Showing posts with label book marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book marketing. Show all posts

Dec 13, 2010

Book Marketing - Learn from the Best


Due to the success of my book How to Retire Happy, Wild and Free, I occassionally get e-mails from authors of other books including retirement books wanting me to give them my secrets for book marketing including my viral marketing techniques.

Here is an e-mail that I recently sent to one of the authors;


    Julie:

    If you want to be more successful at book marketing, just be different than everyone else with your marketing and question what everyone else is doing. Create opportunity from situations where no one sees any.

    See this great blog post by Bob Baker about book marketing.

    I couldn't have said this any better myself in a hundred years.

    Also, read my comment at the bottom of Bob's post.

    Pay partcular attention to the point of how much I respect John Reese for killing his Facebook Account with 5,000 so-called "Friends" and his Twitter account with 25,000 followers, I agree with John that social media has to be the biggest time waster for most people. It will also contribute to why most people will never write a book, let alone spend time doing some true creative marketing.

    But the most important thing is to learn from the best.

    My hero and mentor is Brendon Burchard, from whom I have taken both his Partnership Program and his Experts Academy Program. I will be using both to increase the sales of my books, particulary How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free so that it reaches 500,000 copies sold.

    Brendon actually got $500,000 in Sponsorship for his second book before the book was even written.

    I could also tell you about Eben Pagan and John Reese from whom I have taken incredible programs and from whom I also have learned a lot, but I find that most people are not prepared to pay for their programs. So often my advice is wasted. These two quotes are relevant:


      If small money does not go out, big money will not come in.
      — Chinese proverb

      People that pay for things never complain. It's the guy you give something to [for free] that you can't please.
      — Will Rogers

    In short, Brendon is the best teacher out there and offers incredible value. If you want to learn some amazing things, take his Experts Academy Program. If you want to be like the majority, then just forget about it and settle for mediocre results. Spend your time looking for the meaning of life instead of book marketing.

    Ernie J. Zelinski
    Best-Selling Author, Innovator, and Creativity Consultant
    Author of the Bestseller How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
    (Over 125,000 copies sold and published in 9 languages)
    and the International Bestseller The Joy of Not Working
    (Over 250,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)

Oct 4, 2009

Trying to Overcome Amazon.com's Resistance and Unwillingness to Market Books Properly

The last two or three weeks I have been Trying to Overcome Amazon.com's Unwillingness to Market Books the Way Books Should Be Marketed.

There has been a need to change ISBN numbers for my books since Random House purchased Ten Speed Press and then cancelled the Distribution Agreements for my books that I had with Ten Speed Press.

Since the ISBN changed, Amazon has placed a new webpage for How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free at: http://www.amazon.com/How-Retire-Happy-Wild-Free/dp/096941949X/

But they have not placed any indication on the old webpage (where the book is no longer available) that the book is still readily available by going to the new webpage.

The way Amazon is doing things will just hinder sales because the new pages for each of the books will look exactly like the old pages and the old pages will come up in the search engines instead of the new pages. Search engines operate on the basis that when they see the two pages as duplicate content, the older page will come up first and the newer page will be ignored.

In my opinion, it is totally idiotic to direct people to the old pages where the books cannot be purchased anymore as new copies instead of the new pages where the books can be purchased new.

The best example I can give for this problem is my book The Joy of Not Working. The latest edition came out way back in 2003. The Amazon page for this latest edition is http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Not-Working-Unemployed-Overworked/dp/1580085520/

Yet do a search of The Joy of Not Working on Google and guess what comes up? The page for the older edition ( http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Not-Working-Ernie-Zelinski/dp/0898159148) with absolutely no sign of the new page for the new edition!

To make matters worse, there is nothing on the Amazon page for the old edition to direct buyers to the Amazon.com webpage for the new edition.

Do a search on Yahoo and you will see that the respective pages for the old edition and new edition show up together. But there is still a problem because the older edition appears higher than the newer edition.

There is no doubt in my mind that this has caused a loss of sales of thousands of copies for this book over the years.

Again, Amazon is creating this problem in several ways.

1. They are placing the reviews from the old edition on the new edition.
2. They are placing the reviews from the new edition on the old edition.
3. They have placed the search-inside-the-book feature from the old edition on the new edition.
4. They are making the description of the book the same.

This has made the page for the new edition extremely similar to the page for the old edition. The search engines then ignore the page for the new edition.

So I have trying to over come this same problem with How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free by placing it on as many webpages as possible with links to the new Amazon.com page for How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free.

Here are some of the associated pages:


Mar 13, 2008

Using Viral Marketing to Market My Retirement Books

I have been using a bit of viral marketing and it seems to have helped a lot.

One of the viral marketing tools I use is giving away over half — the top half only — of my book How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free. (The top half is available as a PDF at Creative Free E-books).

Today if anyone types in "retirement" into Amazon.com's search engine, How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free comes in the number 1 position — out of over 175,000 books that Amazon puts in the retirement category.

Given that over 95 percent of the 190,000 books published in North America every year will never sell more than 5,000 copies, my book has done very well.Although largely ignored by the media, and rejected by over 35 American and British publishers, How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free has now sold over 85,000 copies.

Of course, word-of-mouth is still the most powerful advertising for any product or service. A great product or service creates its own viral marketing.

My latest viral marketing tool to promote How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free is giving away my e-book The 237 Best Things Ever Said about Retirement on the The Retirement Quotes Cafe