Book promotion |
Internet Authors Network | marketing books on the internet | Internet book marketing |
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Book promotion |
Internet Authors Network | marketing books on the internet | Internet book marketing |
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So, the real challenge with marketing anything on the Internet is that there are now over 3,000,000,000 indexed Web pages and the number is growing. To complicate your challenge, pages from online book stores are now being filtered out of search results by the larger search engines. So not only are there more pages than ever competing for the attention of only a few hundred million surfers, the pages an author most needs to be seen are less likely to be found at all. By itself, a web page is not an effective marketing tool. Virtually no one will see it even if it's listed in many search engines. The odds against any Web page being viewed more than 10,000 times a year are pretty high. And when you think about how many books people pass by in a book store as they browse the shelves, the number of people who have to see a book just to sell one copy is very high. Internet marketing depends on a complex and evolving selection of advertising services: banner ads, email ads, press releases, and more. But even the professionals cannot agree on how effective these marketing tools are. The advertising services provide conflicting data on who is seeing the ads and how effective they are, the press releases are largely ignored by the news media, and so on. Online marketers have the thankless task of building brand recognition in a medium where they cannot agree on what constitutes a "brand". So the lowly self-promoting author is really caught in a wild storm. Who is selling books on the Internet? There are many myths about online book promotions. Sadly, professional authors and publishers from the traditional publishing industry are helping to spread the myths. Their ignorance is being accepted as credible knowledge. In a news group devoted to writing, one science fiction author told people that ebooks don't sell, that the best sellers have "downloads in the hundreds". Nothing could be further from the truth. That is not to say eBooks sell as many copies as printed books. They don't. Eventually they may, but right now there is a great disparity between eBook sales and print book sales, and though the gap is closing it's not closing as fast as many people would like. Nonetheless, the average well-promoted eBook is expected to generate sales in the low thousands, not "in the hundreds". It is easy to distribute an eBook on the Internet. In fact, if you want downloads in the tens of thousands, just offer your eBook for free. Free eBooks are downloaded approximately 20 times more often than those offered for sale. The inconveniences of eBooks have been the chief reason for why they are not breaking into the New York Times Bestsellers lists. Many people don't want to read books on a computer screen (although most people who spend 20 hours a week online read the equivalent of several books every week). But just because people download your free ebook doesn't mean you'll accomplish your goals. One doctor reported that, after generating 20,000 downloads of a free eBook he hoped would promote an eBook he was selling, he had not realized one sale of the second book. So, you need to understand what you are getting into, and what people are looking for on the Net (in a phrase: free stuff). Are there any success stories in eBooks? Sure. Leta Nolan Childers' The Best Laid Plans, a Romance novel, sold more than 16,000 copies within a matter of months. Childers is a well-known syndicated writer, however, with a large readership. And, of course, most everyone has heard about Stephen King's The Plant. He sold more than 500,000 copies of the first part of this online novel in six installments. The publishing community became divided over whether the book was a success after King announced a two-year hiatus on the project. And, of course, he is Stephen King. His earlier eText release, "Riding the Bullet", was offered both for free and for pay and it made a couple hundred thousand dollars. Another major author to step into the waters of eBook sales is Suspense/Mystery author Frederick Forsyth. |
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