Hi there,

Welcome back to another edition of Reedsy's marketing newsletter!

A couple of weeks ago, I shared one of the most important axioms in book marketing: “The retailers help the authors who help themselves.” In other words: if you want a retailer (from a small neighborhood bookshop to an online giant like Amazon) to notice your book — and promote it to their readers — the best thing you can do is to bring in as many early sales yourself as possible.

So we’ve seen how the timing of those sales matter. Today, we’re going to discuss why the source of such sales is just as important.

You might be thinking: why would a retailer care where the sale comes from? Whether the reader decided to buy the book as a result of a word of mouth, an online ad, or just by browsing through the store and being attracted to the cover, that sale is going to make them the same amount of money, right?

Yes, but while the money will be the same, the data will be different — and retailers, particularly online ones, love data just as much as they love money.

For example, out of the three scenarios I outlined (word of mouth, online ads, and in-store browsing), which would you guess is more interesting to the retailer?

In the case of word of mouth and online ads, the customer walks into the store already knowing which book they want. The only thing this tells the retailer is that this particular book is in demand. 

In the third case of in-store browsing, however, the retailer gets a lot more data: they know what the customer was looking for, which shelves they were looking at, which books they picked up, and which book they ultimately decided to buy. 

In the world of digital marketing, this is what we call an “organic” sale. And the more of those you get, the more prominence the bookshop will want to give your book on the shelf.

When we think about online retailers, we can classify their sources of traffic (users coming to the site), and book sales into five main categories:

• Direct traffic: when the customer goes straight to the site looking for a specific book (usually one they heard of through word of mouth);
• Social: when the customer hears of a book through social media and clicks through to the retailer page to buy it;
• Paid: when the customer clicks on an online ad for the book;
• Referral: when the customer is referred to the retailer from another site (e.g. a review of a book on a particular blog); and
• Organic: when the customer buys a book as a result of browsing through the site.

Organic sales are those that give retailers the most insights into readers’ purchasing behaviors — insights they can then leverage to make better, more informed recommendations to other readers.

For example, let’s imagine we’re Amazon, and we suddenly see an influx of people searching for “books like the martian.” If we notice that 8 out of 10 people searching for this ended up buying Andy Weir’s other book, Project Hail Mary, we’d want to display that book as high as possible in the search results, right?

But what if — and we’re making stuff up here — 8 out of 10 readers looking for a “book like the martian” ended up buying Blake Crouch’s Recursion? Then we’d want that to be the #1 book we display in search results. Even if, overall, it sells a lot fewer copies than Project Hail Mary.

In cases like this, when readers are searching for a particular kind of book, the overall sales volume of a title doesn’t matter nearly as much as its organic performance for that particular search.

The more advanced a retailer, the more it is able to understand readers’ purchasing behaviors, and make truly personalized recommendations. For example, this is one of the first sections I personally get when I look at the Kindle Store with my Amazon account:

Now, I’ve never read any book by any of these authors, but Amazon knows from my previous browsing and purchasing behavior — and that of similar readers before me — that these are the books I’m most likely to be interested in. These are not the highest-selling epic fantasy books out there, by any means, but they're probably the ones that have performed best, organically, when presented to readers like me in the past.

“Alright, so what can I do to get more organic sales?”

Nothing, aside from getting your marketing basics right — in particular, your cover design and your book description. These are the two decisive factors in getting readers to 1. pick up your book (they love the cover) and 2. decide to buy it (they’re hooked by the description). 

If we go back to my example above, if you write a book for fans of The Martian, you will want to make sure that when people run that search above and (hopefully) see your book in the results, they will immediately be attracted to your cover, and immediately want to buy it after reading its blurb.

If you can achieve that, you won’t need to spend millions on ads, or become super famous, in order for retailers to notice you. 

Note: This is one of the many reasons why I always say that a good cover design should be your first and foremost marketing investment. If it manages to attract the right kind of organic sales, it’ll pay for itself in no time. Here’s just one of many examples of this. So if you’ve skimped on cover design in the past, and wonder why your book isn’t selling, do your book a favor and look for a professional cover designer.

Of course, getting a book to rank high on Amazon for searches like “books like the martian” takes more than a good organic sales performance. It requires being “indexed” for that search in the first place.

But this, as you may have guessed, is a topic for next week.

Until then, happy writing, and happy marketing!

Ricardo

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