You’ve got your ebook up at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the other major online bookstores, and maybe you’ve even had a few people review it (thanks Mom and crit group!), but you’re still waiting for the sales to start rolling in en masse.
There are lots of ways to promote your ebook without spending money (many mentioned in the Kindle Ebook Publishing Primer), but if you have some spare coins lying around and want to kick start sales, it may be worth investing a few dollars in advertising.
Note: Know your target audience and avoid throwing money at sites that aren’t full of ebook reading folks. You may also want to think twice about paying for sponsorship on a site that doesn’t have a large audience (an exception may be a niche site with a very targeted audience–i.e. science fiction fans–that precisely matches your ebook’s target audience).
Let’s look at a few options:
This site has a large readership (both via their web page and via their email newsletter) full of just the people you want to target: ebook buyers. They have a number of advertising packages and some great success stories you can check out. Prices range from $60 to $250.
Sponsorship slots are booked months in advance, so get in line early.
This large forum is dedicated to the Kindle (but I guess the name gave that away) and has a lot of e-reading folks visiting every day. For $35, you can purchase an ebook-of-the-day spot at the top of every page. Scroll to the bottom of any page to buy a spot via Paypal.
As with Kindle Nation, the advertising slots are booked months in advance.
This blog, dedicated to all things iPad, offers monthly advertising at $75-$125 for buttons or banners. It gets fewer visitors than the Kindle sites, and tends to cover the technology more than the ebook reading aspect, but you may give it a try if you’re looking for more than one-day exposure.
Goodreads has become a popular destination for readers of all kinds (lots with e-readers and lots not). You can purchase sponsored ads on a pay-per-click model, and you can target your ads to show to a specific audience (i.e. those who enjoy science fiction and fantasy or romance).
At 50 cents a click, these ads may not be worth considering if you’re selling your ebook for .99 to 2.99 (assume a lot more people will click than will actually buy), but it could make sense for someone with a series. Perhaps you lose money selling that first book, but if you’ve made a fan who will go on to purchase all five of your ebooks, then it could be another story.
If it sounds like something you’d like to try, there’s a blog post from Publishing Perspectives you might want to check out: Digital Case Study: Can Goodreads Ads Help Unknown Authors Find an Audience?
If you ultimately decide their advertising program isn’t for you, you may still want to consider their free authors’ program.
These are a few of the biggies in the e-reader world. If you would like to recommend other sites, or let us know what’s worked for you, please leave a comment.
Thanks for the nice mention, and for your comment on the tip post, Lindsay!
No problem. Thanks for stopping by!
great post, thanks for sharing
I get more solid tips out of Lindsay’s posts than I do anywhere else. No matter how much I roam the web, I end up right back here. The Kindle Primer is what got me going in the first place. Gold, I tells ya. This stuff is gold.
Thanks for the kind comments, Mark!
And thank YOU for steering me to Kindle Nation. Their sponsorship packages are just what I’ve been looking for. I was up until dawn this morning looking those suckers over. You rock.
Let us know how it works for you, Mark! I’m planning to buy a couple myself.
Here’s a good link too: http://indiekindle.blogspot.com/2010/12/ovr-two-thirds-of-our-kindle-nation.html
The owner of Kindle Nation posted a spreadsheet, showing each book (including genre) and how much the sponsorship ended up affecting the sales ranking.
Good luck!
Impressive. It’s an invaluable site, as is this one. Glad I found you both. It’s kind of disorienting to think that around Halloween, I was plugging print books only. It almost seems quaint. Really enjoying the flexibility of the Kindle format.