Kindle Promotion: How To Structure Your Kindle eBook Offer To Get Sales!

A Kindle promotion is an excellent way to get more readers. Use these tips to get your next Kindle eBook offer out there into the hands of readers!

 

In this Kindle Promotion article, you will find advice in these areas:

• How to plan your offer so you can gather everything you need and consider costs to save money,
• Analysing your margins is vital to ensure you don’t overspend and learn how much you can spend and still earn royalties,
• Deciding a discount rate can help you evaluate what your maximum discount is so you don’t end up short changed at the end of the Kindle promotion,
• Developing a content plan is helpful for you to ensure all areas are covered to optimise your article’s appearance on search engines,
• Making promotional materials is critical to the success of your Kindle promotion as they are what catch the eye of potential customers – leading to sales,
• Considering language carefully can help speak a customer’s language and appeal to what they want, which can increase sales,
• Getting social is central to your Kindle promotion so your followers on social media can see the offer and buy your book,
• Tracking your success means you’ll understand better what works so you can repeat it next time, only better!

Read the rest of the Kindle Promotion article to learn how you can structure your eBooks offers and get more sales.

 

Kindle Promotion: Start With A Plan

A Kindle promotion is an excellent way to get your book into the hands of more readers. There is no doubt that every Kindle author could so with selling more units. However, every Kindle eBook on sale within the Kindle store is vying for position with every other book out there.

As a Kindle author, we all face the same issue; people want a free Kindle eBook and will wait for your novel to be either extremely cheap or free before pushing the button. When you consider this, how is it possible to compose a Kindle promotion that gets your fiction books into the hands of readers while you make a few pounds or dollars as the author?

This is the problem that all marketers and businesses face — striking the balance of offering a discount to customers that gives them satisfaction, while the company makes enough for their product or service to make the offer viable.

In this article, I share some advice that can help you to build a viable Kindle promotion campaign for your next Kindle eBook. As a fellow Kindle author with digital marketing training and experience, I like to offer creative writing tips and marketing advice to my peers out there.

Let’s get into it!

 

Look At Your Margins

When we create a promotion of any kind, we need to look at the margins. If we hope to make any money from the product we sell, in this case, a book, we need to see how much the book costs to produce. This is a crucial area we need to factor in before we decide how much to reduce our book by.

In the case of Inside Iris, when I first put up a Kindle promotion, I looked at the costs for the paperback and the Kindle eBook editions. The figures I saw on my KDP account showed me just how much I was able to discount Inside Iris by.

If you are an author who is looking to give their book away for free, you may not have to factor the costs into your offer. However, if you are a writer who would like to make money from their books, it is imperative that you so the sums and see just how much of a discount you can offer.

Study your margins, people! It makes sense in the long run.

 

Set A Discount Rate

Once you have worked out how much you can discount your Kindle eBook for in your Kindle promotion, you can now consider the percentage you would like to reduce the book by. In some cases, where the paperback novel costs a more significant amount, the promotional discount you offer will be less.

The beauty of working with an electronic medium for a Kindle promotion is that there are no hard costs that have to be factored in, like:

• Ink,
• Paper,
• Cover,
• Laminating materials, and,
• glue.

All of these cost the manufacturer money and, in turn, you the author. We don’t want to be in a situation where we discount our paperback novels so much that it costs us money to run the Kindle promotion.

This is especially important when it comes to Pay-Per-Click advertising, such as Facebook Ads Manager or Google Ads. As authors, we are working with such low margins that the added cost of paid advertising can eat massively into our funds. For example, if you consider my last Anna’s Awakening Google Ads campaign, I was averaging around 70 pence per click on each ad. This means I was lucky to make 50p per book. When you factor in that someone accidentally clicks on my ad and they don’t buy a book, it doesn’t take long to run into a deficit.

Once you have considered your margins and set your discount rate, you’re almost ready to go.

 

Make Kindle Promotion Materials

When it comes to the creation of Kindle promotion materials, there are any number of apps or programmes out there that a self-published or indie author can use. Some examples include,

• Canva – Great for basic social media slides,
• Figma – Great for logo design & social media graphics, and,
• Crello – Great for animations & web graphics.

When it comes to my graphics, I make use of the Adobe Creative Cloud. Within the paid subscription package, I have access to programmes, like:

• Adobe Photoshop,
• Adobe InDesign,
• Adobe Illustrator, and,
• Adobe Premiere Pro.

In my Adobe Portfolio blog article, I go into detail about how an author can utilise such programmes to create amazing promotional graphics for a Kindle eBook or an author appearance. Nonetheless, authors must create and share their Kindle promotion materials across all social media networks to engage with as many followers or fans as possible.

If you hope to make a splash with your posters and social media or web graphics, they must look the part with high-quality images and clear text that sells your book as well as possible. Only then, will you be able to say that you have done your absolute best with the materials you had to hand.

We’re one step further down the road, and now it’s on to the next area.

 

Consider Language Carefully

Language is vital in all that we do as authors. Whether we are looking to compose a Kindle promotion or we are finalising a draft for our next novel. Words are what we work with daily, and they are what we take pride in when we push the ‘go’ button on KDP.

However, we have all been there when it comes to trying to sell our next Kindle eBook in as few words as possible. We all look at the short blurb we have to compose for the Kindle Store and panic at shortening our 90,000-word manuscript into 500-words. Yet, its part of the process and we simply have to suck it up and get it done!

In the world of promotional posters, banners or social media graphics, we have to sell our book in one short statement. This is a whole other world when compared to writing the full manuscript, and it is an entirely new skill that takes time and practice.

When I came up with the idea of The IRIS Trilogy, I wanted to tell the story of a young teenage girl who had a genetic gift that could help save a pandemic-ridden humanity. That was the basic idea of the three novels that I would come to compose. However, trying to shape that into the base promotional straplines for Kindle promotions over and over again can be tricky.

This, friends, is where we need to be inventive and appeal to potential readers’ by considering what they want by:

• Entertaining them,
• Allowing relaxation,
• Offering escapism,
• Presenting our Kindle eBook as a social experience, and,
• Helping them save money in our Kindle promotion.

The last bullet is the one that is most important to any customer. As authors, we can promise the reader the world in relation to how well our book is written but, if the reader can save money, it is the golden ticket.

When considering the language you use on your Kindle promotion, do so carefully. If you can draw up a series of five-to-ten possible headlines or promotional titles, you can weigh up which is best and which sells your book promotion better. Boil your story down its bare bones and put it forward in less than twenty words, and fewer if possible.

Now we need to put it out there and get social.

 

Get Social

Social media is the modern way to promote and advertise your Kindle promotion. By building up a tonne of followers and ‘friends’, we can share our Kindle promotion with hundreds if not thousands of people.

The average person has 100 followers or ‘friends’ on social media. If that person likes and shares your book promotion, that means 100 people stand a chance of seeing it. Depending on the number of people who then like and share further down that chain, you can have thousands of people see your promotional poster in a matter of hours.

If this liking and sharing all comes about ‘organically’ (free or unpaid ads), then you are laughing, especially if a few of those people buy your book. To fully optimise the social media networks you have to:

• Be active,
• Be sociable,
• Engage with others, and,
• Not spam with repeated messages with the same content.

By being an active member of the writing community, you will be able to take advantage of those bonds and relationships you have built with other writers to give your Kindle promotion real legs. This free sharing of your social media content can help you span countries and continents in no time. Therefore, think about maximising those social media relationships across your most profitable networks.

On the other hand, if you have to pay for a promotion, you need to plan ahead and consider the structure of your ads very carefully. As mentioned in my Social Media Networks blog, there are many pros and cons to be weighed up, but paid ads are an area that the author has to put a lot of thought into.

In a previous Kindle Book Promotion blog, I mentioned how authors must decide whether a PPC Ads campaign is worth funding. If you stand to make only £1 or $1 from every £5 or $5 of ad spend, it doesn’t make sense to run a lengthy paid ads campaign across social media or Google. Read the full article to learn more.

When we work to develop our social media, we do so for help when promoting ourselves and connecting with like-minded people. The fellow authors on your social media networks will likely have been there and will help share your promotion out of kindness. Therefore, as you think about promoting your next Kindle eBook in the coming months, make sure to boost your social media engagement ahead of time!

You’ve done it! You Kindle promotion is out there; now the fun begins – analysing the tracking data.

 

Track Your Success

When you have put the Kindle promotion out there, and people are liking and sharing away, you need to analyse your data. There are several reasons for this, including:

• What works – My using the analytics data, we can see which posts worked and were popular with followers,
• What doesn’t work – We can also see which posts didn’t work, as followers didn’t engage with them enough,
• When works – Time is crucial as authors. We may run across multiple timezones, so considering the best time to post can be vital,
• How it works – Does a specific image work better? Did the last headline grab attention more? Why not ask followers to comment below your post?
• Do it all again – Once you have found what works, do more of it only better.

The tracking of your social media can go far beyond how many likes and shares your post gets. Delve into Facebook Insights and Google Analytics to see just how well your social media and your website pages are doing.

By utilising the tracking data of blogs, website pages, and social media posts, we can make out next Kindle promotion and our website visitor or follower experience better. If we make better content, visitors and followers will engage more often, and our online author profile can grow as a result.

Remember, it is not about us as authors. We need to listen to and engage with our followers and fans. After all, we do it for them, don’t we?

 

Kindle Promotion: The Takeaway

The Kindle promotion is something that we, as authors, need to consider carefully and plan head. As a fiction author, I like to drop hints in my blogs and through my social media. This means when a paperback or Kindle eBook offer is coming up, I can prepare ahead of time and engage a lot with my followers.

I know that, by putting in the time to like, share and follow the posts of others, they will do so in return and help my offers spread further. We also know that people can be somewhat shallow, and our offers need to look good, sound good, speak to the buyer and, ultimately, offer value for money.

There is a lot to take away from this blog. However, you will be able to apply some of the points above into your next kindle promotion. By doing so, your Kindle eBook could get more readers, and your novel’s reputation will grow as a result.

 

Inside Iris & Anna’s Awakening are your perfect reads for dystopian sci-fi. Get your copies today by clicking on the text hyperlinks for the novels above.