Book Funnel Sales Promos
By: Ken Brown
Published: 5/4/2022
Marketing Your Novels When You Don't have a Large Marketing Budget
Learning to Market My Novels
I listen to a lot of podcasts about writing, and I belong to several Facebook Writer's Groups. Through these services, I have heard of Indie publishers marketing their books through Book Funnel. Despite hearing this several times, I never acted on it to benefit my marketing efforts.
This week the spark of an idea exploded into a full fire and I jumped into utilizing Book Funnel Sales Promos. Have you ever heard of marketing through this service? I have seen a lot of talk on Facebook writing groups about indie authors doing newsletter swaps through Book Funnel, but I never realized there was this other service called Sales Promos.
What are Book Funnel Sales Promos?
Book Funnel members can create a sales promo and ask other authors to join them in this promotion. The creator of the promo will post on Book Funnel their desire to create a sales promo for a specific genre, such as fantasy, romance, horror, thriller, or science fiction. Then the sales promo creator sets it up on Book Funnel and sends out a request for authors that may want to join this promotion. Anyone that feels their novel falls within the specific criteria initiated by the creator then can ask to be part of this promotion. The promotion creator can choose to accept or reject any books that she doesn't feel meets the criteria she sets up. They set the promotion to run for several days or even a month.
Once accepted to be part of the promotion, then you have certain responsibilities. The promotion creator expects you to share the promotion with your social media accounts, newsletters, friends, and even your book websites. They give you a link to the promotion page to share at least once or more. Ideally, if the promotion works, then your book or books will get an additional exposure that it doesn't normally get and you may make a few more sales.
Will I Sell Hundreds of Books?
No, I don't expect that the reach of the promotion will be that profitable. It depends on three different factors.
The sales promo creator may not limit the number of participants, so your book may compete against 20, 40, or in my case, 88 other books.
I doubt my book will do that well against 88 other books, but for this first time, it is a marketing test. I'm curious about how effective it will be. Understand that I don't sell any of my books without a specific marketing campaign, so I'm hoping I can sell at least one book.
How many of the participants really shared it with their social media and email accounts?
My newsletter list contains less than 100 readers, so if all the people in the promotion are the same as me, then we won't sell many books as a group. My Facebook groups are mostly my cousins and I will share the link with them, but I don't expect them to buy anything. They expect you to send a certain number of people to the promotion page. They can drop you from the group if you haven't met their traffic goals in the first ten days. For this first time, they expect me to send 10 people to peruse the books and hopefully buy something.
How does the price of your book match the price of other books in the promotion?
Some authors may discount the price of their book for this promotion. I left my price at the full sales price of $3.99. Some sales promos are specific to only Kindle Unlimited books. Be sure and read the promotion requirement if your book is or isn't in KU.
Click Here for a look at the promotion page and see if you find any books to buy.
Takeaways?
You may not know everything there is to know about marketing your novels, so be sure to listen to podcasts, join Facebook writing groups and read books about marketing your fiction. There are even courses out there somewhere that you can take to learn more techniques.
This isn't costing me any money at the moment. I have a paid book funnel account I set up to deliver my reader magnet books to anyone that signed up for my newsletters. I've incurred that cost if I sell a book or recruit a new reader to my newsletter. If I sell a few books using this sales promo method, then maybe I'll recoup some of that money.
For me, this is going to be a wonderful opportunity to learn about the marketing viability of Book Funnel Sales Promos and maybe, over time, will develop rapport with one of two of the people who run these promotions.
This first promotion runs through June 5th, 2022, so I'll come back and report on it after the 5th.
Write Every Day!
Kenneth Brown Author
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