Should I Pay For Book Promotion? Is it Worth The Money?

Should You Buy Book Promotion

Do you need to pay for book promotion?

Every self-published author asks this question, and the answer should be yes, of course.

In any business you can think of, the cost of advertising and promoting your product is your first financial decision to help start generating sales.

However, selling ebooks is not easy.

Money won’t buy you book sales

If you think that just because you pay for book promotion services, it will immediately increase your book sales, then perhaps you should read on.

When you use paid book promotion, it does not mean that you will magically get sales.

If you consider self-publishing ebooks a hobby and don’t want to invest, many free book promotion ideas, ebook marketing services, and tools are available.

So there is by no means a necessity to pay for ebook promotion. The only factor to consider is that free promotion services usually perform in line with the price.

Free book promotion sites are usually more concerned with making money from some form of affiliate marketing.

It might be better for you to leverage your social media accounts to connect with more readers.

However, no matter how much you self-promote or spend on advertising, a poor-quality book with a weak presentation and bad reviews will struggle to sell.

Don’t waste your money on an ebook promotion service to help you. Like any other product, you need to project a high degree of quality and existing customer satisfaction to increase your book sales.

If you have a few published titles, select your best-ranking title or titles.

But if you only have one or two, or you are planning your first book launch, you may have to do some preparation first.

 

Don’t pay for promotion and waste money until your book is ready.

Before you think about spending money on book marketing and advertising, make sure your book can tick all the following quality criteria.

1. It has a professionally designed and attention-grabbing book cover.

2. It is well-written and error-free.

3. It has at least 10-12 positive book reviews.

4. It has a star ranking of 4 or better.

5. It has a fantastic book description. (Refer here for help on using HTML to improve book descriptions on Amazon.)

Once your book looks its best, the choices of free and paid advertising and book promotion are almost endless for every genre.

Unless you want to break the bank, you will need to be highly selective—research which options are going to work best for you.

There are a lot of ways you can promote a book for free. Personally speaking, I never see the logic in spending money on using promotion sites for free ebooks or even discounted ebooks.

Free ebooks are promotions in themselves, which are designed to lift a book’s sales rank.

You can do these promotions for free by enrolling in KDP Select to offer free Kindle books on Amazon. Your ebook is also then available in Kindle Unlimited.

If you publish with either Draft2Digital or Smashwords, you can discount your book price or offer it for free for as long as you want.

If these campaigns are successful, you can then use targeted PPC (pay-per-click) paid promotion to take advantage of the higher ranking, and of course, at your full book price to hopefully recover some of the advertising costs.

With regard to long-term promotion for Indie authors, look for a reasonably priced promotion that will keep bringing attention to your books.

 

What are the best paid promotion options?

It is a very individual choice. Depending on your budget and goals, it will differ from one author to another.

There are hundreds of book marketing service options, so do your research. But here are a few possibilities.

Bookbub is probably the most well-known promotion site for authors and publishers.

However, it is also very expensive and quite selective about the books it accepts to promote.

Books must be accepted before they can be promoted by BookBub daily emails. They must also be heavily discounted or offered for free.

Prices vary for a one-day promotion but range from $150-$2,000. You can check the price list here. While very expensive, Bookbub is also very popular.

Facebook Ads are quite economical if used judiciously.

You need a Facebook Page to be able to use the service. But ads can be finely targeted to suit your book’s potential niche appeal.

My experience has been that my average cost per click on Facebook is around $0.30. This is relatively cheap in comparison to other PPC providers.

The other advantage is that you can set very low daily budgets.

When your ad is approved and running, you can turn it on and off at any time, such as mornings, Mondays, or any other time you feel will not be profitable.

KDP Select PPC Ads. This is a PPC advertising service offered by Amazon.

It is more expensive than Facebook at around $0.70 per click. But the ads are where you want them–right in front of the book buyer’s eyes on the Amazon Kindle Store.

The one important fact I have noticed is that product targeting works much better than category or interest targeting.

So much so that I only gained sales from product-targeted ads.

Here is a link to a post by the Nonfiction Authors Association about how to use KDP Ads. Similar to Facebook ads, once your ad is running, you can pause it at any time.

 

Focus on value for money when selecting your paid promotion service

Whatever you choose, the most important factor is to get value for your money and stick firmly to your budget.

You don’t need to spend a fortune to gain good exposure and increase book sales.

A modest budget of, say, $50.00 per month on either Facebook or Amazon Ads can be very successful if narrowly targeted to book readers who are interested in your genre.

Always remember that with PPC, it is not how many clicks you get but how many of the right types of clicks you get.

So always target down to a narrow potential audience to get the best results.

 

So should you pay for book advertising?

There is no definitive answer because it is up to each author to decide.

But with an ever-increasing number of ebooks, in particular, being published each year, more effort is required to keep a high book ranking–and high book rankings are, of course, what are needed to sell books.

Paid advertising is definitely not a guarantee of success. But if used wisely, it can help lift and maintain higher sales rankings.

To answer the question you may be asking, yes, I use paid advertising to promote some of my books.

I have a small set budget, which I use every second month and combined sometimes with Amazon promotions.

I find this pairing keeps both my ranking and sales moving along nicely.

It certainly hasn’t made me a #1 bestseller.

But for my modest investment, I am more than pleased with the return I get—steady sales and a royalty payment every month.

One word of advice, however.

If you are new to paid advertising, you will need to experiment to see what works best for you.

So set very small budgets initially while you learn, and take your time.

 

Related Reading: Using Relationships With Book Buyers For New Authors

4 thoughts on “Should I Pay For Book Promotion? Is it Worth The Money?”

  1. Great marketing advice. What worked best for me is collecting emails and gathering reviews. I use aweber for email marketing and usbookreviews for gathering reviews.

  2. My husband, turning 86 in April, is working on his 19th book. At first his initial books, especially ‘Mama’s Madness’ did very well – then suddenly nothing much. Since then he has paid a variety of people/sites who promise to send out so many tweets a day and have an author’s page for him. This has started adding up to the point that he is in a very negative position (these sites are making money however). I’m leery of most, if not, all of them. Especially as no additional sales are showing up. He thinks I’m just a penny-pincher and that he needs all these sites. Me, I just want him to get value out of his marketing dollar. The latest one that is trying to entice him is authorshout – which seems very high priced to me to send out tweets. Do you have any feeling on this? Really appreciate any comments.

    1. It always depends, Julie. Promoting a book is worthwhile. But all the elements that define a good book must be right to get sales. It is a highly competitive market now with far more books published than readers can buy. By all estimates, a new title is published on Amazon a little less than every two minutes. So yes, promotion can work, but it has to be for a book readers are willing to purchase.

  3. I believe the days of free book promotions are numbered with Amazon clamping down on the many benefits it use to offer, so I was pleased to read your article supporting the need for paid book promotions where you actually earn royalties from selling books at $0.99 and over. The only sites I know offering to promote books at $2.99 and over are BookBub and Kindle Book Promotions. Which is why I was surprised to see you site so few other promotion sites, especially as Bookbub (which is great) only accepts about 5% of all applicants.
    Authors can find a far more comprehensive list of book promotion sites at Paid Author which recently listed the Best Book Promotion sites of 2018

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