Would You Promote My Book? Pretty Please?

I’ve always like the idea of my own personal recommendation army, which spreads the word of my work through the cosmos in a supernova of goodwill. But the reality is that though good will is great and will get you recommendations here and there, it’s money that really talks. You want as many people selling/recommending your book as possible and the more incentive you provide, the more people who are willing to promote your product. Money makes the world go round, hell it almost costs you for a sneeze these days, and if you offer readers a cut of the profit to promote your novels, they will look after you guaranteed. Your readers will move heaven and earth to promote you on their site, promote you to their social media groups, on their t-shirts, in their front yard, in song - anyway they can if you just make it worth their while.

To start with I would recommend you offer at least 50% of the profits from you sale to your affiliates. Calm down no need for that stunned fish look. The fact of the matter is, your readers have connections and you need to motivate them to actively seek out those connections in relation to your book. Simply saying, “Would you promote my book? Pretty please?” is not a large enough motivator and you are deluding yourself if you think you are going to get more than one brief mention in their Facebook status. If you are a Smashwords author you are already a part of this affiliate cycle. Though you can opt out, Smashwords authors when they first publish their book allow affiliates whether they are other authors, publishers or just people in the market place looking to make some money, to send people to the author’s Smashwords books for an 11% commission if they help make a sale. Either way, you will sell more e-books this way then you would on your own.

But you want to stand out from the crowd, you want people to rave about you, and the more mullah you offer, the greater the enthusiasm of the rave. So by ‘juicing’ the affiliate percentage (as Smashwords terms it), you are making your novel a more sought after product to sell. Also, if you can provide your affiliates/readers with marketing material for the novel on your blog or website, you make this deal a no brainer. They don’t have to come up with the description, they don’t have to come up with the tweets, they don’t have to try and summarise your work so it appears enticing to their friends, they don’t have to compose the promotion emails to send out, nor do they have to do any work at all. If you provide all the writing I have directed you to do in this blog as material for them to use in promotion AND you give them 50%, then it’s just a matter of where do they sign?!

There are 3 very simple steps to getting a good affiliate program going. The first step is to have somewhere that the reader can sign up to be an affiliate. While in the long run it will be better to set up your own affiliate opt in and payment system, this costs money and a bit of professional computer coding. However you can make use of systems already in place, such as Clickbank and Smashwords. Both these sites accept the money for you so you don’t have to organise your own payment system. Clickbank is where you can advertise your e-book so that affiliates can easily sign up, get their own personalised link and start promoting. This is probably more helpful for non-fiction authors who are selling their e-books along with enticing extras. You cannot take your Smashwords produced files to sell through Clickbank though, so you will either have to just sell the pdf format (which you can easily make by downloading a free pdf converter off the net) or pay to have someone convert your book into other e-reader formats for you. Smashwords is probably a more viable option for e-books in general. So make sure that you have the link to join up to the affiliate program at Smashwords handy. It’s important to note that Clickbank does not withhold tax from your affiliate, so it doesn’t matter what country they are from they get the full amount. But Smashwords takes tax out which could deter non-US affiliates. It’s up to your which one you prefer to use. For the rest of this post, we will just use Smashwords as an example.

The second step is to make sure you ‘juice’ your affiliate percentage on Smashwords (and you can also do this in Amazon) to at least 50%. Step three is to let your readers know that they can actually get a cut of the sale if they recommend/promote your e-book to others. Do this on your website, at the end of your synopsis, on your author page and on the last page of your e-book. You need to provide them with a simple list of instructions on how to do this. Give them the link to the Smashwords (or Amazon/clickbank) affiliate sign up page. Then give them the URL for your Smashwords e-book or author page. At the bottom of the page will be their affiliate link. Then give them the link to your marketing material and they will be ready to promote you to the cosmos! Even the little green guys will know about your existence within months.

But do you know the greatest affiliate marketing ploy? Allowing affiliates for the first several months to keep 100% profit of the sales they make (minus the commission to Smashwords). That’s right, I said you are giving them EVERY CENT to promote your e-book. This is the ultimate viral marketing. It is like giving your book away for free, however rather than waiting for people to find you in the search engines you have an army of money hungry readers actively finding your target audience and sending them direct to you! There are no other e-books for the new reader to look at, only yours. By telling your reader that once they buy this book they have the right to promote and sell it AND keep all the profits, you not only increased your rankings in the best sellers list, but you have recruited a soldier for your recommendation army. Later you can decrease their percentage to a more profitable level for you.

Convincing affiliates to sell your e-book takes advantage of viral marketing and not only your own social networks, but all of your affiliate’s networks too! The quicker you get the word out about your e-book, the sooner you will reach the success you are aiming for. All because you went a little further then saying, “Pretty please.”

TOMORROW: The Media Machine: Want to sell you e-book for more than the norm? It’s time to add extra value.

SUCCESS?? Have you started to apply the tips in this blog yet? If you have had success, I would love to hear about it! Please feel free to tell us in the comments section below.