Without good data, book marketing myths spread around the author community like a virus.
The lack of data is also the biggest disadvantage of traditional publishing. Traditional publishers don’t share real-time sales data with their authors. Sometimes, they don’t even share it with their internal marketing teams. I spoke with one marketing executive at a major publisher and he said he received sales data once a week from the sales department across the hall.
In 2020, there is no excuse for the lag in reporting sales and marketing data. Many of the major royalty management solutions offer author dashboards. It is not that the publishers can’t share sales data, it is just that they don’t want their authors to be able to see if the publisher’s marketing is not working. If your marketing is working you want to be able to show it off to your stakeholders.
While you can’t get sales data from your publisher, there is a workaround to get it yourself with Amazon Associates Tracking IDs. Granted, you’ll only get information about Amazon sales, but accurate data for one marketplace is better than no data.
Baby Step 1: Sign up for the Amazon Associates Program.
This takes a few minutes but you only need to do it once.
Baby Step 2: Create a Tracking ID
Amazon gives you up 100 tracking IDs and you can create them here.
Baby Step 3: Create Affiliate Tracking Links to Your Book
You can do this in the site stripe Amazon gives you once you sign up for the affiliate program.
Notice the “Tracking ID” dropdown menu.
Baby Step 4: Use Different Tracking Links for Different Promotion Activities
Use a different links for each of the following.
- Blog
- Website
- Blog Tour
- Etc.
If you use tracking links for all your efforts after a book launch, contact me and we might have you on the show to talk about it.
Baby Step 5: Check Your Amazon Associates Sales Reports
These reports show you the actual sales for each of your tracking IDs, not just clicks or impressions.
Where Tracking Links Work Best
- Your Website
- Social Media
- Your Blog
- Advertising
- Email Marketing (Amazon prefers you link to a landing page that has your affiliate link rather than putting the affiliate link in the text of the email itself.)
Where Tracking Links Don’t Work (as well)
- Media Interviews on TV, Radio, and Podcasts: You have to send people from the car radio or TV to your website in order for them to click your tracking link.
- Offline promotion on Fliers, Bookmarks, Business Cards: Even if you put affiliate links on your material, people prefer to search for your book title rather than typing in a cryptic URL.
- Influencer Marketing: Influencers use their own affiliate links and tracking IDs.
- Word-of-Mouth & Viral Spread: While people might repeat your book landing page web address (yourbooktitle.com), they won’t be able to remember or repeat the characters that make up a tracking URL.
Note: Amazon changes the rules regarding the use of Affiliate links every few months. Always check the current rules so you don’t get hassled by Amazon.
More Ways to Track Your Marketing
There are more ways to track your marketing. Check out the following episodes and their recently updated blog versions to learn more.
- 191 – How to Track Your Book Promotion (Covers marketing dashboards as well as many more ways to track your marketing)
- 212 – How to Use Marketing Data To Sell More Books
Measure Your Time With Rescue Time
What gets measured gets managed. Effective marketing means measuring your strategies, as well as your time. Have you ever sat at your desk all day and wondered at the end of your day where all your time went? That is a bad sign.
How much time did you spend on Facebook last week? How much time on YouTube? If you want to know for sure, you can use an app like RescueTime (Affiliate Link) and get the hard facts about where you’re spending your time.
With RescueTime, you can know exactly how much time you have spent in Scrivener and Microsoft Word as opposed to researching and marketing your book. Nearly every author I have convinced to try RescueTime has been surprised by how little time they actually spend writing. The first step to having more writing time is to see where you currently spend it.
If you don’t want to use Rescue Time, we have a list of alternatives here.
Step 2: Prune
After you start tracking your marketing efforts and time on your computer, you might be stunned to learn how few sales come through social media. It can be very disheartening to see that Facebook following you spent years building only results in a handful of trackable book sales.
You still want to track those sales because you might be the exception. Maybe your social media fans do run out to buy your book as soon as they see a tweet about it. Every author, genre, and book is different. The data you find will be specific to you.
But the 80/20 rule tells us you will find some strategies that underperform and a few that overperform.
The next step is to start pruning the underperforming strategies, and pruning is painful.
Cutting a dead branch from your favorite fruit tree is easy. You know that playing Candy Crush on your phone is a waste of time, and it’s easy to see that the dead branch of mobile games needs to be cut.
But real pruning means cutting branches that are underperforming so the tree can give more nutrients to the healthy branches.
It hurts to cut activities that bring in some sales but not many. Remember, your time on this earth is your most precious resource. Every minute you waste on ineffective strategies is time you can’t spend on effective strategies. It is also time you can’t spend on writing your next book or visiting with your family.
Even though it hurts, cut the underperforming marketing efforts and use the time to do something you know is effective.
Step 3: Invest
Once you cut ineffective activities, you have new time on your hands. Time is money, and we must invest it wisely.
Invest the time you’ve recovered in three powerful tools for growth.
Invest in Education
Ask any author why they don’t take a course, read a craft book, or listen to podcasts and most of them will say they don’t have time. But now that you have “extra” hours each week, spend some time becoming a better writer and author.
If you’re not sure where to begin, start with our course, The Five Year Plan to Becoming a Bestselling Author. This course walks you through exactly what you should be doing in each quarter of the year if you want to become a bestselling novelist.
Invest in Writing
The carpenter doesn’t just build the house, the house builds the carpenter. The more books you write, the better of a writer you become, especially if you invest in reading books on craft and taking courses to improve as you go.
For many authors, they just need more practice to get good. The skill of writing is a bit like the skill of tennis or golf. There is no substitute for deliberate practice. The top players still have coaches so their practice can be deliberate.
If you write fiction I recommend you spend a lot of time writing short stories. If you write nonfiction, get good at blogging.
Invest in Rest
The writing life is a marathon, it takes most authors 10+ years to find the success they are hoping for. The Five Year Plan cuts this in half, but it is still five years of work. The only way to make it is to have a sustainable pace and that means rest.
Find the things that recharge your batteries and do those things. For me, it is spending time with my kids. I have a toddler and a baby right now and they are getting more and more fun to play with. When I take them on a walk, I always feel better afterward than I did at first.
Believe it or not, you can often write more by resting more.
Step 4 Refine Your Time
Triple Dip
One powerful time management principle is to make your work count for triple. Like writing a short story to help improve your craft, then using it to help build your email list, and later selling it in an anthology.
Or, if you write nonfiction, take blog posts from your blog and turn them into a book. This way the time you spend writing the blog post counts for two different content pieces. The notes I use to make my podcasts are turned into blog posts. If I turn those blog posts into a book, I get to triple dip on the time I spend working on the podcast.
This is another advantage of producing substantive content rather than social media posts. Social media pieces tend to only last for a moment. But substantive content can be evergreen, and repurposed over the years.
Study Time Management
Around the first of the year, I interview a productivity expert to talk to us about how best to use your time.
Here is a list of those episodes:
- 221 – New Years Productivity for Authors With Joanna Penn
- 170 – Your Best Year Yet With Susan May Warren
- 152 – How to Write 5000 Words an Hour with Chris Fox
- 117 – How to Plan a Successful New Year with Tracy Higley
We also have some other helpful productivity and time management episodes:
- 067 – How to Keep Your Inbox @ Zero And Have More Time to Write
- 094 – How to Use the Ancient Power of Discipline to Accomplish Your Goals
- 204 – Focus, Pruning and Why Novel Marketing is About to Change
- 233 – How to Build Your Platform During Your Social Distancing
We also have several blog posts on productivity:
- How To Create A Writing Schedule That Works For You
- Quit Wasting Time Now
- We have 50 more posts and episodes about productivity here
Step 5 Enjoy
If you put into practice these four steps:
- Measure
- Prune
- Invest
- Refine
you will waste less time on marketing while getting similar, or even better results.
If you cut the 80% of your time that is resulting in 20% of the results, and then double the amount of time you are spending on the critical 20%, you will increase your total marketing effectiveness by 60% while simultaneously having 60% more time to spend on what really matters.
This really does work and this transformation separates the authors who make it from the authors who don’t. You can burn yourself out doing everything the hard way, or you can follow these steps to a transformed writing career.
Speaking of a transformed writing career our sponsor today is
Sponsor:
5 Year Plan to Become a Bestselling Author
I crafted this plan with bestselling and award winning author James L. The Five Year Plan is a step-by-step guide for the first five years of your writing career. Learn what to do in each quarter of the year to avoid the mistakes that hijack success for most authors and set yourself up for success. Learn more at NovelMarketing.com/courses.
Featured Patron
Jess Lederman author of Hearts Set Free (Affiliate Link)
Yura sets out with her son Luke on an epic cross-country quest to win back her husband—and destroy the woman who stole his heart.
You can become a Novel Marketing Patron here.
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Encouragement
This pandemic has shown me the power of books to help in times of crisis.
We live in Austin, TX which is currently experiencing a COVID outbreak. Between that, the original lockdown and our quarantine with the new baby, my 20 month old has spent the last 7 or 8 months in lockdown. Our toddler Mercy has only played with other toddlers two or three times since Christmas. That is around a third of her life with almost no other toddler contact.
I have noticed that the Childrens books she picks out for me to read to her all have the same theme: friendship. She is a super social little girl and she so wants to have friends. But she just can’t everyone is staying home right now.
Friendship is something my daughter learns about in books. If she didn’t have all these childrens books how would she learn about friendship. Hopefully soon she can learn about it in real life, but in the meantime, thank God for children’s books.
What is true about my toddler is true with a lot of adults as well. As people are locked down, the characters in your books may be their closest friends. So make sure to write friends worth spending time with.
The post How to Spend LESS Time Marketing Your Book appeared first on Author Media.