I buy a few copies of my book – at a loss of £1 a go – and over a couple of days my bestseller rank increases. I want to boost my rank and hopefully keep shifting copies, so I follow in the footsteps of this legend, who lost his top 10 position in the Sunday Times bestseller charts after revealing he bought 400 copies of his own book, The Cleaner, to increase his position. I’m at number 47 in personal finance, floating around with the likes of How to Be a Landlord and Currency Trading for Dummies. I know I’m only supposed to be in it for the money, but it’s difficult to think of a more soulless approach to writing a book than that.Ī couple of weeks after the launch, my book is still averaging a few sales a day, though its ranking is falling off a bit. “I'm a firm believer in writing books that correspond with the keywords readers are already searching for on Amazon,” Publisher Rocket’s creator, Dave Chesson, tells me. The software has tools for analysing keywords and ways to find relevant but niche categories on Amazon. I spend £95 on Amazon keyword software Publisher Rocket, though it does have a 30-day money back guarantee, so I’m not out of pocket. Without adverts, I’m left with few other options to try to increase sales. If you’re ending up paying £30, £40, £50 for an ad on Facebook, you don’t have much leeway on the number of people who click before you’re losing money.” “I think it would be quite difficult to use Facebook ads to show a reasonable return. “It is a complete risk,” says Leslie Gilmour, a digital marketing consultant at Cube Digital. With my book priced so low, theres’ little room for error when targeting the adverts, which can cost up to 50p every time someone clicks through to the sales page. I consider dropping some cash on adverts, but I find various forum posts from authors who have paid for adverts, only to generate a few extra sales and ultimately lose money. While he admits he has at times lost money on particular pay-per-click adverts, because he has such a big collection of books these losses are outnumbered by his customers bouncing from one book to another. Mind you, it’s still competing with Jack Monroe in Amazon’s top 50 personal finance books.īen says his biggest marketing method is paid Facebook and Amazon advertising. It does increase sales for a bit, but they even out afterwards, as does the book’s bestseller rank. I notice a big increase in sales the day it’s published – 11 copies, which is over three times my daily average so far. He lets me post a lengthy piece about the book, with links to the Amazon page. I first met Barney, who runs the site, when I was writing about the financial independence movement last year. Instead, I write a blog post for money website The Escape Artist. Both Ben and Kerry suggest I recruit the help of influencers or celebrities to promote the book, which would be great advice if I knew any. With the soft launch doing about as much as could be expected (not that much), I turn to other methods to try to increase sales. Maybe no one but a handful of my friends is willing to drop £2.99 on 40 pages of waffle about making a relatively small amount of money online?īut after refreshing one morning I notice I’ve sold a couple of copies and immediately go back to thinking I’m a literary phenomenon: the Sally Rooney of personal finance ebooks. I’ve sold around three copies a day so far, which is OK, though I’m not exactly threatening to knock 50 Cent off his perch. After a couple of days, Side Hustles is at number 60 in both the personal finance and personal money management categories, and shows up pretty high when I test search terms related to the book.
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