-
What should my budget be?
Most writers search only for low-cost or free ways to advertise a book, but that almost guarantees failure. People can’t buy a book that they never hear about. So, what do you do to advertise?
1) Start a blog. Give away free articles, short stories, novels, courses–whatever it takes–in order to get people to come to your site and become interested in your work. You need to build a fan base. Cost? Between author photos, web hosting, and so on, this tends to run a minimum of a few hundred dollars per year.
2) Writing contests. If you’ve got a great novel, don’t hesitate to enter some novel-writing contests. If you lose, no harm is done, but if you win a little award, it will go far to boost your sales. It simply lets people know that a panel of experts thought your book was the best in its class. Cost? About $300-$500, depending on how many contests you enter.
3) Cover quotes. Cover quotes can come from big reviewers–like at the New York Times or Publishers Weekly–but they can also come from writers in your genre, from celebrities, from book bloggers, and so on. Some of these reviewers can charge $200 to review your book, and you want several quotes. So how much should you invest? Figure $400.
4) Great art. There are a lot of ways to get cheap or free art. You can find artists on artist sites like Deviant Art, and some of them are from third-world countries–so their work is fabulous and still inexpensive. I’ve seen great covers from artists in Taiwan, the Ukraine, Spain, nad so on, all for under $300. You can also buy reprints from your favorite artists, or get stock photos and photo-shop your own covers. I’ve seen great work done for very little money, but I prefer to support my favorite artists if I can. So how much does a great cover cost? I like to plan on a few hundred but have paid up to $4000.
5) Giveaways. I’ve given away posters, wristbands, and finger puppets for children’s books–along with other things. Quite frankly, in the middle-grade and picture-book markets, there is no better way to boost sales. So how much are your giveaways? I think you want to keep the price of the giveaway a fraction of the book cost–10% to 20%. So if I have a book that will sell for $17, I don’t want to have more than $3.40 in freebies for it. Note, though, that the more you give, the more you sell. And with these kinds of deals, your giveaways eat up all of your advertising budget. Thus, for example, a t-shirt is often too expensive to use as a giveaway, though you might consider it for certain occasions. What occasion? How about when you are selling books at a major science fiction convention? A few hundred dollars in advertising in the right spot can get a lot of notice.
6) Press releases. You can write up articles about you and the release of your latest book and send them out to newspapers to help drum up business. These press releases go about to thousands of papers and can get picked up by a couple hundred of them pretty easily. You usually buy the press releases in packages of say six, so that you get multiple shots at publicizing your book, and it can cost about $3000 for a package.
7) Blog tours. A blog tour is where you send books out to bloggers, but you can also send books out to reviewers and super-fans, or perhaps newspapers, magazines, bookstore owners, and movie producers. This might require you to spend upwards of $10 per book for shipping, packaging, etc. How many do you need? Most publishers plan on sending out a minimum of 50, but perhaps as many as 500. So just multiply the # of copies needed by 10, and you have your budget.
Other things. I sometimes take books to Christmas shows or book shows to sell. Getting a booth at a State Fair might cost me $500 for a week, plus I have to travel, get hotels, and so on, so I spend two or three thousand. If I go on an in-state book tour, I know that my costs tend to run about $2000 to hit 30 or 40 bookstores. I can also get on television at Christmas time to do a 5-minute interview on a couple of news channels in our state, but it tends to cost about $500 for the interview, plus time and travel. Then there are ad campaigns that you can do through Bookbub or other online venues, and so on.
If you start adding up the advertising costs for a book, you will see that I spend $10,000 to $20,000 per book. But the question becomes, do you get your money back? Yes, you do. Giveaways on books for kids bring a huge and immediate return, but so do those appearances at book fairs, Christmas shows, and State Fairs. Other things, like radio reviews and newspaper promotional campaigns, often don’t show up for a bit.
Sometimes you will find that one of your advertising gambles didn’t pay off. Other times, things go crazy. For example, the first time that I did a State Fair, I spent $3,000 decorating my booth and spent about two weeks on the silly thing. I sold $59,000 in books (making back about $25,000 in clear profit), so I did well for the week.
On another instance, I spent a thousand dollars to advertise a book online. I can see that in the short term, I broke even, but I suspect that over the weeks and months that followed, it really helped kick my sales up.
But let’s say that I go to do book signings on a multi-state tour. I might sell very little. It doesn’t seem worth it. But while I am visiting each bookstore, I find that I get to speak to the managers and give them a gift–say a free book or a coffee mug. What I find is that over the coming year, that store will sell far more books than they would have otherwise. The sales managers mention my name to book buyers, and my sales go crazy in that location. So is it worth it? Heck, yeah!
-
3 Replies
-
Please ad cool ideas for advertising here. This will help other writers consider their own budgets.
-
In some of the workshops I attended online (not my ideas):
1) Catering to specific markets/shops.
One person contacted the local hotel when he saw that the kids were bored. He sold a lot of books locally by catering to tourists.
If cooking has a special place in your story, contact hospitality places and ask them if they might display your book. Doughnut shops might appreciate a story about a person offering doughnuts to neighbors, etc.
Budget: Traveling expenses.2) Investing in a huge poster of you and your book in gathering places where you sign your books. That has worked wonders for a lot of people. You can also make posters to advertise book signing and ask to post them in libraries, etc. Libraries only sponsor events.
Budget: In my library, we only pay the cost of the paper, so check your library system. A regular wall poster is around $15.3) NetGalley, which is a review site for ARC. At least 5 reviews. I got more reviews for my non-fiction books in one month’s time. Worth it!
Budget: Officially about $1000. However, there are places that can get you in for as little as $100 for a month.4) Hiring sensibility readers help give authenticity to your story. It can pay off when you advertise it. It can give you access to more readers.
Budget: $200-$400.5) Goodreads giveaways have proven very lucrative for some.
Budget: $119- $6006) Making yourself available to book clubs either in person or by Skype. Some people have slowly gathered a lot of followers by responding to small groups of fans and answering their questions.
Budget: Travel expenses. -
Okay, so I have a bit of an unusual answer to this question. Like so many things I talk about with clients, it comes down to ROI + if/then.
AKA: If you’re coming out the other end ROI positive… then the answer to your question is literally “Every penny you have.”, because every dollar will bring more than a dollar back.
Step back, and the question then becomes how do you get the most ROI?
There’s a lot of stuff in the middle (and things mentioned above) that I don’t have experience with, but in general (with things that aren’t books), I’ve found a lot of success with targeted online marketing on one end of the (scalable) spectrum, and one-to-one personal outreach (unscalable) on the other.
The trick with both is to not just go straight for the sale, but instead *EARN* a connection, and “political capital” over time, so when you do have something to try and sell people, you’ve really earned their consideration.
I’m still relatively new at this particular niche, but it appears that a lot of authors are under the mistaken impression that blathering on about their personal lives, opinions about unrelated things – often hateful, “writers life” problems, and such amounts to delivering value that will earn them much with potential readers. The ROI on that is horrible, for an array of reasons.
There are as many ways of doing this than there are people, but a great example of what I’m talking about is actually Maestro Farland, and why I’m here now vs 1-3 months from now, when I’d planned to join.
I’m already up to my eyeballs in Masterclass courses, a couple books and a couple audio courses, and I already own two of the books I got for joining today. I’m also a bit of a tightwad, am shopping for a lyre and about to launch my insane answer to the horrible “build an author platform” nonsense, which is going to be a big money suck for a year or more… but I still sprang for joining here early.
I didn’t really have any objective reasons to join now (vs probably October), but his emails are dense with useful information, I’m enjoying his recent videos on YouTube and his social feeds are pretty much all about delivering genuinely good advice – much of it a heck of a lot better than fluff other people charge for. He also either is very good at hiding the fact that he’s doing all of it to lure us into his evil lair here (haha), or he really is as generous and interested in helping aspiring authors as he seems.
All of that creates a sense of owing in people who derive value from it. Humans are wired that way.
An amusing, Apex-relevant, allegory that I’ve seen in marketing discussions over the years is the difference between two princes who both want to marry the same princess. The first is a cocksure Gaston-esque character, brags a bit, peacocks around and then swoops right in for the kiss. The other pays attention, gets to know her, they find mutual interests… he woos her.
Who’s the princess gonna want to marry?
That princess = your target audience. You’ll probably eek out some ROI with ads selling your books directly on various sites, and that’s great, but wooing potential readers between now and when you try to sell them something and you’ll be much more likely to be the one they buy for those you reach, over the literal millions of other options – many of the free now… they’ll also be more likely evangelists, more likely to review (and give nicer reviews), etc.
So before you start thinking about *how much* to spend, I’d make sure you’re spending it in a way that is about earning readers, in whatever way you’re called to (mine is nerding out about ancient Greek history, and starting a website with worldbuilding resources). THEN light that on fire with smart marketing.
Get that stuff ironed out, and start experimenting with your marketing to see what pays off. Learn, adapt, do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
Rinse, repeat, adventure 🙂
—
PS – “…the first time that I did a State Fair, I spent $3,000 decorating my booth and spent about two weeks on the silly thing. I sold $59,000 in books (making back about $25,000 in clear profit)”
PSS – Note to self: add ‘Learn about selling books at general public events’ to my list
Log in to reply.