Can You Afford NOT To Advertise?

All Indie authors need an advertising budget.
 
There, I’ve said it.
 
You may not want to read that and you may now be sticking your fingers in your ears and going “la la la”, but I’m afraid it’s true.
 
Let’s start from basics.

Nobody is going to stumble on your book by accident. It may be the best book ever written, but if nobody knows it exists then they can’t read it.

---

Nobody is going to stumble on your book by accident!

You will be aware that social media can be used to bring your book to the attention of a wider audience for free, but it has a limited utility.
 
Once your post or Tweet about your book has been read by your “friends” or “followers” they will do one of two things. They will either buy the book (hooray) or they will ignore it (boo). After that, no matter how often you post or Tweet about your book, nothing will happen.

​The people who bought your book when they first saw the post aren’t going to buy it again and the people who ignored it first time around are going to continue to ignore it.
 
This means you have to keep finding new “friends” and/or “followers” who haven’t previously seen your message and who will either buy your book or ignore it. And finding those people is a relentless slog which takes up more and more of your time.

And your time is valuable.

​You should be spending your time writing new books, not trawling through social media trying to attract new people.

---

Which is where advertising comes in.
 
There is a thing in commerce called “spend to save”. The basic principle is that if you spend money now on certain things, you will save money in the longer term.

​For example, if you spend £1,000 on replacing your existing light bulbs with more energy efficient light bulbs, you will save more than £1,000 over the next five years, thus repaying the initial outlay and making a profit. This is also known as “return on investment” (ROI).
 
The same principle applies in advertising, though here you might call it “spend to earn”. If you spend £x on advertising now, you will earn £y back in sales, so the advertising cost is paid back and you get your ROI.
 
This is something that is well understood across business. If advertising didn’t pay for itself, then all those adverts that we see on-line, on TV, in the cinema and that we hear on the radio, just wouldn’t be there. Advertising has to pay for itself or or nobody would do it.

---

But you are an Indie author. You don’t have much money. How can you possibly afford to advertise?
 
Fortunately, the same social media we used to promote our book for free, also offers the facility to advertise that isn’t expensive.

​You may have 5,000 followers on Twitter, but a paid advertisement has the potential to reach millions of people. The same applies to Facebook and to all the other forms of social media. It even works by paying for advertising on Amazon.
 
There are some good practices that should be born in mind if you are going to advertise and I’ll touch on these now. We have covered most of them in previous blogs, so we won’t go into detail here.

---

Target your audience. Make sure the advert is aimed at the right people. There’s no point in paying for your book to be promoted to people who don’t read books or who don’t read books in your genre.
 
Time your advertising. Not everyone is on social media 24/7, so find out when your audience is likely to be on-line and time your advertising accordingly.
 
Change your message. People get annoyed by repetition, so each advert should be different from the one before. This will require you to be creative – but you’re an author, you are already creative.
 
Make your adverts eye-catching. People are more attracted to pictures than to words and they are more attracted to moving pictures than to still ones.

---

Think long-term. Every new reader that you attract with an advert is likely to stay loyal if they enjoy your book. So that’s a sale in the bag for your next book and all the others you are going to write – and you won’t have to pay for those sales.
 
Save to spend. Set aside money from each sale to help pay for your next advert. I would recommend 10% minimum from the income from each sale.

---

You shouldn’t waste money on those businesses (mainly on Twitter) who offer to promote your book to their gazillion followers. Their output isn’t targeted and there is very little evidence that it produces results.

​You might as well stand in the street with a megaphone shouting “buy my book”. In fact, you’d probably get more sales that way (along with a restraining order).
 
How much should you spend? Well, a Facebook advert running for 4 days will cost about £25 ($30) and that should return you enough sales to justify the cost. Other social media channels and Amazon offer similar levels of pricing.
 
How often should you advertise? As often as you can afford it. I would suggest at least one advert per month and if you can’t afford that, try for one very two months.
 
Have I convinced you? If not, then there is only one thing that will. Give it a try, just once, and see what happens. Experience costs money, but for some people it is the only way they will be convinced. But, let’s face it, if your book isn’t selling, then doing nothing isn’t really an option if you want that to change.

If you have enjoyed this blog or found it interesting, make sure you don't miss the next edition by signing up for our newsletter. If you do, you can get a full length novel for FREE. Just hit the button.

---

Newsletter