Chris Baird | August 10, 2022
What I Did With My Book To Get It To 3x My Sales

It is a pain seeing little to no book sales at all. Here’s what I did with my book to get it to 3x my sales.

My books were completely fizzling as time went on and on. I watched the sales completely collapse and just go downwards. I began to wonder that maybe this is just what happens to all books or maybe not what I'm going to talk about today.

Today's topic is what I did with my book to get it to 3x my sale. So, the thing is that after I had written my first several books, I was getting into the flow of things. It was not that difficult once you start to have done it many times.

As I was moving through it, I had even gotten to the point where I was running ads against them and able to get some sales. I just wasn't seeing the results that I wanted to see. So, what I wanted was to see if it was possible to do something that would dramatically increase the number of sales that I was making on my books.

I just couldn't figure it out since I had gone through so many tips and tricks that I had learned over the years without having any impact at all. I had also followed a lot of other authors and saw the different strategies that they were implementing to increase sales. But it just wasn't having an impact on my book.

So initially, I had heard that keywords were an important part of the puzzle. But I wasn't completely sure how to implement them for my books. I mean, what do I know about what people are searching for or not searching for and what was happening?

Was I seeing a possible loss of motivation as I was moving forward if I did not manage to get this fixed? With the motivation would come the desire to put out new books. And it would continue to snowball until I was no longer productive at all.

But I was beginning to wonder if maybe it was already too late for the books that I had put onto the market. And that is something like a normal question for many of my clients: how do we deal with the previous books? That's a very classic one.

You need to be very careful with what you're doing with your old books and the amount of effort that you're doing. So, the first thing I was trying to do is that I was check to see if maybe I could go onto Fiverr. Hire someone to go through and just spam out links to my books on all of these different social media sites.

Check out this related article: 3 60-Second HABITS For A BEST SELLING BOOK

I had heard of some channels and people had said “This is great, you should give that a try.” So, I put them out all over the place and the result was no change in sales at all. It was awful.

The second strategy I tried was to see if by using some specific tools, some of them don't even work any longer. But it would be connected to all these newsletters that would automatically send out free books. Then I would set my book to be on a five-day free promo.

At the end of the five days, it would go back to full price. So, I ran it through this particular strategy. It resulted in getting thousands of downloads for free of my book on Amazon.

It just didn't translate into any sales. So, what I finally did was I heard about the power of keywords. As I mentioned earlier, I still wasn't completely sure how to implement them.

But after listening and following a lot of different strategies people were suggesting, I came to the understanding that you want to make sure on the non-fiction books that your title is your primary keyword.

So, if you're writing a book about vegan cooking for your dog, it's not so important in that main title since there isn't a specific thing that we're trying to target. The second thing I discovered was you want that title with that keyword to be large on the thumbnail.

When people see your ads or they're searching on Google or Amazon and come to your book, they're simply not going to know you need the title to be vegan cooking for your dogs. Because it immediately has that value proposition.

Knowing Who The Book Is For

No matter what it is that you're doing, like cutting grass effectively, it would be called cutting grass or something. Do you see? And so, you would have these, that would become the title. As opposed to trying to come up with some clever title.

That was the first thing when you're dealing with non-fiction books. For fiction, if they see just this micro thumbnail and have no idea what the book's about, remember our cover is designed for two purposes only.

It is to get the person who is a good match to realize what kind of book this is. And to see the title there on that cover. So, in other words, they see that initial title that draws them in.

Then they will read the actual title and subtitle and click. That is the only thing we want to do. Many people say you can't judge a book by its cover but everyone is doing this all the time.

So, you do need to focus on making sure that you are not making these exact mistakes that I had been making as well. The final thing is the subtitle and it is incredibly important fiction or nonfiction.

It does a couple of things. One of the things it does is that it shows you the keywords that you should be putting. The keywords in there, are additional keywords related to your primary keyword. This is where if somebody didn't type one of the keywords that's in the title.

Well, maybe they hit one in the subtitle when they're searching to get our results on the page right in front of them. And for all of these particular ones, I use KDSpy, that's my favorite tool. 

This one is fantastic for showing exactly how to find which keywords are related and which keywords your competition is using. Because the best sellers of your competition have already figured this whole keyword thing out. They've got it going on their things unless they're a famous author.

Check out this related article: How To Sell eBooks without going through Amazon!

Most of the others are playing keyword games when it comes to titles and subtitles. The other thing in your subtitle that you're going to do. When you're using KDSpy to figure this all out, you're going to list the genre that you're in.

Perhaps, even who this book is for by the end of seeing a cover. We should immediately know what this book is about without doing anything else. Is it a science fiction book about nature?

Is this a book telling me how to cook vegan food? It's going to be something along these lines. And we need to know immediately what this book is about.

Number two, we need to make sure that when they do look at the subtitle and title, they know exactly who this book is for. There should be no question in their mind about what kind of book it is and who is designed to get it. I had a client just the other day commenting exactly on this category.

The question was asked at a conference. His entire first book, all the copies that he brought, and the paperback versions were all sold out. But librarians were asking which age group children this book is for.

Now, if his subtitle had included that for children ages 13 to 20, then he would have been in a very different position. Because he could have maybe even sold more books. Now in his case, this client of mine had managed to sell all of his books at the convention.

He should have bought even more but it showed the librarians, that it was very important to understand whether this book is for me. Just like another client I had earlier this week who was exactly addressing the same issue.

The idea is that when you look at the cover, it's not clear who this is for. Let's say this book was for people who are swimmers, the book has stories about swimming. But it's not clear that this book is for swimmers like there are actual lessons that a swimmer would get out of this book. 

Bringing In The Traffic

Now it doesn't mean the book isn't going to be of value and interesting to other readers. But the book didn't say in the subtitle for swimmers like lessons of swimming for swimmers. You see how this game goes.

If it's a fiction book, we're going to then say something like a romance novel for teens or something along these lines. So, it would be very clear which age group and demographic we are targeting with our specific book. Using our subtitles as the perfect location to make sure that we're doing this.

Because when I put these together on my books and a lot of the books that I've been putting out of the 200 that I've got out there, by doing this, we're setting ourselves up to win. That's also one of the reasons I even created a free Self-Publishing Secrets Checklist.

Grab a copy of this and you can thank me later. Start working through the checklist to make sure that you're not skipping any of the key steps necessary to get your book self-published and selling. So, the final thing that I found was that I did manage to get my titles there and I was playing around.

But I discovered that with the paperbacks, I couldn't change the titles. That was a little bit of a challenge because the titles have been assigned to specific ISBN. If I wanted to change it, I'd have to take the books down with all of the reviews.

Then I would have to re-put those books back up there for the paperback with a different title. But there's a better strategy, you can change the title on your Kindle version of the book. So that is allowed.

By changing that specific title on the Kindle version, people who click on that want to come in. Then they're able to find your paperback version afterward. Regardless of what the old title was, the old title for the paperback will still be there.

But the two will be linked together as they always have been. So, you don't have to feel terrible about it, they do not have to match. It's just fine, we're making choices. As we move through the self-publishing process, we need to ensure that we're setting ourselves up for whatever it takes to win this game.

Check out this related article: Should You Self-Publish Your Book In 2022?

So, the thing was, I finally discovered this. I changed the titles for my eBooks and I started running ads again. Since then, I've run 120 million ads on Amazon. I have a bit of experience in understanding what it takes to get books selling through the use of ads.

By running it through these ads, the fact was shooting to the Kindle version and a separate ad set to the paperback version, I noticed something magical. First of all, I tripled my Kindle sales on my books as a result of this keyword game change.

It was a game changer in many ways here. In addition, my paperback sales started to go up as well. But I didn't just say that I wasn't able to change the title.

The answer is I would bring in the traffic through the Kindle version of the ads and then they would buy the paperback. Because the ads are really about trying to get people to buy the paperbacks. For most authors that I know, your paperback sales will be twice as much as your Kindle ads.

Your Kindle book's main purpose is to sell more paperback books. It's kind of odd I know but you charge $2.99 for the book regardless of whatever the length of your Kindle version is. We're using it just to trigger it around and to get our paperbacks to sell.

That was a key one. So, I did this and I saw huge results coming out of this entire process. It was unbelievable to me since I hadn't changed the description or anything else in the book.

And yet we were tripling the number of sales. Just because we were getting all this organic traffic through. Doing a better job of communicating the value that this book would have.

But my question for you today is have you used keywords correctly in your title and subtitle? If you have, write “Yes” below in the comments. If you've never played with keywords and their power of them and released that power, then write “No” below in the comments. Because I need to know where you're coming from.

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