Kindle Promotion Tips to Maximize Your Newsletter Marketing Campaign

The window for marketing is pretty small. Certainly, you should never give up on a book once it’s had its major marketing push, but Amazon only gives a 3-month window to end up in the Hot New Releases section, or to benefit from other ranking factors that fade over time the older a book gets. So it can make sense to put all your eggs in one basket and try to make a giant push all at once.

Think of movie marketing – there are a few weeks of heavy advertising leading up to a release, there’s an opening weekend, and the movie will be out in the theaters for a month, maybe. Book releases aren’t that narrow, as the internet is eternal, but for a book to take off, it needs as big a push as possible, instead of a lot of little pushes, to make a real dent in Amazon ranking.

For this reason, you should stack your marketing efforts and not just rely on one marketing strategy. If you manage to get a BookBub slot, or a have a promotion with SPR’s newsletter promotions, you should not stop there. This may seem daunting if you’re already spending a lot of money on a promo, but an extra $100 or so can go a long way in making the core newsletter promo even more successful.

One of the advantages of SPR’s own Kindle promotions is that you are guaranteed a slot and a promotion date, so you don’t have to wait around for acceptance from BookBub that might not come, so you can schedule these other marketing options accordingly. Once you know the date of a newsletter, whether it’s with SPR or somewhere else, it’s time to get your book marketing plan into shape.

Set Your Price to $.99

Some authors want to keep their price at $4.99 for a newsletter promotion to help make back some of the money that went into the promotion. If you’re paying $1000 or more, it’s understandable that you want to make $3.50 you would get for a $4.99 book. Sell a thousand books and you’ll get $3500 back right away.

This makes sense in theory, but

1. Most newsletter services won’t accept a book that isn’t being discounted to $2.99 or below.
2. You are much more likely to sell books during a promotion if the book is significantly discounted.

However, it does make sense to set your book price to $3.99 or more in the run-up to a newsletter promo to show that the book has been significantly discounted during the promotion period.

Keep in mind that you should leave your book at the reduced price for 5 days or more. A newsletter promo doesn’t end the day of the promo, as it still takes time for people to open the newsletter, and your improved ranking on Amazon will last for several days after the initial push, so you should continue pushing the book after the main promo date.

Change Your Amazon Keywords & Categories

To even get into a category, you need to include specific keywords, and even then you might not make it into the top 100. Some categories are incredibly competitive, so you’ll be competing with the #1 book in all of Amazon to rank #1 in the category, so you need to know what categories are most viable for making a dent, as well as what keywords are required to rank.

SPR offers an Amazon Keyword & Category Assessment to make sure you rank high in your category, whether or not you’re running a newsletter promotion. Our Best Seller Promotions include a category and keyword assessment.

Check out our tips for selecting keywords and categories yourself.

Run Other Pay Newsletter Promos

If you’ve spent a lot for a newsletter promo, you may feel, well, spent. Relative to the cost of BookBub, there are a number of different newsletter services that are relatively inexpensive, and you should always stack your promos. As mentioned above, your Amazon rank will shoot up in the early days of the promo, so to keep the book ranking well, you should run smaller promos in the days following the big one.

Note: this can make it difficult to track which promos are most effective, should you ever want to invest again, so you shouldn’t necessarily stack promos all on the same day. Staggering promos over a five-day period will help you track sales and keep the book ranking high.

Run Free Newsletter Promos

There are also free newsletter promo sites that are surprisingly effective. The same principle applies as the above. If you add two or more promo sites on the same day, it may be hard to track, but that’s really a small price to pay for increased book sales.

Run a Book Tour

This could be most effective as preparation for a newsletter promo, as book tour hosts are known to review books on Amazon and Goodreads, so one idea would be to run the book tour a month or so before the newsletter campaign to up your review numbers and gain bookblog reviews to put in the Editorial Reviews section on Amazon.

Alternately, you could run the tour during a newsletter campaign, when people are more primed to buy the book at a reduced price. Book tour hosts tend to be very active on social media, so this can increase visibility when it’s needed most.

Here are our recommendations for book tour services.

Keep an Eye on Social Media

Many of the smaller newsletter promo sites will post their promos on social media as well. Incessantly tweeting “Check out my book” during a promotion doesn’t always go so far, but retweeting branded accounts can be both more effective and less desperate. The same goes for Facebook – it looks far more professional to be sharing a service’s post than posting yourself over and over again. Do a search for your author name and book title throughout the promo campaign and schedule your shared posts so they don’t all land at once.

Book tours are especially useful in this regard, as book tour hosts are big on social media, so you’ll have a chance to retweet their posts, in addition to posts from newsletter marketers.

Run Giveaways

Authors often run giveaways for pre-orders of a new book, but they can work just as well for discounted books. Again, book tours are very helpful here, as the book tour company can set up the giveaway for you – cutting down on you having to hound people to check out your giveaway, as book tour companies have an established base of bloggers who have their own crop of readers.

Running a giveaway on your own is a bit trickier, as you need to track if people are actually participating. So if your giveaway is – Buy my book on this day and win a $50 Amazon gift card – you need a contact form for users to prove that they have indeed purchased the book. It’s a bit cumbersome, but it can be much more effective than just imploring people to buy your book.

Run Facebook & Amazon Ads

When you’ve got a price drop for your book, this is exactly the time to funnel some money into Facebook ads. Authors do run Facebook ads year round, but most authors can’t make that kind of investment, so you should use your newsletter period to alert readers of the deal. This means crafting a post about your deal and boosting that post, or creating an ad that links directly to Amazon, which will charge per impression, rather than a base cost, as it does with a boosted post.

Amazon ads are more complicated, so your best bet if you’re a newbie is to start with sponsored products using popular authors in your genre for keywords. This process can take some time to master, so it’s best to see which keywords are working before your newsletter campaign begins, and then upping your daily spend during the promotion period.

Send Out Your Own Newsletter

The reason that many authors rely on newsletter services is for the very reason that they don’t have their own newsletter with any kind of subscriber base. If you do have a sizable newsletter, it should go without saying that you should send out an alert of a deal to your list. While people on the list may have already purchased the book, there’s always the opportunity to inform friends and family about the deal, or purchase the book as a gift. Don’t just use your newsletter for new releases.

If you don’t have much of a newsletter list, take this time to add a call to action at the end of the book you’re promoting to join the list – providing a link to a signup form on your author site.

Get Reviewed Ahead of Time

SPR’s Amazon Book Promotions don’t require a set number of reviews to qualify, as do other services, but it’s still recommended to have a few reviews posted to help readers make a purchase. Our recommendation would be to purchase a Reviews Package before submitting your book to other newsletter marketing services. The barrier of entry for reviews can be pretty high – especially for Bookbub, but even for smaller services – so if you sit around and wait to reach the threshold, you may be waiting a while.

Book tours are also a good source for Amazon and Goodreads reviews, but these will primarily be unverified reviews via a free download, rather than a purchased book, which has a better effect on ranking. It’s also possible that newsletter services will not hold unverified reviews to the same standard when assessing a book.

Don’t Expect Newsletters to do All the Work

In short: just because you’re hiring someone else do the work doesn’t mean your work is done. One might be led to believe that if you have a promo coming up that’s due to make a major dent, you can rest up and do nothing, and then do the small stuff at other times to keep the momentum going. While you should be running smaller promotions year round, it’s a very good idea to crank up the marketing power when you have the opportunity to really make an impact. If a newsletter promo can get you into the top 100 in the whole Kindle store, adding some extra marketing muscle to your promotion could get you even higher.