AP 0277: How Do I Promote an Ebook for Kids?

AskPat 277 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 277 of AskPat. I appreciate you being here today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have another great question today from Eddie. But, before we get to that, I want to thank today's amazing sponsor which is AWeber.com, a company that I've been working with for the last four or five years, actually. They are helping me build my email list and send mass emails out to all of my subscribers and certain segments of them, sometimes all of them at once. And they also help me with my autoresponder series, a series of emails that I've prewritten that go out sequentially over time that help me keep in contact with my audience, continue that relationship, and help increase the open rate. That's why my open rate is between 50-70 percent on some emails, even emails that were prewritten in my autoresponder sequence.

If you want to try AWeber out to help you build your email list and reach your customers faster and better, go to AWeber.com/askpat and you can check out a testimonial video from me there as well, and try it out for 30 days for $1. Again, AWeber.com/askpat. Awesome. Now, let's get to today's question from Eddie.

Eddie: Hi Pat, this is Eddie. My wife wrote an ebook, a children's ebook. It didn't sell so far. It's been released for more than two months. My question is, how … and if you can give me some tips on how to promote the ebook. Because it's an ebook, a children's ebook, you can't use affiliate because the price is quite low. But if you could give me some ideas and tips on how to promote it and how to sell it on Amazon, where it is at the moment, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.

Pat Flynn: Eddie, thank you so much for this question. Awesome that you are sending me this question to help your wife sell more children's books. This is great. I'm going to help you out as much as I can. The first thing that comes to mind is connecting with people who are experienced children's writers, for a number of reasons. One, you want to befriend them. You want her to build a relationship with them, help them out, provide value to them because what happens, well, the law of reciprocity comes into play.

Often times, when you help those people out in every which way that you can, those people are going to help you out as well. That might translate to more sales to your book directly, or it might indirectly translate to more sales because sometimes those people just simply give you a lot of good tips. They're good relationships to have. They might introduce you to certain people who can help you get more sales down the road as well. So first and foremost, I mean, for anybody out there in any niche out there, the best thing to do is connect with other people who are doing the same thing as you, who share the same goals, who share the same values. You kind of all help each other out and just grow together exponentially better than you could do on your own, each on your own. That would be the first thing that I would do.

Also, I would connect with people who are online, sharing tips and things like that as well. I am not a children's book writer, although that would be really cool and maybe something to shoot for someday. I know a person who is a children's book writer and author, and she's amazing. You can find her at KatieDavis.com. She's written a number of children's books. I've read a few of them myself, to my children. They're amazing. She knows what she's talking about. One thing she's big into, and you'll see when you visit her site at KatieDavis.com, is video. I completely agree, if you aren't shooting videos to help promote your book, then you're missing out. Video is being consumed by more people now than ever. We're not just talking about book trailers either. Book trailers are important, they help set the tone of a book and why people should get it.

Even beyond that, there's a lot of cool things you can do in relation to the book that you're publishing that can help your book. That is, getting into the lessons involved within your book and having your book be a topic surrounding that bigger lesson, getting personal with how you created it. What gave you the inspiration to write this book? Those little things that people love, those little tidbits and Easter eggs that you share are going to entice people to get your book as well.

Beyond that, I also want to talk about social media. Again, going back to relationships. Social media is great for connecting with other influencers and helping to share each others' things and build relationships that you can take to the next level, but also connecting with those who are potential readers of your book as well. Once you build that relationship and people are interested in what you have to offer them, if they are part of your target audience, chances are they're going to get your book. If you build that relationship and you provide a value for them in some way, like I said earlier, they're going to try and search for ways to provide value back to you as well.

The affiliate marketing thing, like you mentioned, that doesn't really work completely well. Especially if you're book is already just on Amazon as a Kindle book, for a number of reasons. One, the price just isn't worth it sometimes. However, those things add up. I wouldn't discount that, but I would definitely focus on other things.

Now, speaking of Kindle, there are a lot of things you can do with Kindle. If you are only publishing on Kindle, you can do a lot of promotional-type things to have your book rank much higher. For instance, if you are a part of the Amazon Kindle select program, you have the ability to do some cool things in terms of promoting and offering your book for free.

There are a lot of cool things coming out with Amazon, too. I know they just came up with this thing called Sweepstakes, which you might want to research, to give people some incentive to go along and purchase your book. In doing that, they would be entered into a sweepstakes to be able to win something. I believe that's how it works, but I have to do more research on that. But, it is something we should all be looking at. So go ahead and go to Amazon and look up Amazon Sweepstakes, cause they're getting into the sweepstakes game and that might be a game changer for a lot of us, whether we're promoting books or products or anything on Amazon. So that's really cool.

But, again, some things people do to help is to run big promotions and events around these timed promotions where you are going to give your book away for free for a little bit. So the idea is, you want to … if you're a part of Amazon Kindle Select, you can have your book be free for a certain of time. You can surround that period of time with an event. So make a big deal out of this thing and treat it like an event in this promotion. That's how you're going to get a lot of downloads in a short period of time, which is going to increase your rankings in the app store, or not the app store, sorry, in Kindle. It's going to help when you go back to a paid model. You're going to have more reviews. You're going to have a higher ranking and it's going to help push your book even further.

So those would be the things that I would start with. I would love to hear everybody else's thoughts on this. I have a lot of great content on selling primarily-nonfiction books. We have some great podcast episodes on The Smart Income Passive Podcast. Jeff Goins was on the show and we talked a lot about nonfiction book publishing, although a lot of those strategies could work as well. We've talked about a little bit of those things today.

Another thing I would do, which is going to be a little bit harder if you're just starting out and you don't have very many sales, is to have some sort of ambassador group. So once you, over time, build this audience base, there's going to be a few people who become super-fans. You definitely want to utilize them and their connections and their networks to be able to sell your books for you, and to help you with promotions and building hype and promoting these events that you have going on.

I wouldn't worry about paid advertising right now. This is not the right time for that. But, I will say that—I know more than anything else, this is why I wanted to finish with this—one of the best ways that people are promoting their books on Amazon is to publish more books on Amazon and have them cross-promote each other. What often happens is, some of those books will get a few sales here and there, but then one or two of them will just hit home for a lot of people and take off. Maybe somebody influential talks about it or discovers it and shares it, and all of a sudden you are in the algorithm where people who buy this also buy that. This is from the same author. They get to see all the other books that that author has written.

A lot of things can happen quite quickly. It takes more publishing to make that happen. One book might not do the trick, but maybe three, maybe four, maybe two. I think the more you write the better, at least, experience you'll get with the Amazon environment, but also more chances you'll have to get into that, what I was talking about earlier. It becomes almost self-perpetual at that time, once things start to pick up and things start to cross-promote each other.

So Eddie, I know that's a ton of ideas. Hopefully you and your wife listen to this and have some things and direction to go and move forward with. For those of you listening, if you have some suggestions for Eddie and his wife for this children's book, if maybe you're a children's author yourself and you've done few things that have really made a difference for you, use the hashtag #AskPat277. Again, that's #AskPat277 on Twitter. We can continue the conversation there. Thank you so much Eddie: An AskPat t-shirt will be headed your way for having your question featured here on the show.

For those of you listening, I know a lot of you have heard this message before and you have questions to ask but you have yet to ask them. If you want to ask me a question, I'm here to help answer it. Go to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page, thanks to the SpeakPipe.com widget, which collects those voicemails and turns them into mp3 files for me. I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is AWeber.com, making it super easy for you to integrate email marketing into your business, if you aren't doing it already. Seriously, that was one of the biggest mistakes I made—twice, since starting my online businesses—was not starting my email soon enough. Once I finally got my head on straight, I got together with AWeber. They've been great. Their customer service is fantastic, live chat helping me along the way. Check it out. You can check it out for 30 days for $1 by going to AWeber.com/askpat.

Sweet. Now let's finish off, as we always do, with a quote. Today's quote comes from Bruce Lee. He says, “A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.” Cheers, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.