My ebook is available for sale, but what do I do now?

Andrea Johnson, Troubador's Digital Production Controller offers her advice for authors post-ebook publication. 

One of the most common questions we get here at Troubador is what to do after an ebook has been published. A lot of time and effort has gone into getting to this stage – from the cover design to the actual ebook production – and the last thing we want to do is just put an ebook out there and hope it sells.

As with any title, it doesn’t matter how far and wide you distribute your ebook, if no one knows it’s there, it won’t sell. There are a number of things you can try to promote your ebook, but the common factor is that they take place online. As ebooks are sold online, the marketing takes place online, so when you are looking for things to do, do keep this in mind.

Social media is a really good place to start as you can share direct links to your followers which go to your ebook on the retailers. Your ebook will be available for sale on a lot of retailers, so instead of copying all of these individual links, why not use Link Tree to create one link for everything? Here you can consolidate all of the links for your ebook online into one place.

Consider using graphics with each post made with your ebook in mind. Research shows that social media posts with imagery are much more engaging than posts without, so you have more chance of encouraging someone to stop scrolling through their feed and read about your ebook if there is something else to look at. The more exciting you can make a post, the better!

Once you’ve encouraged readers to go to your ebook retailer page, how do then convince them to buy a copy? Well, the best way to do this is to have as many reviews as possible for your title. The more reviews you have, the more visible your ebook will be, so it is worth asking for reviews. Of course, it would be wonderful if they were all 5-star reviews, but it can often help to have a mixed bag on there, so if there’s one which is not quite as positive as you’d like, don’t let this worry you. In our experience, honest reviews are better than ones which appear suspiciously positive, so don’t be afraid to put your ebook out there for review.

Our Ebook Marketing service includes a 4-week listing on NetGalley, a leading review website used by reviewers, bloggers, people within the media and other publishers, so if you are looking for ways to get reviews, this could be something to consider. You can also encourage reviews by making use of Apple codes. If your ebook is available on the Apple Books store, you are entitled to 250 codes that allow for a free, protected copy of your ebook. These are really handy to send out to reviewers or bloggers, and as long as they have an Apple device to use them on, they can get a free copy of your ebook. 

If you are looking for a short-term boost in sales, a Bookbub Featured Deal is worth looking into. Bookbub is a website that promotes free and discounted ebooks by sending out daily emails to their subscribers, and a Featured Deal would include your ebook in this. You would need to discount your ebook during the promotion, but they are highly effective in seeing a boost in ebook sales. These are paid-for promotions (the cost varies depending on the genre) but they are notoriously difficult to be accepted for. It can sometimes take several attempts to be accepted, but they are something we’d recommend! 

In the long term, an online advert for your ebook can increase sales. Adverts are always ‘slow-burners’ in terms of promotion tools, but they aim to increase the visibility of your title and traffic to the ebook page. We offer an advert either on Amazon or on BookBub, and you can choose which you’d like to have. The Amazon adverts we run are called Lockscreen Ads, and appear on the locked screens of readers’ Kindle devices so that they see them when they turn on or unlock their Kindle. Which ad displays on a reader’s Kindle at any given time depends on their previous buying history and what genres/authors they have previously purchased titles from – the ad that displays will be something that Amazon thinks the reader would like. BookBub adverts appear on the daily emails that get sent out to their hundreds of thousands of subscribers (as described above with the Featured Deals). The adverts appear at the bottom of these emails and feature your book cover, a snappy tagline, and a ‘call to action’ such as ‘Read Now!’ or ‘Buy Now!’. BookBub subscribers specify what their favourite ebook retailers are, and so this determines which retailer they are taken to when they click on your ad.

In terms of free things you can do, why not run a price-drop promotion? The lowest we can drop the price of your ebook to is 99p, and if you tied this in with some posts on social media to let your followers know about the cheaper price, you could see an increase in sales over a short period of time. We’d always advise increasing the price of your ebook after the promotion (you don’t want to undervalue your work!) but an increase in sales can increase your ranking online and maybe lead to more reviews being left.

Ebooks in our experience benefit from consistent marketing efforts, and there is always something else you can do to push sales, so don’t be afraid to try new things and put your ebook out there. If you don’t try, you’ll never know how well it could have gone. If you have any questions on anything described here, do get in touch with the Digital Department.

Our ebook marketing service is detailed further here