How Book Authors Can Use Facebook Advertising

On today's episode we talk about:

• Selling your book - How to effectively sell your book with Facebook ads to gain traction and interest.
• How to grow your email list - We're going to show you a way to build your email list that you can use in the future to offer products and services.
• Live Events - How to use live events and book signings to sell more books.

Aaron: [00:00:15] Howdy,guys. Thanks for tuning into another episode. Christian's laughing at me. I'mjust going to keep rolling with it. Whether you're riding your bike or in yourcar or wherever else, thanks for listening to this podcast. Today is going tobe awesome. If you are an aspiring author or maybe self-publisher, this episodeis for you. We're talking about how book authors can use Facebook advertising.A few things we're going to cover are how to sell your books, how to grow youremail list, and promote live events or book signings all within Facebookadvertising and hopefully for a decent price.

Christian: [00:00:51] Hopefully.I mean, you've got to admit that Facebook is just a powerhouse when it comes toadvertising, and it's just probably one of the greatest advertising platformsout there.

Aaron: [00:01:04] It'svery undervalued. I will say this- Preface this with saying that a lot ofpeople think that since Facebook is cheap that you can- like a cheaperalternative that you can just spend a hundred dollars and be successful, andI'll just preface that with saying that probably not going to happen that way.But we're going to talk about some strategies that maybe you can get some greatresults with spending a little with very little money to promote your book. Sothe first thing is to sell your book. You know, you have this book. You want toget it to as many people as possible, and your resources or probably whatyou've been doing is reaching out to a bunch of friends, family, maybe you gavesome free copies to people to get to kind of read about it, but you just arehaving trouble selling the book. One thing that you could do with Facebook isoffer- giving away the book for free. So it sounds crazy to sell your book onFacebook and then give it away for free, but one strategy a lot of people useis to give away the book for free. Have them pay for the shipping and justgetting it into as many people's hands as possible, and then just doing like anupsell afterwards. So without going crazy in-depth with this, you could sellthe book, give it away or give it away for free and offer the free shipping,but as soon as they purchase that, try to sell them on something else. So maybethat complements the book or maybe they order two books. So A, it's a businessbook or it's something that's going to benefit her friend, get another book forhalf off or something, but you know that if they purchased it for that freeshipping, you have an option to send it maybe to a friend. Like if I give out abook- Actually, I did this with Christian actually. There was a Seth Godinbook, and I bought five copies of them. And it was a better deal to buy five ofthem than it was to buy just one later. So I bought five for like fifty dollarsor something, and they're normally like 40 dollars a piece when they were goingto sell. And so I got five of them. I gave one to Christian and gave one toanother friend, and then I sold the other two and made my money back. But thepoint was that Seth Godin did a great job of just getting it out to as manypeople, and then I promoted it for him because I showed it to Christian, got itin more hands. But then I talked about it on social media, and I think that'sthe big thing with your books is that if it's good and you get it into morepeople's hands, they're going to share it with other people. And you're goingto get more sales because of that as well.

Christian: [00:03:24] Right.And giving it away like you're also, in essence, building an audience rightthere which you can later use to target in the future or even create lookalikeaudiences from that initial batch of people who got it for free. And also youdon't even have to give your whole book away for free. Some people do-

Aaron: [00:03:44] Likeexcerpts. Like the first three chapters.

Christian: [00:03:47] Yeah.Maybe even half the book or something, but yeah, you can definitely getcreative by selling your book directly with Facebook ads. Now as far as- Iguess I talked about, you know, that e-mail lists and look like audiences. Iguess the other thing would be just to sort of cold target, you know, ademographic that you know that's going to like and want that book.

Aaron: [00:04:10] Right.So the biggest thing with advertising, and if you guys have listened to a fewepisodes, we'll just continue to go more in-depth with just hopefully givingyou tidbits of information about advertising, but the most important thing onadvertising other than your creative which is like your video or your imagethat you're going to try to sell with is your targeting. So figuring out who isyour audience. So if you're writing a business book, you can't just targetbusiness owners and entrepreneurs. Who is your book really going to affect orreally going to work with? And niche down to that, or so I've been told latelythat it's wrong to say niche. It's niche. Niche.

Christian: [00:04:46] Niche.

Aaron: [00:04:47] Niche.I say that because Christian says it wrong, and so now I've been saying it'sniche. Niche down. But yeah, targeting audiences. You can do things like off ofinterest, and you have that cold audience as well. So you want to start as warmof an audience as you can, creating a lookalike audience on there. But if youcan, go to a cold audience and just put this in front of them. If you have anentertaining book or I mean a video to kind of engage them, that will be agreat first step, and then you could retarget them based off of the percentagethat they watched the video. That may be or may not be a more complex strategy,but it is very possible to do that.

Christian: [00:05:26] Yeah,and technically if we backtrack here, this first strategy that we gave you isto sort of just sell your book directly to your customers using Facebook ads.Another great way that book authors can use Facebook advertising is to grow ane-mail list, and if you're a book author, I mean, you probably need to get onsome other avenues as far as, you know, maybe some webinars or maybe creatingsome other content or blog posts or even, I don't know. Maybe some plugins orsomething. So definitely have different avenues of revenue, and creating ads togrow your email list is a great way to eventually, you know, sell them, youknow, your book. So right away when you're doing Facebook advertising to growyour email list, that's just a great way to build the initial audience evenbefore you even have a book. You know, even before you're an actual author.

Aaron: [00:06:24] Right.I was thinking if you used ads to grow your e-mail list, you could be thinkingabout prepping people to say like hey, this is the book that's coming out. Youknow, get on this waitlist. You know, a certain percentage of people are goingto do that, but you may be able to give something that kind of works along withthe book. So maybe like a checklist or like people love doing this quizzes thatare- What are they called? The Myers Briggs or something. So those types ofquizzes. We're still going on that business book avenue, but like a Myers Briggquiz to kind of figure out like hey, maybe what kind of entrepreneur are you?What kind of business owner are you? And you know, they answer that quiz, andyou give them the answer, you get their e-mail address, and then you can targetthem later with a book that kind of goes along with that. So you build it there,and if you don't get them, say for example, you did get a good chunk of e-mailsfrom doing a quiz or offering people to be notified beforehand. You can createaudiences from your e-mail list and use that as another avenue of warmaudiences to generate more leads or generate more business from people who arejust like the ones who want to purchase your book the first time.

Christian: [00:07:29] Andthis is different from- Because I mean, technically the first option that wetalked about which is sell books directly, that's more of- Because obviously,Facebook has different types of ads that you can pick and choose from. Thatfirst one that we talked about is more of maybe clicks to the website, clicksto a landing page. This collecting email addresses is more of lead generationad.

Aaron: [00:07:53] Right.It's actually technically called like conversion. So you could do lead ads onFacebook was what Christian was talking about, and it's a landing page onFacebook and send them there. Or you could send them to a website with theintent of like a conversion, and that's like to collect those e-mail addresses.So yeah, they are two different objectives. So that is important when you'resetting that up is to figure out what the end goal is there. If you just wantmore people to get to your website to make that decision or if you want them toconvert. So one other thing is when you really have a successful book launch oras you're really trying to get it out to people is having a live event or doinglike a book signing. Book signings are great if you know you have friends andfamily, but you can promote your event on Facebook and say look, I'm offeringthese books for a great deal, great price here but I'm also going to sign it.So if they got say, for example, like Christian said, they got the first halfof the book. They loved it. Now they're going to, you know- Maybe they got thefull book, and they want to go meet you afterwards and get the book signed. Iknow that I did that. I was on a- What was it? A kind of wait list, and like Ithink it was in April. The book didn't come out until September, and I met themat like a Barnes and Noble. We're not saying that you had to be at Barnes andNoble. It just happened for this one, but it was like a huge wait. And then atBarnes and Noble, I got the book, and then I hadn't even read it yet. But I gotthe author to sign it which, you know, it's free. It doesn't take that muchtime, and it just puts in that extra effort that people really like to havebecause I would love to have all my books, you know, signed.

Christian: [00:09:27] Exactly.Now if you're doing a live event, would you go with an event on Facebook orwould you try to do some Eventbrite or use some other third party? Is there adifference?

Aaron: [00:09:41] Right.So I think the best route to go is to create the event on Facebook but thenlink it to an Eventbrite because Eventbrite does have the ability to trackwhether or not somebody's been there. And with Facebook in the last month or soyou actually can target people. So for example, you targeted people who areinterested in going to your event. They said they were interested. You couldrun an ad specifically to them saying like hey, I know you're interested in theevent. Like you know, switch the interest over to going, and then you could runa different ad for people who said that they're going saying like hey, we can'twait to see you. Just as though- Like with most people who filed events, youcan kind of relate. It's like if you put interested, it's a maybe, but probablyyou're not going to go. If you put going, you're more like a maybe, and it'slike a 60 percent chance you actually are going to go. So running those lastinitial ads to say like hey, you know, if you switch that from interest togoing, we're going to incentivize you by saying like hey, you'll get a bookand, you know, you'll get something else like an audio book or whatever.

Christian: [00:10:42] Freee-book.

Aaron: [00:10:42] Yeah,free ebook or something just incentivize them to go. So I would do a Facebookevent, and then they purchase the tickets or like they purchased the voucher.Like even though it's free, they get something off of Eventbrite.

Christian: [00:10:57] Gotcha.

Aaron: [00:10:57] SoI mean, there's a lot that you can do with a book or selling your book, gettingyour book in front of a lot of people. It doesn't cost a bunch of money, but Ithink the big investment here is to figure out your audience, create a video,at least at the very least create a really good image of you and the book, andput that in front of the right people, and then go after these strategies thatwe talked about here which is to give part of the book away for free. Maybe thewhole book away for free. At least try to grow your email list beforehand. Ifnot, at least whenever they're making the purchase. Collect that e-mailaddress, and then always follow up with a live event, or, you know, if you'rereally doing well, like creating it as an e-book or like you're listening now.Audio book is becoming really, really popular. That would be- You'd be goingabove and beyond if you had an audio book and could sell the audio book. Giveaway the regular book, and then sell the audio book. That would be a greatstrategy. So anything else, Christian? Got any-

Christian: [00:12:00] Idon't have anything else.

Aaron: [00:12:01] Sohe hasn't sold- He hasn't started authoring any books yet, and I haven'teither. So maybe when we write a book, we'll have some more insight forourselves too.

Christian: [00:12:10] Yeah,sometime in the future.

Aaron: [00:12:12] Allright. So besides going to check out our book in the future and giving us youre-mail address so we can market our books to you later on Facebook, weappreciate that for you to just put those e-mails just like in the commentssomewhere, but make sure you go and subscribe to our podcast. We talk aboutlocal businesses specifically and just helping them try to grow, and if you'veliked this podcast, listened to three or four episodes, please leave us areview. We'd love to have some more reviews. We have one. Shout out to the oneperson. We don't know who you are. Overtime. He said it was a great podcast. Sowe appreciate him and get special shout out, but go leave us a comment. You'llbe on there, get some exposure because there's only one of them right now. Sowe'd love some more, and make sure you share this with a friend. This doesn'thave to be an actual author. This could be somebody who wants to self publishand just trying to get their book out there to as many hands as possible.

Christian: [00:13:05] Yeah.That was good. That was great.

Aaron: [00:13:07] Allright. We'll see you guys next week, or you'll listen to us next week.

Christian: [00:13:10] Yeah.Listen.

Narrator: [00:13:14] TheMarketing Natives podcast is a production of BitBranding.