Are you still looking for effective strategies to make your books sell? Here are the 3 ways to make sure your book bombs.
Eric's book was completely bombing. He had no idea what exactly was going on. That's the reason we're going to discuss today the 3 Ways to Make Sure Your Book Bombs.
It was about a year ago when I knew Eric. He was a self-publisher. Someone who was working on getting his very first book out.
Onto the market in South Africa. He wanted to see if it was possible to get books onto the market and get them selling. He was working with books that were in the tech area.
He sees that with KDP, there are a lot of opportunities. To replace your day job with the income that's coming through with self-published books. He also worked himself within the technology sector.
He figured this was going to be a great and easy way of going about doing this. So he started producing these technology books. Like on Microsoft products, how to do with Apple products, or how to do Samsung products.
There were several different types of books that he was coming out with on the market. The only problem was that none of them were selling at all. He realized that if he continued at this rate, he was never going to be seeing any sales of any of these books.
As a result of that, he would never be able to quit his day job. He maybe was misinformed that on KDP or Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, it's not so easy to get sales. You can write and publish books but then it's a completely different thing to get sales coming through.
And he started to doubt whether or not this whole KDP thing was for real. Or whether it was just fake. And that people had said it would work, but in reality, it doesn't work.
Check out this related article: What Is A Reader Magnet
Or it only works for a select few. People who happen to be really good at writing. So we started to doubt a bit whether or not he was actually a good writer.
But when he first started, he started with the Microsoft route. Since that was the tool that he was used to. So how to deal with Windows 10 or Windows 11?
How do we get these operating systems up and running? Or other aspects like Microsoft Outlook or Powerpoint or other tools. So putting these books onto the market, he figured there would be an audience.
But when he didn't see any sales. He moved on to the next option which was Apple and went on to Android technology. Choosing the latest technologies and putting books on how to use those technologies and get the most out of them.
The thing is that the quality of the books was great. Each of the books explained exactly how to use the tool. They included pictures, everything appeared to be just fine.
The only problem was nobody was buying his books. That was the point for which after watching a number of my videos, he decided “I'm going to book a coaching session.”
So the first thing we did was I went immediately looked through his book. I have an idea of where exactly the problem might be. After all, they were bombing.
So there were at least three things he was doing that were creating this bit of an issue. Virtually, all of my clients are unaware of the mistakes that you're making when it comes to self-publishing your books.
So the first one, he didn't check to see that the exact type of books that he was writing was selling on Amazon. I used KDSpy and I went through exactly some of the first couple of his books like How To Use Windows 11.
Different Mediums Available
I looked on Amazon for the absolute best sellers ranking for How To Use Windows 11. I noticed they were all ranking in like the one million zone range. In other words, I'm always keeping my eye out to see, are any of these books rank within the top hundred thousand?
Because that means they're selling about a book a day. If they aren't in that range, well then they're going to be in the millions. So they're selling maybe once a month or once every other month.
So in other words, I got an immediate message. That the first thing he was doing and failing on was choosing a niche or a targeted niche. In this case, how to use Windows that people just weren't buying the books.
Now it doesn't mean people don't need that information. It's just in book format or maybe audiobook format. They just don't want it.
Some people like to consume their media via magazines. Others like to read books, some people like to listen to podcasts or Youtube videos. So what happened is that we assume that because people need this information.
Then they will buy it through any of the different mediums that are available on the internet. That is a huge mistake and a surefire way to bomb with your self-published books. We want to make sure we're writing books in markets that exist.
We may come up with some weird-looking fruit. But if we stick it on a market and nobody knows what it is, nobody's interested in it. They're not going to buy it and we do not want to have to create a new market.
That's a lot more expensive than finding an existing market that isn't too far off. The second thing we did was we looked at his covers. We noticed that some of his covers were not looking like the top sellers inside those markets.
Check out this related article: Optimize Your Amazon Book Page
So even with few sales being made for the existing books, we saw that his covers also had some room for improvement. It was difficult to read some of the letters that were on the covers.
It sort of blended into the background. Many mistakes had been made. It is one of the reasons why I usually recommend that we go through actual cover designers.
Don't just try to do it in Canva. On the positive side, he had taken the covers and they did match each other. He built a brand around a single name.
I noticed that a lot of the bestsellers were just doing one-off books here and there. Where the author had no author's bio. They were just simply hoping for the best.
So he had optimized this area and I did see that his content was solid. The chapter breakdowns and the way that it described how to use these tools. It looked really helpful for somebody who had that problem.
Even though there weren't that many people who wanted to read a book on how to solve that problem. The final point was that he assumed that if the book's content was good, he didn't have to drive traffic.
Now, driving traffic can be done. There are three different ways to get the traffic that we're going to need on our books. The first one is through ads with Amazon.
This is a great way to go about figuring out if there's a problem with our title, subtitle, or our cover. So that when people see those things all together, it's going to tempt them to click on the video. On the link that we see in the ad on Amazon.
Then they will come to your sales page. So that was the first thing that we had on the 3 Ways to Make Sure Your Book Bombs. And that is the role of ads.
Ads Drive More Traffic
Then we have content marketing where he builds a blog under his name. He's continually writing out content on how to go about solving these problems people have. It can then push the books as a supplement to existing traffic.
So Google themselves will send traffic to him that's dealing with that. Then the final one on the 3 Ways to Make Sure Your Book Bombs is the most important in many ways. It's making sure that the keywords that he's using in his title and subtitle are what people are searching for.
The problem, in this case, is there was a low volume of searches that were going on. So all three of these created a situation in which his book was "bombing". He wasn't sure exactly where to go from there.
So he started just to assume that maybe then nobody wants to buy tech books.
But that was when we finally went through more of his books by using KDSpy. We discovered that within some of his books, there was a decent amount of purchases being made on Amazon. And that told us that these are the books that need to be targeted.
With regards to his future books that he's writing, we take none of the books we have on the market down. We always put all the content that we've created out there. There's just no reason not to bring in the money from that.
Over many years, you can see hundreds of dollars coming in through low-performing books. That was something that he was a little bit tempted by. It was just taking down a book and that's an awful idea.
We keep the books up there. But then we make sure that our future books are going along this line. In terms of targeting markets that exist or selling lots of books.
But there aren't that many books on Amazon for those exact topics. Then the other thing we do is that we optimize and we drive traffic against them. He would not ever really think about driving Amazon ads.
He was saying they might be too expensive for him. You know, in South Africa where he works, he's not making so much money. But he didn't understand that the point of ads is not to bleed money, it's to make money.
So that we're pushing ads and we're testing out how we can fix our cover, title, subtitle, or reviews. To drive more sales of our books on Amazon. Which then brings money in to pay for the very ads we're doing.
Our goal of ads is to break even. It is not to make a profit, it's to increase that audience size. Then if you're able to get their email addresses, we go from there.
That gives us the ability to do a lot better over the long run. So this is a long game we're in about optimizing things. The biggest lesson for him was the idea that sometimes it's useful to figure out what are strategies you're not implementing that definitely could be implemented.
Since this point, he's chosen to target the profitable markets. He's begun within the tech area, so he's not shifting everything. He's just focusing on books that are already selling on Amazon.
Making sure that his books are not differing so much from some of those books already. He started to see the traction that was going on there. This is a huge problem that a lot of self-publishers struggle with.
So one of the things is trying to figure out why your books are bombing. Then make the adjustments you need to do to stop them from happening.
But I want to know, tell me below in the comments what have you done that have caused your books to bomb? Let me know below in the comments because I love to hear from you and I respond to all.