Holiday Book Sales, Part II: Finding Your Readers

August 7, 2021

By Steven Spatz -

In part two of our four-part series highlighting effective strategies to score holiday book sales, we focus on getting your book distributed and reaching readers.

“How To Get Holiday Book Sales: Part I” launched our 12-step series for authors looking to market their titles for the holidays and included steps 1–3 dealing with timelines, budgets, and getting out in your community. Now let’s focus on where and how your potential readers can find and buy your books.

Step 4: Be conspicuous

To sell books, you need to be found. That means you need to maximize the chances that readers can discover your books. That extends to the type of products you offer and your distribution plan.

I’ve been involved with marketing different kinds of products for years before helping launch BookBaby. We marketers have a favorite saying: Make it easy for customers to buy. For authors, that includes the formats of your books. It’s vitally important that you offer both eBooks and printed books.

With the invention of the Kindle, iPad, and eBooks, readers suddenly had a new way to consume books. Our fascination with new and trendy electronics caused some so-called experts to make wild predictions, but the early claims that print was dead were vastly overstated. As digital books have been adapted around the globe, reading preferences have now been established, and we have a clearer view of the new publishing landscape.

Approximately 25 percent of readers ONLY read eBooks. That figure is probably lower in the US but much higher in emerging economies that rely heavily on smart phones as the dominant tech.
About 40 percent of readers ONLY read printed books. Give them the tactile feel of ink and paper!
That leaves 35 percent of the reading public who toggle between both formats, depending on price and availability.

Independent authors — especially those who are new and relatively unknown — cannot afford to limit their potential audience. If you only have eBooks, make print. If you only have print, make an eBook. This advice works for sales during every season of the year.

The other half of being found is about your book distribution plan. We recently updated a post of mine that describes a potentially costly mistake many self-published authors make: They ONLY sell books through Amazon. To mix our holiday metaphors, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Mind you, Amazon is a very BIG basket. It’s the biggest and most important online bookstore in the industry, with approximately 67 percent of the eBook and printed book market share in the United States. It’s a given that you must have your eBook and printed books in all the Amazon stores around the world.

But there are many other baskets — stores where millions of eBooks and printed books are sold in the US each year, including Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, and dozens more.

Here are a few of the places where your eBooks should be available:

Amazon. But you already knew that.
Apple Books. Apple Books is the premier eBook destination for iPad and iPhone owners around the globe.
Barnes & Noble. Your eBook can be easily purchased by millions of NOOK owners around the world.
Google Play. Google’s eBook and audiobook store.
Hoopla. This digital on-demand service makes your eBook accessible to North American public libraries.
Kobo. Walmart has partnered with Kobo to deliver six million eBook titles to readers in 190 countries. Kobo owns about 20 percent of the worldwide eBook market and is the leading eBook retailer in Canada and Japan.

Here’s where your print-on-demand titles should be available:

Amazon. Next…
Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble is the largest retail bookseller in the United States, with over 600 bookstores throughout the country (plus 700+ college bookstores).
Books-A-Million. BAM! is the second largest book retailer in the nation, operating over 250 stores in 31 states and the District of Columbia.
Baker & Taylor. Baker & Taylor distributes books to more than 36,000 libraries, institutions, and retailers in more than 120 countries.

To reach every single potential reader, our advice for this holiday season: go beyond the Amazon jungle and put your book in dozens of stores.

Step 5: Attract attention

Now that your eBooks and Printed books are available in stores around the globe, self-published authors must work hard to attract the attention of would-be readers. You can do this in two ways:

1. Your book cover design. A great book cover design is one of your best sales tools, instantly conveying the key thoughts, messages, and images that sum up your book. On those crowded online retail sites, it’s essential for you to stand out from everyone else. An eBook or printed book cover created by a dedicated book designer will ensure you make a professional impression.

How do you know if you need a new cover? Start out by answering these questions:

Does your cover include trends and tropes that perform well in your genre?
Is the typeface professional? Are the fonts current and appropriate to your genre?
Is the title visible and legible when viewing a thumbnail of the cover?

Of course, a self-analysis can only get you so far. You could ask some of your family, friends, and beta readers for some objective opinions using these questions:

Based on the cover, what do you think this book is about?
What is the genre of this book?
Is the text on this cover easy to read?

We’ve heard dozens of success stories from authors who made the critical decision to replace their original covers, and sales soared. Maybe your book can experience the same success.

2. Metadata. Another way readers can discover your book is anything but visual. It’s called metadata. Simply put, metadata is data about data, and it’s crucial for your book’s discoverability.

Metadata is one of the least understood components when publishing a book, but it’s critical to your marketing and sales efforts. Metadata is all the information related to a specific book, including:

Author biography
The genre and subgenre of your book
Short and long book descriptions
Keywords that will aid readers searching for your book on Amazon

Think of it this way: Browsing through online bookshelves usually begins with a search. If your metadata does not reflect what someone is searching for, no one will ever find your book.

Here are a few things you can do to make sure your metadata is up to the task of showcasing your book.

Research retailers. Go to Amazon.com, Apple Books, or BN.com and look up books like yours. What categories are they in? Study the book descriptions. See what words they’ve used to describe their books, then search for books using the keywords you found using the keyword tool.
Be consistent. Don’t put one book description on Amazon and change it around for B&N. Use similar wording for the boilerplate on your press release, book flyer, etc.
Utilize BookBaby’s metadata review service. Need another set of eyes to check your efforts? At just $99, our Book Metadata Optimization service is a great insurance policy to make sure you’ve covered all your bases.

3. Consider Social Media Ads. Authors from all genres are seeing sales by advertising their books on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. With billions of users, social media advertising can be a powerful tool for self-published authors looking to promote their books and build readership. It’s something you can do yourself with a lot of study and trial-and-error tests on each platform. Or you can make it easy on yourself and enlist BookBaby’s Ads for Authors services. We can help you tap into these huge user bases with your own targeted ad campaigns.

Step 6: Entitle yourself

It’s time to add one more title to your growing resume: writer, author, self-publisher, and now… bookseller. Tell your readers to buy eBooks and print-on-demand (physical) books directly from you and not from Amazon, B&N, and all the others. If you have your BookBaby BookShop page, you can make a lot more money by selling direct.

How do you get readers to buy your books through BookShop instead of, say, Amazon? As I mentioned, it’s important to have printed books available on Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play, etc., but the reality is it’s unlikely readers will discover self-published authors on large retail sites — especially during the holiday season. The Amazon algorithms don’t favor indie authors. Plus, you need to consider the holiday fatigue factor. Searching for different kinds of books takes time and effort. It’s awfully easy for readers to take the easy way out and order a best-seller.

So how do you take control? In talking with dozens of BookBaby authors and by monitoring sales results, we estimate that 90 percent of eBook and POD sales are a result of actively driving interested readers directly to a designated retail website. What this means is that authors already control where their books are sold by sending links through emails, texts, tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts, and promotions featured on author blogs and websites. Their faithful readers follow their instructions as to where to buy.

Selling direct to readers can have a big financial effect on your royalties. On many direct-to-reader sites, authors can see increases in both eBook and POD royalties. BookBaby has spent a lot of time and effort to build up its own BookShop program for its authors. Here’s how BookBaby authors benefit.

BookShop pays authors more. We pay 85 percent of the selling price on eBooks and a huge 50 percent royalty on print-on-demand books.
BookBaby pays authors fast. Your sales are recorded and put into your account within a week. Compare that with Amazon (100+ days), Apple Books (120 days), and everyone else in the industry.
BookBaby promises your POD title always has “in-stock” status. During the busy holiday season, Amazon often has to list POD titles as “out of stock” as its warehouses are swamped with deliveries. That’s never a problem with BookBaby: we print the book and ship it out directly to the reader. No time-consuming warehouse issues!

Features of BookBaby BookShop pages include:

Banner Creation. Create a banner link to promote your BookShop page on your personal website.
See Inside. Give readers a taste of your book with our “See Inside” feature.
Overview. Give a brief description of your book in two to five lines — just enough to whet a potential reader’s appetite.
Description. This section expands on the overview, adding more detail about why the reader will love the book.
Bio. Who are you? Why are you the best candidate to write this particular story? Are your education, lifestyle, and job relevant to your book? It all goes here.
Other Titles. Showcase your other book titles.
Book Reviews. Add credibility with author-approved book reviews.
Coupons. Use coupons and discounts to bolster your book promotion.
Customer email capture. Start to compile your list of readers when they purchase through BookShop.