Pay to play for what works.

Disclosure: Another post for those thinking about or who are writing a book.

You need a book marketing plan, one that includes essential marketing mix elements that apply to selling books:

• A website for your book (or a page about the book on your personal website).
• Presence in the most important social media platforms (Facebook/Instagram required).
• Advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
• You interacting with people who respond to your marketing.

You might get some traction with just that last one, but it's unlikely that many people will be looking to interact with you unless you advertise. Other than friends and family, they won't know that you or your book exists.

How you do that is covered in some of the previous posts in this blog. If you have questions, message me; I'll be happy to help you however possible.

Once you're doing that, there are two metrics you want to follow closely:

• Traffic to the book page on your website (send them there because you can provide more information about you and your book than what they'll find in your ads)
• Book sales.

The graphic in this post is a month-long website traffic summary for The Unlived Lives of Raymond Quinn book page on my website.

An upward trajectory for both page views and unique visits, with a slight drop in the average number of pages visited on my website.

So was June bad, mid-July onward, good? If so, what made the difference?

For starters, there wouldn't have been a 'trajectory' had I not advertised. I did, and both Views and Visits were relatively flat from June 28 to July 16.

Seeing that, I reviewed my advertising, turning off underperforming ads completely, reducing budgets for those that were doing okay, reallocating the money to ads that were performing well above average. 

The result is an increase in traffic with sales trending upward as well.

An oversimplification, but you get the idea.

You have to pay to play.

Just make certain that what you pay for is producing.