The beauty of the Amazon Adwords is everybody who's searching on Amazon Books is a book buyer. You don't have to convince them to buy a book. You only have to convince them to buy YOUR book.
This is a bonus episode of my miniseries on how to PLAN, WRITE, EDIT, and PUBLISH your book. This episode is how to MARKET your book.
My co-host for the series is Greg Larson. Greg has written and edited more than 80 books.
In Part 1 we reviewed how to PLAN your book.
In Part 2 we reviewed how to WRITE your book.
In Part 3 we reviewed how to EDIT your book.
In Part 4 we reviewed how to PUBLISH your book.
Today Greg and I and special guest Mark Paul review how to MARKET your book.
Mark’s self-published book The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told: A True Tale of Three Gamblers, The Kentucky Derby, and the Mexican Cartel, has sold more than 40,000 copies which puts it in the 99.99th percentile of books sold. The Los Angeles Times says, “It's light, it moves quickly, it's fun.”
Greg’s book, Clubbie: A Minor League Baseball Memoir, has sold more than 4,000 copies which puts it in the 98th percentile of books sold. The Los Angeles Daily News says, “If Clubbie isn't the best piece of baseball literature since Ball Four, it's the leader in the clubhouse.”
My book, Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball: Memoir of a Namibian Odyssey, has sold more than 400 copies which puts it in the 60th percentile of books sold. The New York Daily News says, “I was hooked from the start. A terrific read of the can't-put-it-down variety!”
In this episode I first interview Mark and we talk best book marketing practices and what he learned moving 40,000 books. Then I take the best marketing advice from a previous interview I did with Mark and present that advice. Finally, I take the best marketing excerpts from Greg from our first conversation and present those. Enjoy!
TRANSCRIPT
Ben Guest:
Hi everyone. This is Ben Guest, and I've just finished a four part mini series with Greg Larson on how to plan, write, edit, and publish your book. So this is a bonus or companion episode on an important part of publishing your book which is, after you publish it, you have to market it. What good is a book that no one reads, right?
So this is a special episode where I've taken three different interviews and taken the best parts of those interviews about marketing and combined them. The first is a brand new interview with the author, Mark Paul, who I've had on previously. Mark self-published his book called The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told, and at this date, he's sold more than 40000 copies, which is amazing. If you sell more than 4000 copies, you're in the top 2% of books sold in one calendar year, to sell 40000 is in the 99.9999 percentile.
It's an astounding number of books, especially self-publishing, the other distribution and marketing muscle of a traditional publishing house. So Mark knows his stuff. In the first interview, which leads off this episode with Mark, we talk two things. We talk genre choice at the beginning, before you even start planning your book, thinking about genre choice and using a great tool called Publisher Rocket, which is available on kindlepreneur.com.
I'll link to that in the show notes. And then we talk about Amazon Ads and kind of the back end after you've published, how to market your book. After that is the first interview I did with Mark several months ago, and that was Episode 34. I've taken the best parts of that episode that apply just to marketing and chopped that up and included that. And then the third part of the episode is the very first interview I did with Greg Larson also several months ago, and I've taken the best parts of that interview that applies solely to marketing and chopped that up.
So you're getting a brand new interview with Mark Paul, the excerpts of the best bits of marketing advice from Mark Paul from a previous interview and the best marketing advice from Greg Larson from a previous interview. So this should be a helpful introduction to book marketing. If you enjoy this episode, please recommend it to others. Please like the podcast on the platform of your choice and subscribe to my weekly newsletter at benbo.substack.com, B-E-N-B-O, .substack.com. Benbo is my family nickname. So, benbo.substack.com. I put all of this content out here for free. So if you enjoy it and you find useful advice or information in it, please take a minute to like and subscribe. Thank you and enjoy the episode.
Ben Guest:
Mark, thank you so much for coming on.
Mark Paul:
Glad to be here again.
Ben Guest:
You are the man when it comes to moving books, you've sold over 40,000 books of your self-published fantastic book, The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told.
Mark Paul:
Thank you. I love mark getting my book. I never stop. If you're around me, you're going to hear about my damn book, I guarantee it.
Ben Guest:
So somebody comes to you, they have an idea, they want to write a book. How would you advise them to think about the process of marketing before they even start writing their book?
Mark Paul:
The number one thing I learned that I didn't know until after published my book and started marketing my book is, unfortunately, you're not going to sell many books unless you're in a genre that people buy a lot of books. You can sell a lot of books with an average book in a high demand genre, as opposed to having a magnificent book in genre that nobody cares about, nobody buys books.
Mark Paul:
But I mentioned to you that I wrote a book that in its premise is about a female, a filly trying to win the Kentucky Derby against the male colts, something that had only occurred twice in 150 years. And that's a great story, but there's not a lot of people out there looking to buy books in the horse racing genre. So I would've really probably not sold a lot of books, but I got lucky because my book had a big component to it, is that the guys that bet on this filly to win the Kentucky Derby made the bet at a little rinky-dinky racetrack in Tijuana, that they found out late was owned by the Mexican cartel.
Mark Paul:
So now they were faced with this dilemma, which kind of a cool thing where could a filly, a female beat the colts in the Derby. And of course now you've got, women are interested, you've got women engaged, sports fans, horse racing people, but now I have a genre of true crime and I'd probably have sold 10 books in true crime genre for every book I sold on horse racing, even though you could say my book is about ...
Ben Guest:
And you've mentioned that either on the first episode we did or off air, that when your book broke into the top 10 on Amazon of true crime, then I think you saw a bump in sales. Is that correct?
Mark Paul:
Absolutely. One thing I learned is you have to always be afraid. I lived in fear of falling into the well, and once you get into the Amazon algorithm well of not selling books and not being something that they think their audience wants, I don't know how you ever crawl back out of the well. One thing that I did is I really studied Amazon ad words and I realized quickly in marketing that Amazon is magnificent in one way.
Mark Paul:
And that normally when you run an ad, if you were going to run a Google ad words about your book, the problem is, is that most people, 99% of the people that are seeing it, aren't there to buy a book. So, you're up against it and you're wasting your money. The beauty of the Amazon ad words for books is everybody who's searching on Amazon books for a book is a book buyer.
Mark Paul:
So you don't have to convince them to buy a book. You only have to convince them to buy your book. So you already, you've got a real buyer on your hands there. So now you need to get into that algorithm and its success to get success. One thing that I did, I was not out afraid, especially in the beginning to spend money on buying ad words and having a budget for my book.
Mark Paul:
And they always tell you, well, if you're on Amazon basically, and you're self-published, you can get about 70% of every dollar of sales. So they say as long as you're spending money and you're not spending more than 70 cents per dollar received, you're at least breaking even, which was kind of my immediate goal. But I actually thought about it after a while. I was saying, well, I'm selling books, but I'm not making any money because I'm spending 70 cents every book that I sell.
Mark Paul:
But then I realized something, this might seem self evident, but it wasn't, it dawned in me, I said, well, hold on, I'm getting 70 cents for every dollar I spend, but that's only for my Kindle books, for my eBooks, but for every ebook I was selling, now I was shocked at this, for every ebook book that I sold I'd sold two paperbacks, and I wasn't paying anything for my paperback.
Mark Paul:
So although I was spending all this money to sell my eBooks, I wasn't realizing that I was selling twice as many of this on my paperback books. So don't be afraid to spend money on your ad words, especially out of the gate, and especially, obviously find a category or two that you can dominate. Find a little niche category that you can be the number one author in. And that'll give you that cool little Amazon orange banner, that you're a number one author and when you die on your gravestone, you can write that I was a number one author. It might have been in the category where I was joke is, gay dinosaurs. It's a very small category, but by God, I'm number one.
Ben Guest:
Here lies John Smith, beloved father, son, and best selling author in.
Mark Paul:
They can never take it away from you.
Ben Guest:
They could immediately leave off the category. Love it. So let's talk Amazon ads. Can you kind of break down for the listener how Amazon on ads work? I think there's a bidding process.
Mark Paul:
Yeah, the best thing that I found, and I don't get any money for this, or what is it? Rocket-
Ben Guest:
To Rocket ...
Mark Paul:
Fantastic. They're really cheap. It's $35 a year or something to join. And when you go on Publisher Rocket, you finally understand there's all of these categories. Well, first of all, when you go on Amazon, they tell you, you get three categories, but you really don't. You really get 10 categories. All you have to do is email them and tell them the 10 categories you want your book in. So, that's really important. So if you go and you study all these categories and you know similar books to yours, what categories they're in, then I would try to pick five of them that are big selling categories, like true crime.
Mark Paul:
And then I would try to pick a few of those that are really minuscule little small genres that perhaps you can be number one or at least top three in for that. And one thing about that website is they'll actually tell you all of the keywords that those books are using in their ads. So you need to know all the ad words. And then what I did too, I created these lists and listenings of any book that was like my book, any categories, words that were like my book.
Mark Paul:
And also then I would actually advertise all the competing books and all the competing authors. And I would bid on all of those keywords as well. The best course racing book ever written was Laura Hillenbrand, Sea Biscuit. And so, I would bid on Laura Hillenbrand, her name. I would bid on Sea Biscuit and I would want anybody who's looking for Sea Biscuit, I would hopefully have my I book come up before Sea Biscuit because I was paying good money for it, because I wanted to dominate the horse raising genre.
Ben Guest:
And that advice is so key, and that's exactly the advice that you gave me before I published my book and I followed it to a T. So you identify some categories that are big categories and then you identify a couple of categories that are super small and niche. Just to give the listener an example, a funny example. So I downloaded on my phone the other day, Twitter and Facebook. So I go to the Apple app store and I search for Facebook. And the first thing that comes up is Facebook, right?
Ben Guest:
So I download it. Then I search for Twitter. The first thing that comes up is Facebook, meaning Facebook has bid well in that ad space, right? So Twitter comes up second under their own search. So it's the same thing, whatever book you're writing, you want to find, my friend, Greg Larson calls it, your pilot author.
Ben Guest:
Somebody that the author in the book is comparable to yours, and then you can see like Mark is saying, on Amazon ads, you can say, Stephen King, when people search for Stephen King Misery, my book comes up first. Now something like that, a huge book, a huge author, you're going to bid really high. But then I identify more niche authors in niche books because again, to your point, someone going on the Amazon bookstore is going to leave with a book, it's going to be someone else's book or it's going to be your book.
Mark Paul:
Exactly. And you wouldn't want to bid on Stephen King because it'd be too expensive. And you don't want bid on things that aren't related to your book because people aren't going to buy your book. So you have to make sure that if you wrote a book on basketball coaching, I'd be bidding on Phil Jackson and Showtime and Coach K and all that stuff. That's what I'd be bidding on, not Stephen.
Ben Guest:
100% and so jet us to break this down for the listener. So I wrote a book about the power of meditation and the impact that it had on coaching basketball. Obviously Phil Jackson is a number one for that. And so when I did my Amazon categories, which Mark mentioned, not category, sorry, keywords, when I did my Amazon keywords for my book, one of the keywords I put in was Phil Jackson and basketball.
Ben Guest:
And then Phil Jackson has several books and I included the titles of all his books. So that means when it's a keyword, that means when someone searches for that keyword, your book is going to show up in that search. Now that's totally free. Then separate the Amazon ads that you bid on, I would bid on Phil Jackson, I would bid on More Than A Game, which is the title of one of his books, Sacred Hoops, another title, things like that.
Ben Guest:
So there's keywords, which are free, there are categories which we've talked about. So again, my book would fall under basketball, coaching, sports, things like that, memoir, travel writing. Those are free when you register your book and upload your manuscript to Amazon, and then you pay for the Amazon ads, but it's the same principle. The same principle applies across all these things.
Mark Paul:
So I would say that was the number one thing that I did was spend money. And then what's great is that if you start doing well, then as you have more revenue and more sale, you can spend more money. And as you spend more money, you climb up these charts. And so I'm sorry, I just, it's a vicious capitalistic system, but if you can either accept it or fail, it's your two choices.
Ben Guest:
Yes. And so we've talked about the back-back end, right after you've published your book, after you've done all of that work, but you mentioned at the top, something you should think about even before you begin writing, even before you begin outlining, which is genre choice. And again, Publisher Rocket is very helpful in that. Mark, can you talk about genre choice? And if you were advising someone who wants to write a book, what they should think about when it comes to genre choice?
Mark Paul:
Well, you'll quickly realize that there's, I don't know me, maybe 15 genres that are big sellers and that's a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that if you can get into those genres, you could sell a hell of a lot of books. The bad thing is that the bigger the genre is, the better selling it is, now you've got to compete with all of the romance novels and all the things that are selling, but you need to be aware of it up front and realize that if you're writing a book that's in a genre that people don't sell books in, nobody is searching for your book and you could have a magnificent book.
Mark Paul:
And I still would tell you to write it if it's a story that you want to tell in your heart, it's important to you and you write a great book, that's a goal unto itself, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, but then don't be disappointed when it doesn't sell, because nobody in the history of mankind has ever sold a lot of books in that genre.
Mark Paul:
But the good news is that these genres are diced up in a lot of different areas. I mentioned true crime. I learned right away, I could not ... Even now, actually one thing nobody really talks about is paperback versus ebook sales. And that's an interesting thing as I said a moment ago that I sold twice as many paperbacks, I sold two paperbacks for every ebook that I sold, which surprised me, but that's kind of a standard thing in the industry.
Mark Paul:
But I also learned that I cannot compete, I could not compete as a self published author in hard copy crime segments because I was just dealing with all of the true crime books in paperback that are sold at the airports, that are sold at Barnes And Noble, that are sold by the big publishers.
Mark Paul:
I didn't have that behind me. And there's an area that I couldn't compete in, but I could sure as hell compete in the ebook categories of that. So even now I have bookmarked on my computer and my book has been out now for almost two and a half years, I've bookmarked horse racing, Kindle horse racing books, best sellers.
Mark Paul:
And I'll click on a couple times a week and see how my book's doing. I don't even bother to click on any true crime category for hard copy or for paperback, because I know that I'm not going to do well in that area. Because I don't have the infrastructure, the physical distribution channel that the big publishers have. You're not going to compete there, doesn't mean you're not going to sell paperback, I'm not telling you. I would absolutely tell you to do it, ebook and definitely a paperback.
Mark Paul:
And you can do a hard cover if you want to or not. It's not that important, but I definitely would tell you to do a paperback because you'll sell more paperbacks than you do eBooks, but just basically market your ebook because that's the only area that you can really be competitive. And then realize too, when you check your sales, you can check your sales specifically, oh, how am I doing in best selling basketball books in eBooks and how am I doing in best selling basketball print books?
Mark Paul:
And I guarantee you, then you're probably getting your ass kicked in paperback basketball books because you're not in the airports, you don't have that distribution, but you actually can compete in the ebook category.
Ben Guest:
Mistake I made was, so Amazon now offers paperback, hard cover and I published in all three at the same time, but the sales report is broken up into ebook and print, meaning combination, paperback and hard cover. So especially the first couple of weeks say coaching basketball, I was number one in ebook and then I was number five in paperback and number 12 in hard cover.
Ben Guest:
So my hard cover and paperback sales cannibalized each other. So one way I encourage authors to think about publishing, one of the few things that the traditional model has correct, I think is you publish your hard cover first, hard cover and ebook together, then paperback later because on Amazon, your paperback and hard cover sales are going to cannibalize each other. Mark, last thing for you-
Mark Paul:
I wouldn't agree. I always-
Ben Guest:
No, go ahead.
Mark Paul:
When you have people with differing opinions, I wouldn't do that because if I'm taking the time out of the gate to sell books, you are always going to sell more books early than you are late. My wife has to put up with me all the time now. I will come in and I will say to her, "How are you doing?" And she'll say, "How are you doing?" And I go, "Oh, I'm really depressed. My book isn't selling well anymore."
Mark Paul:
And it's like, what do I expect? I expect two and a half years later, I'm going to sell just like I did in day one. You think, well maybe you should, you have a best selling, you have a lot of great reader comments, I have over 1700 reviews, why wouldn't I sell more books now? And I think the reason is, is that people that are going to buy basketball books, you've saturated after a few months. People that are going to read books about the cartel like my book, horse racing like my book, sports like my book, after a while you run through your core audience.
Mark Paul:
But if you're going to launch early because for every paperback, for every ebook you're going to sell, you're going to sell more paperback. So I'm not sure. I would probably do them both at the same time. Points well taken.
Ben Guest:
No, I always love disagreement because then there's learning there. So my take on this is, so right now Amazon's always changing a little bit, with eBooks, you take home 70% of the sales and with paperback and hardcover, you take home 60%. So for example, my paperback is priced at 7.99. My hard cover at, I think 14.99. So obviously you make more money on the hard cover.
Ben Guest:
So my thinking, but Mark, tell me if you disagree or you have a different approach or you would advise someone differently is, next time publish ebook and hard cover because I'm going to generate more profit from the hard cover and more sales on launch week and launch month, publication week and publication month. Therefore, if people don't have the option for paperback, whether they're going to take home 70% of ebook sales or 60% of the more expensive hard cover.
Mark Paul:
It would depend on how expensive your hard cover because my ebook was 7.99, my paperback was 14.99 and my hard cover was 24.99, you're just not going to sell a lot of stuff at 24.99. So I'm not sure I would agree with that.
Ben Guest:
That makes perfect sense. You'd have to weigh sort of how many sales are you losing by not having to paperback because like you, the vast majority of my sales have been paperback. Go ahead.
Mark Paul:
Stay at the top with that algorithm, you have to fight and kick and you've at least got to get into that bloodstream somehow, at least. Again, in your little genre and your little niche, you have to be at the top of that or you just, you're not going to get the rankings you want.
Ben Guest:
And we've talked about this and you mentioned this on the first episode we did, one of the best ways to stay on top of the algorithm, and this isn't something you or I have done, is to have a series. If you're dropping a new book every three months or six months of, the virtuous cycle of that, virtuous circle of that is your third book is going to generate sales for your second and first, your fourth book, so on and so forth.
Mark Paul:
I couldn't agree. If you said to me, what did you learn in your five year saga of writing a book and publishing it and marketing it, and you said, Mark, you have to feed your family by being an author, what would you do? First of all, I would be scared to death because do not do this for money, by God do not do this for money.
Mark Paul:
It's difficult. I sold 40000 books and I'm telling you don't do it for money, but I've definitely, I would do a fictional series. And that gives you a lot of things you can do. And you can give away the first book in your series and get people to like your characters or you can sell it in 99 cents and you could do a lot of promotions. And I also, this is probably completely wrong, but first of all, I'm no expert, I've written one book in my entire life, one nonfiction book.
Ben Guest:
You're no expert, you've only sold more books than 99.999% of authors.
Mark Paul:
I've only done one. And I can tell you that, I think that writing a non-fiction book is so much harder than writing a fictional book because first of all, you're going to wind up spending six months or two years just doing the research to be accurate in your book, even if it's about your own life.
Mark Paul:
So that's going to take a lot of time and then you can't just make stuff up. You can't just get creative and start banging out 10 pages a day freelancing. It's got to follow very narrow script and times. But in writing fiction, if you're just creating, then I think you could bang out a lot more pages and you could do a lot books. And I definitely think the only way to make money, only way to make money as an author would be to have a series of books that you're always promoting. No question.
Ben Guest:
100% and then that back list just generates steady income. Last question, back to genre choice, and again, Publisher Rocket is a great tool to help select which genres, which categories to be in. So let's say someone's writing travel memoir about Namibia, very small interest built in audience for that. Would you recommend trying to identify a more popular genre that you could in a truthful way, in an accurate way link your book to, or would you say just don't write it?
Mark Paul:
If you told me, oh, I would tell you, well, you have to ask yourself why you're writing it. Are you writing it to sell books? Are you writing it to get it shared or you're writing it for, do you want to share it with your children and your two neighbor? I would market that book. I would never talk about Namibia. I would talk about Africa, but more importantly, I would talk about overseas travel in that I would try to somehow tie in Anthony Bourdain or some famous guy who has a well known genre. And I'd say, I want anybody who's thinking of buying an Anthony Bourdain travel book to look at my book.
Mark Paul:
I would say and I would go, how does he do it? Where do they advertise? What are their keywords? What's the imagery that they want? That's what I'd want to capture. If you get too narrow, you have no chance to sell. But travel, that's a really good comparison, Ben. And if you had a travel book about a small place, don't make it about the small place, make it about the grand experience of travel to far away, dangerous, unique places.
Ben Guest:
And for the audience, Mark has a fantastic website with an unbelievably kick ass book trailer for his book, which in the first episode we did, he strongly recommended doing a book trailer. I took that advice. So I can't encourage you strongly enough to go to Mark's website, which is markpaulauthor.com.
Ben Guest:
And he also has a couple blog entries that he's put together, talking more in depth about all these topics.
Mark Paul:
And all our podcasts, my podcasts are there, including all the ones that are done with you and you do a great job, Ben. And by the way, what a great book, I really enjoyed your book a lot.
Ben Guest:
Thank you very much. Oh, and so you mentioned your book at the top. For the audience out there, you place this incredible bet with what ended up being a cartel in Tijuana. Did you collect them?
Mark Paul:
Well, everybody thinks that my book, because it's about a filly trying to, a true story, it's a true story about a filly trying to win the Kentucky Derby, they think that in ... I will tell you part of the ending is that she actually is successful and she actually wins the Kentucky Derby, but that's not when the book ends. In many ways, that's when the book starts because now these guys are faced with, can they get into Tijuana and can they collect their prize without getting killed? And no, I'm not going to tell you that, you have to read a book.
Ben Guest:
I love it. And that was the advice off air Mark gave to me about, don't tell people the ending, right?
Mark Paul:
They've got to buy the book, so don't give away my ending.
Ben Guest:
You worked hard on it. I worked hard on mine so people can buy it. And Mark's book, we were talking off air and came up with this sort of description of it. It's sort of a combination, heist story, right? So now you've got all this money in Tijuana, how do you get it out? And it's a buddy ...
Mark Paul:
It's a buddy cop movie combined with Ocean’s 11. We've thrown a little bit of the Me Too movement in with the girls kicking ass on the boys.
Ben Guest:
And as listeners may know, I'm now out in Los Angeles and Mark lives in Beverly Hills. So Mark, I will see you Thursday for dinner. Thank you so much for coming on.
Mark Paul:
Great. Great talking.
Ben Guest:
Thank you. So, that was my interview with author Mark Paul. Now here are clips from my first interview with Mark that I did last year. Here, we talk about the importance of an author website, making a trailer for your book, like a movie trailer, but it's a book trailer. And we do a deep dive into using Amazon ad words.
Mark Paul:
It doesn't matter how well edited it is or how great the cover is, if it's a boring topic that people don't care about, you're in trouble. One of the things I've been fortunate with my book on is that my book was actually number one in 10 Amazon categories. And one thing I learned about categories of books that's hugely important, in other words, I'm number one in horse racing, almost always [inaudible 00:30:48], number one in sports gambling, number one in gambling, those are great and I'm very proudly be number one in there.
Mark Paul:
But typically, I just checked the day, I always check this, [inaudible 00:30:58], I just checked today after two years, I just checked today, I'm number two or number three in biographies of true crime, white collar crime and organized. And the funny thing is that, if I was number 10 in organized crime, I would sell five times more books than I would be number one in horse racing, number one in sports gambling and number one in gambling because not a lot of gamblers and horse racing people buy books, but people are searching for true crime books all day long.
Mark Paul:
So one of the things that we'll talk about with ad words and the like is, what really helped my book, why did I sell so many books? I sold 10000 books in the first 90 days and right now, I've sold about 35000, the reason which is not like James Patterson or something, a big author, but for self-published authors they're good, is that I'm like a country music song who crosses over onto the pop charts. And you could sell a lot more songs on the pop charts than just the country charts along.
Mark Paul:
So that's a really big thing is if you write a book, try to figure out how not to market it to just one genre, try to market it in many genres, but specifically, gosh, darn it, figure out how to sell it in categories that people are looking for, because you could have the greatest book in the world but if it's about some obscure topic, it doesn't matter. Nobody's going to find you because nobody's looking for you.
Ben Guest:
I think that's so key. And maybe we can talk about keyword selection, Amazon keyword selection in a second. And one of the benefits of all of what you just described happening is that of course, as you know the Amazon algorithm kicks in and starts recommending the book to like buyers. You said young authors, when you're talking to them and you give advice, what are some of the pieces of advice you find yourself telling multiple people?
Mark Paul:
Definitely hirer a professional, having a great cover is super important. Having a great title is important. I had a title that I liked much more than the title that I used. I like in horse racing, the Kentucky Derby's referred to as the greatest two minutes. And initially my book was titled the greatest two minutes. I love that title, but it doesn't do anything.
Mark Paul:
Now, my title's almost confrontational in face. The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told, all the gamblers go, no, it's not. I know a better story. My cousin Jimmy, well, now they know about it and they're talking about it, right? So, title's important, cover's important. And then really I would say looking at lots of different categories and you mentioned Amazon, which is the dominant place. I probably sold 92% of all my books solely on Amazon. Even though I published wide, I'm on Barnes And Noble and I'm on Apple Books.
Mark Paul:
The thing is on Amazon., you can spend money and you can market and you could affect your sale. I don't know how to affect and change my sale on Amazon or Barnes And Noble, I'm kind of at their mercy. And Amazon, you can spend money and get results. So one thing I learned at Amazon early is that when we self-publish your book, they tell you can be in three categories.
Mark Paul:
So you could be in history. You could be in American history and history of civil war. But what they don't tell you is that you actually can be in 10 categories. All you have to do is ask. And if you email them, you go to the chat rooms, just so you need to go research really carefully, all those specific categories. And one of the things that I learned right away, I would try with those 10 categories is try to pick two or three categories that you can hopefully dominate or be number one in, and then try to choose other categories that are maybe much more competitive, like true crime.
Mark Paul:
And true crime or I have to compete with Bill O'Reilly that. I have to compete with these really big, well known authors, but by being next to Bill O'Reilly I sell a lot more books. So I would say pick an easy category. To me, there's a category called track betting, well, there's probably, two books published every 10 years in track betting.
Mark Paul:
So how can I not be number one in track betting when I go to do my ad words and pay for ad words, I make sure I just outbid everybody because you know what happens, by being number one in this dinky little category I get to have that really cool number one orange banner on Amazon, it says, number one best seller. It is. And maybe you're in a category of gay dinosaurs or something. It's not a lot of competition, but figure it out, and then find some categories or a lot of books that are selling.
Mark Paul:
I tell you, I don't get any money for [inaudible 00:36:13] I'm associated with. Going to Publishers Rocket is a really great tool to be on. For next to nothing you can go on in, they'll give you all the categories. And when you click on it, they'll give you the categories and the keywords and they'll tell you how many, each of those books that are in the top categories, how many they're selling, how many books they're selling, how many published paperback books and hardcover books they're selling, and really look at those categories. That's huge.
Ben Guest:
100%. I use that tool all the time because it helps you know your competition.
Mark Paul:
Exactly. Also, make sure that you also do your book in hardcover, in paperback, not just in ebook. One of the things that I learned earlier is, when I first started advertising on Amazon keywords, they're going to tell you, you're getting about a 70% commission split, so if you sell a book for $10, you're going to keep about seven and Amazon is going to get about three.
Mark Paul:
That's true, but that's also minus your ad cost. So they tell you really, they call it ACOS, average cost of sale, how much you're paying for your ads versus how many sales you're getting, that number and you shouldn't be spending more than 70% of your ACOS, your average cost of sale, where you're advertising, you're selling books [inaudible 00:37:40] money.
Mark Paul:
Well, first of all, like I told you, I don't mind in the little categories, I don't mind this money because by God, we work so hard, at least come out with a couple of these cute little Amazon batters, you can cut and paste, do a paint version, and save that image and you'll have it for all the time and put it up in your wall and you can say I was an Amazon.
Mark Paul:
So definitely, don't be afraid to dominate in the little categories. But one thing that I learned is I would say, sometimes I would go oh, my ACOS with 83 cents. I would go, oh, that's shitty. I'm getting my ass kicked here. I'm spending more money than I'm receiving in my commissions. But then about four months later, I got my first commission for my paperback sale.
Mark Paul:
And then it dawned at me because one thing that was really shocking to me in this world of wifi and internet and online and Kindle readers and everything, I still sell about two thirds of my book are prints. People go ahead and buy my book for $15 instead of $8, because the paperback's $15 and the ebook is $8, but I still sold two times as many paperbacks.
Mark Paul:
So what I'm saying is that if I wound up spending 83 cents to get a 70 cents sale, I wasn't doing any ... I was also getting my paperback sales out of that number. I started realizing that maybe I could actually be spending a hundred cents. I could be losing by my ebooks, as long as I'm selling a ton of print books, I'm making money. So, that's okay. I also did an audio book.
Ben Guest:
Talk to us about that.
Mark Paul:
I really enjoyed doing my audio book. First of all, I would not recommend being your own narrator unless you're exceptional. I'm pretty comfortable with public speaking. I never showed up, I'm always talking, but it doesn't mean I'm a good narrator. The narrator that I had [inaudible 00:39:47] is really fantastic. So I would do that. It's really enjoyable. I don't know, I've made money at it, but I probably three, four, 5% of my books sales have been audio books, but it was really enjoyable.
Mark Paul:
I'll tell you what, one thing that I would really encourage everybody to do, when I die and go to my maker and I go, what are your five proudest moments? I'll tell them that marrying my great wife and having my two sons but in the top five will be the book trailer that I did. I did my own book trailer. It's on my website, makrpaulauthor.com. That book trailer is 58 seconds long and it's had 38, excuse me, over 310000 downloads, if you could imagine.
Mark Paul:
300000 downloads. And that was a really good way for me to sell my book. And I really enjoyed doing that. What I did is I don't have any video on it. I used all still photos, photos that I purchased combined with some stock video footage, a little bit of stock video footage that I was able to purchase from Shutter Stock for one of those places.
Mark Paul:
And then I did do my own narration and I went to a sound studio and I paid, it wasn't that expensive, I think I paid about $180 for the hour in the sound. And they recorded that and spliced it together for me. But I really think having a book trailer in today's visual world, particularly for young people is really valuable. I was out at a cocktail party getting, I ran into a big movie person, right?
Mark Paul:
I was telling them about my book. And they were fading in interest and I said, "Hey, do you have 57 seconds?" And I just took out my cell phone and I put on my download by ... I showed them my book trailer and within a minute they were like, oh, you've got to see this, bringing other people over. And I emailed them my ebook and they're reading it right now, people that are not interested, visually they can see that link, I will definitely do a book trailer.
Ben Guest:
Ah, that's such great advice. I mean, I'm just making a list here, Mark, of the gems that you're dropping. So just keeping track, book trailer-
Mark Paul:
Author website, you've got to have a good author website. It has to be there, it has to be something of interest.
Ben Guest:
Talk to me about that please.
Mark Paul:
Oh, I just, again, I hired a company that does ... I used Author Bites. I did promotion with them. I was very happy with them. I like going to one of these companies that's already done 800 off their websites. So, they know what they're doing and then you can go on and steal all the best ... There's no reason to reinvent the wheel. Just go look at the five author websites that you think fit your book the best and go copy what they're doing. I probably spent, I don't know, $1000 on my website. It wasn't importantly expensive, maybe a little bit more.
Ben Guest:
Imagery is really important, having some good pictures and visuals that you can market with are important.
Mark Paul:
So, my book has a lot of different genres in them. I think that's one of the reasons it was successful. Yes, it's about sports. Yes, it's about a race horse, and a female race horse. And that helped me because women buy two thirds of all books and women don't buy books typically about sports gambling but they do buy books about horses. So I found places, there's horse lover websites, and I would publish my book and promote it and pay to be on the horse lover's websites. So, everybody else has got a romance novel about a woman being swept off her feet by a handsome young rodeo star.
Mark Paul:
And there's my book next to it, but it's there, I sell books there. And then I sell books in gambling. But I sell more books in true crime because the gamblers had to try to [inaudible 00:43:50] the cartel. So again, every book was different, but if you can get knowledge and spread it out and try to be a crossover hit, you'd have a lot better chance of selling than just being, just one book in one narrow genre.
Ben Guest:
Of all the different things you've done to market your book, what's had the greatest ROI?
Mark Paul:
Amazon as words, that's by far, that was the game changer for me. Authors are very analytic and we're the kind of people that when we buy a car we'll actually read the owner's manual before we drive the car. When I was already to launch my book, I probably spent 30 hours every week for the first month looking at Amazon ad words, really studying it, trying to understand it. There's another, you probably know it, there's other service called-
Ben Guest:
Kindlepreneur.
Mark Paul:
That's it. Thank you. Kindlepreneur is phenomenal. And one of the things that I realized when I would look at the book descriptions, book descriptions are really important and you have five seconds to grab people, so when you're going to write your book description, and you're going to get your book reviews up there, a couple of really important pieces of advice, one, it's more important who gives you the review then what the review is.
Mark Paul:
Because I know me, when I'm reading a review, I don't really care whether it's a glowing review that was written by the guy's mother, right? But if I can see the review that is written by some name, maybe written by somebody from the LA Times or, even something that has some credibility with me, that's really important.
Mark Paul:
So I'm an [inaudible 00:45:40] author. I didn't know anybody. I didn't have any reviews, critical reviews. I didn't have Laura Hillenbrand who wrote Sea Biscuit giving me a review. So I said, what the hell can I do to get names up there? Well, I live in Beverly Hills, there's a lot of movie people here and I got all my movie friends, some of my friends had been involved with maybe they were the cinematographer for a big movie, maybe they were a publisher.
Mark Paul:
So I could write, cinematographer for Lone Survivor, and then I would put Lone Survivor in bold, but now people go, oh look at this. The guy that was involved in Lone Survivor like this. And then over time I would get, eventually I started getting more reviews. I did get an LA Times and of course that featured among LA Times. So the other thing with Kindlepreneur is that when you go online and you look at book descriptions, or look at books that don't sell and look at with James Patterson or these top selling authors, I noticed something, drop off over here, the bigger selling authors, their copy has a lot of white space, but it also has bold. It has italics, it has quotation marks.
Mark Paul:
It isn't just a bunch of uniform, two paragraphs of tightly spaced information that nobody's going to take the time to read. And the way that you have to do that is just free in Kindlepreneur, you write what you want it to write, and it has to convert it to this unique code that Amazon uses. And it just, you print what you want and you drop it into this online tool at Kindlepreneur, and then it publishes it the way you want it to be.
Mark Paul:
It's really important. If you look at my copy in The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told, it lays out in full, it shows that I have the LA Times as a review and I have people that they might recognize it that wrote reviews because people are scanning, they're probably having a glass of wine and they're on their iPad. They're not reading every detail word, they're making a decision, do I want to spend $7 on this book, and make it really attractive. That's super important.
Mark Paul:
And your copy needs to grab them. Don't tell them about some esoteric thing. Tell them about why this is exciting and why they're going to want read it. One of the tag lines that I use a lot is, would you bet your life on a 50 to one shot? [inaudible 00:48:27] something that's a book, something that grabs them. And the other thing is you can see, always be marketing. I'd swear to you when I go out, I sell books when I'm in an elevator.
Mark Paul:
I love my book. I found out how to make it really exciting where people want to buy it and I'm always selling books. I can books at a picnic. And one of the things that I do on my website, I do get people to contact me. I go back to anybody who talks to me, and I have kind of an epilogue that I have in there, but in my epilogue and the only thing that I have highlighted in yellow is please leave a review. And I have the link because they don't know how to leave it, they don't know what to do.
Mark Paul:
And you just give them a link. And my friends that I wanted to post a review, I send them a link and I email them, please give me a review. Do not publish your book until you have at least 10 reviews.
Ben Guest:
I've seen that advice over and over again, even to the extent that some people say, if you're writing a fiction series and you think you have something, write the first two or three books before you publish the first one, just so that they're lined up, ready to go. You mentioned Amazon ad words and I've heard advice about that, but I haven't yet started with Amazon ad words. Could you talk to me about that process and what you've learned and KDP, it's called KDP select or whatever it is?
Mark Paul:
You just go to KDP and you can upload your book. Although I really would encourage you to hire a publisher, a paid publisher who will do all the things that you need to do, put it in the right formats and all published properly. They do all of that for you, although you certainly can do it yourself. If you're on a limited budget, I would not publish my book because I couldn't afford to pay somebody to do these services.
Mark Paul:
I fortunately could pay somebody to make sure all the wording was done and formatted properly. I elected to publish wide. In retrospect, I don't think I'd bother. I think I'd just go to Amazon. You can't fight them, they're just too big and powerful and you're going to sell majority of your books there anyway. And then they have, how you can do campaigns and they break down the ... I haven't been doing this as avidly as I was two years ago, they have different ...
Mark Paul:
You can. I did multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple campaigns. And I came up with about 600 ad words that I could market my books and that might seem crazy. But again, that Publisher Rocket really helped me because what I would do is I would look at okay, in the 10 categories that I'm competing, what are the 10 books that are in those categories?
Mark Paul:
And then I would see, I would put in their books in Publisher Pocket and it would tell me what the most popular keywords are in those categories. So I would go, I sell books in true crime. What are the most popular keywords for true crime? I would put together a list of all of them. And then I would go, all right, I sell books in the horse race. What are the keywords in the horse race? All these different categories.
Mark Paul:
And then I would do separate campaigns. I would start a campaign just for horse racing. I would start a campaign just for gambling. You know where else I sell books? I sell books in the history of sports and there's some big books in there. There's a book called Boys In The Boat, which is a really good book. But [inaudible 00:52:09] and I would study that book and I would see what the keywords that they used in order to sell books.
Mark Paul:
So I'd come up with this really broad ... The other thing that they do, that's really good again, Publisher Rocket is they'll print this out for you. And it's $50 a year. [inaudible 00:52:31], they'll tell you all of the books that are the top sellers and those books, and those book's authors become keywords.
Mark Paul:
So in other words I said, all right, my book, the number one book of all time, maybe in horse racing is Sea Biscuit. So I advertised Sea Biscuit and all my ad words, I advertised Laura Hillenbrand, the author. If somebody's searching for Laura Hillenbrand, they're going to see my book come up. If somebody's searching Boys In The Boat, they're going see my book come up.
Mark Paul:
And so, I really did a lot of keywords, a lot of advertising. And there's a saying, it's not my quote, [inaudible 00:53:14] but he says, when I was first starting to market and advertise, there's this saying that says, I didn't think, I experimented. And that's kind of what I did. I didn't know what would work. So I just did it all, but I wasn't afraid to spend money either. And I know that I had an advantage there that I could spend money.
Mark Paul:
And if I lost five grand, that was okay. Turns out I didn't, I made money, but that's because I was willing to spend money. The other things that they do is they have these campaigns that are basically auto fill campaigns, where Amazon will go out and choose the keyword for you. I'm not online right now, I don't know exactly what they're called, but you can't miss them.
Mark Paul:
And I can tell you that those Amazon auto campaigns that they do, where Amazon chooses the words are far better than anything you could do on your own. So if you said, I'm not techy, I don't want to come up with 600 ad words, I don't want to spend 30 hours a week, fine. Then just go with their auto campaigns, but you need to monitor them every single day. I don't need to monitor them every day now after two years.
Mark Paul:
But when you first start, I would monitor them twice a day because I would see a campaign that's selling, maybe I'm spending money, I'm spending $200 a day on that campaign. But if I'm bringing in, especially if I was spending $200 day in that campaign, I was bringing in $150 of revenue, I was okay with that in the first month. I didn't care if I lost money, I wanted to see what worked.
Mark Paul:
I figured out how to fine tune it. And I've done that. So now after a month or two, I can pair it down to what doesn't work and spend more of my money on what does work. As an author, you cannot sit in your room and wait for the world to find you, the world doesn't work that way. You have to put yourself out there and unfortunately you have to spend money, right? I really believe you really do have to spend money in order to let people know that you're there.
Ben Guest:
I mean, there are eight million ebooks on Amazon Kindle, on the Kindle store.
Mark Paul:
And when I was at the top, when I was selling the most books, some months, let's say I was selling 5000 books a month, I was probably the 5000th best seller on Amazon means, that means that I never got to be in the top 100 on Amazon, even top 1000 on Amazon. But I was still selling 5000 books [inaudible 00:56:02]. So, it's a big world.
Ben Guest:
If you extrapolate from eight million books on the Amazon Kindle store, you're in the 1% of sales.
Mark Paul:
What's great about Amazon ad words, I will say this is that if people are on Amazon Kindle and they're searching for books, they're going to buy a book. If you go and do an ad on YouTube, the chances of the person on YouTube that actually reads books is maybe one in 100, right? But if they're on Amazon Kindle searching for books, they're going to buy a damn book. All you have to do is convince them to buy your book. That's a lot easier to sell.
Ben Guest:
Let's end with a question. Oh, do you think it's a better use of time and money to do the auto Amazon ad word campaign or to fine tune your own keywords?
Mark Paul:
If you can only do one, the auto's absolutely. I don't know how they do it. They are better at it. I can say now I do, I spend a lot more time with the auto campaigns than I did before because I learned how good they are. But I also think that I can't give you the analytical backup for this, but I think that the fact that I was out there and I was doing lots of campaigns, I think also helped Auto campaigns.
Mark Paul:
I think that the computer algorithm saw, this guy is spending money, people are clicking his links, they're buying books and you need to go up into that food chain where they think they have something to sell. Also, I did something now. I just went on to Kindle Unlimited. I resisted it 18 months, but now after 18 months or so of my book being on the charts, I've noticed that my sales, they're still good.
Mark Paul:
I was selling, when things were really going good, I was selling 5000 books a month. Now I'm selling about 700 and I don't like that. I go, what do I got to do? So I started doing, I noticed a lot of the top selling books are Kindle Unlimited. So I did that and I've only been doing that for four days.
Mark Paul:
So I don't know what I'm doing there either. There's a certain joy of that. I clicked on it this morning and I saw that I'd already had, I forget-
Ben Guest:
The page reads?
Mark Paul:
Yeah, 2000 page reads today. I thought, well, my book is 200 pages long, 10 people have read my book. And as an author, isn't that really what it's about? I mean, if I could have done all of this and lost money, a little bit of money, it still would've been one of the greatest joys of anything I've ever done in my life. It's fine.
Mark Paul:
And so going on this morning seeing, wow, 10 people, because I could see the page reads have read my book, that was good and it made my day. That's cool. I think that if you do things, not for money, but for passion, you'll probably make money that'll come through.
Ben Guest:
And now last but not least, here are excerpts from the very first interview I did with Greg Larson way back in August of last year and the best marketing advice that he had. We talk about creating an ecosystem around your book, creating a website, a YouTube page, et cetera.
Ben Guest:
Greg goes into detail with all of that. We also talk about finding your pilot author and following the same path that your pilot author followed. Tons of great advice in this. Enjoy. Greg, thanks so much for coming on. Let's start with book promotion, and maybe we can start with your website. The website is fantastic. Let me make sure I have the right address to send everybody to. It's clubbiebook.com. So that's C-L-U-B-B-I-E, book.com.
Greg Larson:
Yes, sir.
Ben Guest:
Can you talk about putting the site together and your thoughts with book promotion.
Greg Larson:
Yeah. As far as putting the sites, I'd actually asked a lot of authors about their advice on creating a website. A lot of people say, oh, it's not necessary, hire somebody else to do that. I have just enough experience with say web design or SEO marketing, all that kind of stuff to be dangerous enough. As far as book promotions go and creating the website, my only thought process with creating the website was for people who add a good time reading the book, I want to give them extra content to enjoy for free as much as possible.
Greg Larson:
So, that's the way it's designed. It's for you read the book and you show up and there's a bunch of behind the scenes pictures and old videos from the years of being a clubhouse attendant in 2012, 2013, and as far as promos in general go, I mean, I take every single opportunity that comes my way. I created my own podcast, I chop up into clip up on my YouTube channel.
Greg Larson:
My thought was I need to create as much content as I possibly can around this book. And that's the only way people are going to find it. Otherwise, a lot of people just put a book out and they expect the world to just find it and make it great. Sorry, art is not a pure meritocracy. It is meritocracy plus marketing.
Ben Guest:
100%. One of the best nonfiction books written in the past 30 years or so is Freakonomics. And I was listening to an interview with one of the co-authors, Steven Levit. And he was saying, because of Freakonomics, he gets sent books all the time to blurb and he thought at first there was going to be a lot of mediocre books and not well written books. And he is like, there are so many great books out there and they're just undiscovered because there's so much material in the market.
Greg Larson:
Oh yeah. I don't know. I mean, there are millions of books self-published on Amazon every single year. And what is it that separates a book that's never discovered, that nobody reads and a book that a bunch of people read that enters the cannon or the zeitgeist? A lot of it is marketing and quality. I don't know. Nobody wants to hear that. When I was in school, I would've preferred not to hear that. My professors would've told me that, that's not true. But here we are.
Greg Larson:
What's the lowest level media outlet that I can get attention from? And maybe it's a local news station. Boom. I take that local KUT Austin, Austin's NPR station gives me some attention. And then I use that to leverage into a pitch to CBS Sports radio. And I use that to leverage into a pitch to the LA Times.
Greg Larson:
And then it's just like, boom, boom, boom, climbing up the ladder. And to be perfectly frank, not all of them directly correlate to book sales. I can usually see a jump whenever something new comes out. But what it does create is this perception of being everywhere. You know what I mean? I have to think about it as a branding effort. It was a piece of art that I created my book Clubbie, but once it became published, it went from being an artistic endeavor to a business. And that's how I had to think about it. So now I'm thinking about what's my brand strategy and my brand strategy is make sure every person who enjoys baseball books finds out about my book.
Ben Guest:
So here's the million dollar question based on what you just said. What does correlate?
Greg Larson:
What I've found especially in the last year has been doing podcasts has, the most concentrated book sales I've seen have been doing podcasts and oddly enough radio shows, which I never would've expected. It's one of those people expect that to be a dying medium and maybe in some ways it is, but a lot of people still listen to the radio in their car.
Greg Larson:
So for example, I was on The Fan in Baltimore. My book takes place in Baltimore. After I did that show, it's a 15 minute spot, the next day I saw my sales jump up. I don't know exact numbers. I can just see the Amazon sales rank, but it jumped up tens of thousands of spots on the Amazon sales rank, which shocked me because everybody says radio is dead.
Greg Larson:
As far as book promotions go, I don't think that's accurate. Podcasts are actually better because once this goes up on your website, it stays there. Radio is one and done unless I capture it somehow, which I try to do as well. That's another one. I try to record as many radio interviews as I possibly can and then put it on my YouTube channel.
Ben Guest:
This is all great stuff. What is it about radio shows that bump up sales, do you think?
Greg Larson:
Part of it, there's still this perception that, because there's a higher barrier of entry, there's still this perception that radio is, I don't know, a more classic medium that has more prestige as opposed to podcasts, there's still this perception of anybody can do it, therefore being on a podcast, doesn't hold the same social status. That's going to change and that is changing, but there is something about it.
Greg Larson:
It's analogous to traditional publishing versus self-publishing. Self-publishing is going to dominate traditional publishing. But those old morays are hard to fight again, TV versus YouTube, it's all the same exact sort of change there. A lot of my readers are still stuck in some of the old morays of the past, as far as media goes.
Greg Larson:
And I'm going to use that to my advantage and get on the radio. And I don't know, it's not only old people. When I tell people that I was on CBS Sports radio or ESPN radio or something like that, it's still, there's a little ding that says oh, that's official, right?
Ben Guest:
So how do you get on radio programs?
Greg Larson:
I send out pitch emails, I try to send them out every single day. Today I sent out two pitch emails, every weekday at the very least. So what I started with is I start with local stations and try to work my way up from there, like I said, but what I'll start with is I try to frame my book as part of a larger discussion. I don't say, I'm an author and you should promote my book. I say, here's, what's going on in minor league baseball right now.
Greg Larson:
There's a bunch of in income inequality issues in minor league baseball, there's contraction going on. And not only are those issues a microcosm of what's going on at the US at large, but I'm the perfect person to talk about it because I wrote a book about minor league baseball that came out this summer. And I word that in a way that's, I don't know, more nimble than that, but then I include a couple of status markers, like for reference here's my interview that I did on MLB Network, that kind of thing.
Greg Larson:
And my success rate is, if I get a 12% success rate in a week, that's good for me. So sending out media pitch emails, I expect a huge rate of failure. And I think that's what keeps a lot of authors from doing it.
Ben Guest:
And I think that's also helpful because we talked earlier about how marketing is an important component of the process. And I also think sometimes, we mention this off air as well, authors, we can be so internal that we don't pay attention to that. And it's such a closed world that being able to share this information is just so helpful.
Greg Larson:
Oh yeah, where I didn't even know who to pitch in the first place. And most people don't. What I did was, it seemed so obvious after I thought of it, but it was such a revelation to me, I found an author who had published a book similar to me the year before. And I just pitched every single media outlet that had covered his book.
Greg Larson:
And then not only do I know who's interested in my work, but then I can actually use him as a launching point of saying, hey, I noticed that you covered Brad Balukjian last year. My book is very similar from the same publisher. Here's what it's about. That has been a godsend to me, because a lot of authors don't even know who to reach out to.
Ben Guest:
Greg, that is so smart. So the pitch email, the structure is something along the lines of, here's some things that are happening in baseball. Here's how my book is connected to that. Here are some other interviews or media hits that I've done. Is that right?
Greg Larson:
You want me to read you a pitch word for word? Would that be helpful for anybody?
Ben Guest:
That would be fantastic.
Greg Larson:
Here's a pitch that I just gave to NPR using my local NPR as a launching point, I say, hi person, I'm Greg Larson. And I recently published a book with university of Nebraska Press that helped bring light to income inequality issues in minor league baseball. Some baseball fans know the facts and figures around these problems. And then I give a couple of facts about minor league baseball, but most people don't know what that world looks like on the inside and how it is a perfect microcosm of economic issues in America.
Greg Larson:
With the changes taking place this summer and rampant income inequality across the country, I believe this story helps highlight issues that plague the US at large and would be a perfect fit for NPR programming. What do you think? And then I give them my cell phone number and then I send them a link to a media kit where it's just a Google drive that has pictures and has blurb images that I created and a full PDF of the book.
Greg Larson:
And then I say also for reference, here's my recent interview in Austin's NPR station, KUT, best Greg Larson. That gives me a 10 to 15% success rate. So I think about it in terms of opening with personalization. Why am I contacting you? What have I seen of yours, liked recently, why is this issue important? How does my book fit into the conversation? Let's schedule a time.
Ben Guest:
So, let's go back to the website for a minute.
Greg Larson:
Sure.
Ben Guest:
What were the fundamentals of the website design for you?
Greg Larson:
So I chose Square Space, which is a software that I'm somewhat familiar with. It's just plug and play. And I was just, as far as design goes, I created a logo with somebody on Fiverr, I think, and that cost me a couple bucks, maybe 15 bucks. And then I used that cheap logo to take it to a more expensive designer, then I paid 300 bucks to have them make a more professional looking one.
Greg Larson:
And so have I seen a direct ROI on say, that logo design that's all over the website? Probably not, but again, it just creates this whole aesthetic. I can put that logo on my newsletter. I can put that logo on every piece of media that I create, the website, blogs. I created a landing page. This has been incredible useful. I created a landing page for my signed hardcover copies that people buy.
Greg Larson:
I just assume that whoever's hitting that landing page doesn't know anything about the book. And I created, just tried to create a little story with visuals, what the book is about, a couple of reviews of it, and then a link to buy. And that has been helpful for me to sell some copies because those copies, I make way more money on people buying directly from me than I do somebody buying from Amazon.
Greg Larson:
And then I have a blog that I just update every once in a while. There's maybe six blogs on there. But oddly enough, one of my blogs that I wrote is the number one way that people come to my website, which I never would've expected. I mean, that was one lesson in there was that the things I thought would land or connect with people are definitely not the things that actually connect with people.
Greg Larson:
It's perfectly analogous. On the website, it was a blog post about what the best baseball jersey numbers are. That's the number one way people find my website and with the book, people are really interested in the love story of me with my girlfriend and the downfall of our relationship during this baseball, which I thought was this unnecessary distraction from the main story. But it's one of the things that people ask me about the most.
Ben Guest:
So website, and then you have a YouTube page that is dedicated to Clubbie.
Greg Larson:
The way I thought about the YouTube channel, first off, I had a lot of hesitancy to even do a YouTube channel in the first place or a video podcast as I was thinking of it. I thought, well, I don't have enough content or on the book, I'm not going to have enough to say, nobody's going to be interested in this. All of the standard self-defeating that I have before I start any creative endeavor.
Greg Larson:
But what I found was I had a specific focus. As a clubhouse attendant, I learned a lot about baseball that most fans don't, just obscure stuff like how to make a rosin bag, what pine tar smells like, all these little things. And I thought, this YouTube channel is going to be dedicated to the most obscure baseball knowledge on the internet. Boom. I had a focus.
Greg Larson:
And so each episode I would talk for maybe 15, 20 minutes about a specific thing, what's in an on deck circle bag, why do some baseball players sniff their bats? And there's specific reasons behind it because the baseball comes off of the bat so fast that it creates this burning sensation on the bat where they can actually smell the wood burning.
Greg Larson:
And I'll just go deeper into, it's like behind the scenes in more detail into stuff that's covered in the book. And what I've found is that, I don't have a ton of subscribers, there might be 30 subscribers, but what I've found is, it's another one of those things ... Hey, Penguin, what are you doing? Get out of there. She's not allowed in the bedroom. The audacity.
Greg Larson:
But what I found is, it's another one of those clout building things where people can see that I have a YouTube page and there's all these videos. I don't know, there might be 50 videos up there and they might have a couple hundred views a piece. I don't think they're very high, but again, it's the perception and the ubiquity of Clubbie is everywhere kind of a feeling. That has been the most valuable part.
Ben Guest:
Just, it being one part of getting the word out or what's the most valuable part of it?
Greg Larson:
Yes, the fact that they exist, the fact that-
Ben Guest:
Ecosystem.
Greg Larson:
That's 100% it. Podcasts, the videos, blog posts, anything, just get the word out there. Yes.
Ben Guest:
What was the date of publication?
Greg Larson:
April 1st of this year.
Ben Guest:
So, let's say the month of April, how many hours a day are you putting into all of this, promoting the book?
Greg Larson:
Well, it's slowed down some, but the first month of April, I mean, I was treating it like a part-time job. I would say it was between three and five hours a weekday in the month of April. And since then, I would say, it's gone down to an hour to two hours every weekday. And now those one to two hours are either dedicated to doing it in interview or sending pitch emails. That's the majority of it. And then on Fridays, I'll usually schedule a bunch of videos for the next week on TikTok and YouTube.
Ben Guest:
Love it. What was the most helpful thing you did to promote the book pre-publication, pre-publishing?
Greg Larson:
I concentrated a lot of my effort, how to put it, I think a lot of people shoot their cannons too early when it comes to pre-publication where it creates this perception of I'm going to start promoting my book, well, sometimes I just don't promote it at all, but the people who do promote it, they start to, and then it goes on too long and publication date hasn't hit yet.
Greg Larson:
And then by the time the book comes out, the people in their atmosphere, whether it's friends, family, people on their Facebook, social media, they're fatigued. They're like, this book didn't already come out. I've been hearing about it for three months now. The most helpful thing I did was concentrate, I tried to concentrate everything to one month ahead of publication, just to, well, what did that look like specifically? I maxed out all of my LinkedIn connections every single day of on the preceding months.
Greg Larson:
And I focused entirely on people who were in my target audience. So people who worked. I would go to every single minor league and major league baseball team, go to their employees list and just add everybody until LinkedIn wouldn't let me add anymore. Boom. All of a sudden I have a social network completely filled with my potential readers.
Greg Larson:
On Facebook, I had been apathetic about Facebook leading up to my book release for years, but I finally said, f**k it. I'm going to go and add in all of the people from high school, all the people from college that I have just been ignoring on there. And then again, do the same thing. Find people who looked like they were in my target audience.
Greg Larson:
I went back through old rosters of the teams that I worked for and added all of those guys. And then all of a sudden Facebook's algorithm was kicking out people to me who were in my target audience. Doing that, so now the people in my atmosphere, people who were interested in me specifically or were interested in the content. And then when I was doing podcasts and posting about it's going out to people who might be likely to read the book, that made a huge difference.
Ben Guest:
So let's take Facebook. So now you've you made these connections. Are you creating a group? Are you inviting people there? How often, let's say in the week, the seven days leading up to April 1st, how often are you posting about the book? How are you communicating it, et cetera?
Greg Larson:
I didn't create a specific group, but I was posting in other groups. I found a baseball books group, for example, or I found Orioles groups for, I don't remember how many days leading up to the release. I had a countdown where I would create a meme of some kind that said, seven days to release, six days to release and so forth. So people knew that there's some anticipation building, but I didn't start so early that again, people got fatigued by it.
Greg Larson:
And again, I just want to make an important point on that too, as an author, nobody is as familiar with your content as you are. I think, oh, I'm posting about this too much. When people don't give a s**t about something, they just ignore it. They really don't give a s**t, but there is a certain aspect of momentum that is important leading up to a launch, but after a launch, it doesn't matter, dude. Throw that s**t out there and people will ignore what's not relevant to that.
Ben Guest:
So, let's talk after launch. So after April 1st, what were the two or three most helpful things you did to market the book?
Greg Larson:
Now I'm on a roughly 10 pitch emails a week pace. But at that point I was obsessively pitching media outlets, podcasts, everybody I possibly could. That was by far the most helpful and continues to be the most helpful. I don't know if I would change any part of the that. I think I would do all of that exactly the same. And if anything, I would put even more time into sending pitch emails.
Greg Larson:
I found an author who published a similar book to me and I just tailed all of his media outlets. That was an easy first step. If I were to do it differently, I would've done more research into that world and different podcasts that I could have been on outside of what he had done. I did an easy first step, which is fantastic, but I would've done more research there.
Ben Guest:
Did you reach out to that author by the way?
Greg Larson:
Oh yeah. We're friends. He blurbed my book, we text and stuff. I always went into that relationship like, I am only here to help him and anytime I ask him for something it's only after I've provided him 10 X value. So I never went into it like, what can I get from this guy? It was like, what can we do for each other? And what do we have in common? That's the way I thought about it. And it's made all the difference in the world.
Ben Guest:
So, that is your book marketing 101 class. I hope you enjoyed it, found lots of helpful information. Mark's book is The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told. It is the best selling horse betting book ever written, more than 40000 copies sold. He also has a great audio book. So after listening to Mark's audio book, I'm thinking about doing an audio book for my book, which is Zen In The Art Of Coaching Basketball: Memoir Of A Namibian Odyssey, which you can buy on Amazon.
Ben Guest:
And Greg's book is Clubbie, also a memoir about his time working as a clubhouse attendant in minor league baseball. So I encourage you to support authors, support the two authors who have shared their knowledge on this podcast and buy all three of our books, Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told by Mark Paul, Zen In The Art Of Coaching Basketball by Ben Guest and Clubbie by Greg Larson. If you enjoy this content, please subscribe to my newsletter Benbo.substack.com. That's B-E-N-B-O, .substack.com. Thank you and have a great day.
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