Tim Castleman

3 Biggest Mistakes Most People Make Poor niche research / topic selection Self published look and feel Lack of reviews

Playing The Numbers Main Category: ABR of 20k or below Niche: ABR of 50k or below When In Doubt: Use the smaller number

How I Do My Books First book is to get the process down Second book is to get results Future books are to scale and grow within the category

Keyword Research Learn Your ABCs What Else Is Selling Well In Your Category

What I Look For In A Good Cover Singular Image To Focus On Proper Title Interesting Tag Line

Let’s Look At A Couple Of Examples

Things To Consider Try not to look self published What do other books in your same category look like How can you stand out from them?

Designing Your Book Covers Fiverr Go On Write 99 Designs

This Is Who We Use

Secondary Source

Go On Write

99 Designs

Reviews Once your book is live publish it at 99 cents Try to get at least 5 to 10 good reviews prior to your promotional days

Software For Reviews

Results Of The Software

Get Reviews Post that you need reviews on your Facebook wall or some close friends and family

Getting More Reviews Join our Author’s Advantage Group Give Gift Cards To Potential Reviewers -Amazon Verified Purchase -Credit as a sale of your book

Promotional Strategies Here’s A Run Down Of What I’ve Done In The Past Trying To Sell My Book Software Services

We bought the 2500 Download Package Sold 5 times the number of books in a single day then we did all month Got Best Seller Status In The Main Category Increase our Amazon Best Seller Ranking

Best Seller Status

Here’s How Everything Worked 3. Software: We got a couple of hundred downloads, we got very few sales afterwards 2. Services: They sent us close to 3,000 downloads, made a decent amount of sales 1. Pump The Brakes: We got the most downloads and sales during and after the promotion

All Of That – Lead Me To Here The Pump The Brakes Promotional Strategy This Is How We Leverage Free Traffic Into Paid Buyers

Before We Begin

Here’s Who You Need To Hire

This Guy Too

Setup A Promotional Create a Gmail account specifically for promoting your books and give your outsourcer access to it

Original Promotion Plan Use 4 of our free days to promote the book prior to it being for sale the week of Thanksgiving Free Days: Friday through Monday Sale Days: Tuesday til forever

Prior To Our Promotion Reduced price to 99 cents to get buyers / reviews Gave out 10 gift cards out for people to review the book in our Authors Advantage Group

The First 24 Hours

48 Hours In

Time For A Change At 11:30am, after getting over 2600 downloads, we decided to shut off the free promotion and make the book for sale for $2.99 for the rest of the day

I Made A Mistake I woke up Sunday morning … with no new sales What I should have done was put the book back to Free on Sunday to encourage more downloads and eventually more sales. As a result, I was forced to “waste” Sunday with no sales or downloads and regroup on Monday

Here’s What We Did We made the book free again on Monday bringing in another few thousand downloads – before switching it back to paid

Tuesday

Pump The Brakes Promotions Use Free Traffic to bring you interested people Switch from free to paid listing daily (usually in the afternoon / evening time) Switch back to a free download the following day

PTB Part 2 Because people buy the book it rises up in Amazon’s Best Seller Ranking … causing more people to buy. When traffic slows, make it free again The closer to the holiday the more you charge for the book (Valentines Day Example)

One More Thing We raised the price to $3.99 before making it paid again on Tuesday just to see what would happen and how it would affect sales

Here Is The Complete Breakdown

Pump The Brakes Quick Guide 1.Get 5 to 10 reviews prior to using this strategy 2.Plan on using at least 3 days to promote 3.Leave your book free the first 24 hours so that you can judge the # of downloads 4.Pump the brakes for half days until you run out of days or decide to make it paid

What To Watch For If you do not get at least 100 downloads during your first full free day, you have a problem and should abort the promotion or only commit to one PTB day to see what sales are like If sales slow, make the book free again to drive more traffic to it or abandon the promotion completely

Things To Consider 1.Niche/Category Selection 2.Time Of Year 3.Ability to Piggyback Off Other Events 4.Other (Cover, Reviews, Etc.)

Lets Talk About Refunds Suspected Causes Free Traffic “Tricked” Into Buying Freebie Seekers Legitimate Refunders

List Building After downloads, guess how many people signed up for our list?

24 People

This Didn’t Help

How To Build A List Provide An Ethical Bribe or Missing Link In Exchange For Their List

A Quick Change To Our Description

What Should You Do With The List? them weekly if you have enough “similar” books for sales them asking for reviews (run a contest) them when you have a new release

Lets Talk About Pricing $.99 to get initial sales and reviews $2.99 is the minimum price Raise your price $1 per PTB promotion until you have a noticeable drop in sales, then revert back to the lower price

How We Got 10x More Downloads Pick a non traditional day to do a free giveaway (like Monday). When we have done this, we have had 10 times more downloads that weekend promotions

How To Predict The Future Amazon’s Time Machine

How To Make Sure Similar Customers See Your Book Put Other Authors Books At The Back Of Your Book – That Way When People Look At Their Book, They’ll See Yours Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

A Simple Way To Make More Sales Put a resources page at the end of your book with all of your other similar books for sale. Also list those books in your Amazon book description as well

Promotional Plan If you’re brand new and have ZERO books on the market Get your first two books created and run a PTB promotion on each of them individually

Promotional Calendar

What If You Have 5+ Books Combine some of the books in bundles until you have 8 listings Run a PTB each week for a different book along with the bundles Get more books created

What If You Have 10+ Books Run a PTB each week for a different book in a 12 week cycle so that you can promote each book once every 90 days and use your free promotion days to the max

Spreading Out Your Free Days Your First PTB: 3 Days If you’re happy with the results keep going If you’re not happy, adjust what we talked about tonight and use your remaining two free days for another PTB promotion

This Is Just The Beginning I’ve Setup A Facebook Group For Us To Share What’s Working (and not working) for us Promotion Wise Join It:

How About Some Free Stuff? Kindle Case Studies I personally review their … Covers Book Descriptions Authors Pages and more ….

Need A Little More Help? If you’re willing to write me a testimonial about tonight’s training, I’ll be more than happy to get on a Skype call and personally help you for 15 minutes.

Questions?