Holiday Book Sales, Part II: Finding Your Readers

By BookBaby author Steven Spatz In part two of our four-part series highlighting effective strategies to score holiday book sales, we focus on getting your book distributed and reaching readers. “ How To Get Holiday Book Sales: Part I ” launched our 12-step series for authors looking to market their titles for the holidays and included steps 1–3 dealing with timelines, budgets, and getting out in your community. Now let’s focus on where and how your potential readers can find and buy your books. Step 4: Be conspicuous To sell books, you need to be found. That means you need to maximize the chances that readers can discover your books. That extends to the type of products you offer and your distribution plan. I’ve been involved with marketing different kinds of products for years before helping launch BookBaby. We marketers have a favorite saying: Make it easy for customers to buy. For authors, that includes the formats of your books. It’s vitally important that you offer both eBooks and printed books. With the invention of the Kindle, iPad, and eBooks, readers suddenly had a new way to consume books. Our fascination with new and trendy electronics caused some so-called experts to make wild predictions, but the early claims that print was dead were vastly overstated. As digital books have been adapted around the globe, reading preferences have now been established, and we have a clearer view of the new publishing landscape. Approximately 25 percent of readers ONLY read eBooks. That figure is probably lower in the US but much higher in emerging economies that rely heavily on smart phones as the dominant tech. About 40 percent of readers ONLY read printed books. Give them the tactile feel of ink and paper! That leaves 35 percent of the reading public who toggle between both formats, depending on price and availability. Independent authors — especially those who are new and relatively unknown — cannot afford to limit their potential audience. If you only have eBooks, make print. If you only have print, make an eBook. This advice works for sales during every season of the year. The other half of being found is about your book distribution plan. We recently updated a post of mine that describes a potentially costly mistake many self-published authors make: They ONLY sell books through Amazon. To mix our holiday metaphors, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Mind you, Amazon is a very BIG basket. It’s the biggest and most important online bookstore in the industry, with approximately 67 percent of the eBook and printed book market share in the United States. It’s a given that you must have your eBook and printed books in all the Amazon stores around the world. But there are many other baskets — stores where millions of eBooks and printed books are sold in the US each year, including Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, and dozens more. Here are a few of the places where your eBooks...

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