Email Book Marketing: The Ugly Side of Amazon Campaigns

When I released my The Truth About Book Marketing whitepaper (opt-in on the top right to get it), I didn’t have kind things to say about what’s commonly become known as “amazon bombing” email campaigns. I still don’t. But, some people misconstrued that to mean I don’t favor tapping coordinated email or blog posts to launch a book.

In fact, email can be a hugely powerful component of a book launch.

One I’ve used and will use again with my next book. It’s not email that I was railing against, but rather how it’s being used and what’s being promised to authors and list-holders by those running campaigns that bothers me.

Here’s how a typical amazon campaign works…

A book marketing company specializing in amazon campaigns solicits a lot of people with lists, blogs and followings to mail their tribes and ask them to all buy from amazon on the same day, often the same hour. Those tribe-members are supposedly incentivized to buy at the designated time and day by the opportunity to return to a “bonus” page after their purchase and download dozens (sometimes even hundreds) of supposedly high-value bonuses.

List-holders are incentivized to mail, because when they do, they get to place a downloadable product on the bonus page and visitors to that page are required to opt-in before downloading. So, the promise by campaign organizers to list-holders is that, if they mail, they’ll grow their lists in a huge way when the people from all the other people’s lists hit the bonus page, get exposed to their bonus and opt-in to download it.

What about the authors? What’s the promise to them? Often it’s that they’ll sell a mountain of books, and hit #1 in their category on amazon for an hour or even a few. They’ll then be able to call themselves a bestselling author and that will open the door to national media, giant speaking fees and riches and fame beyond compare. All in exchange for a fee that I’ve seen range from a few thousand dollars to $15,000.

Those are the promises, but the reality is often radically different…

Let’s start with the authors.

First awakening, hitting #1 in your category on amazon for a few hours does not a bestseller make. At least not on the level that will open the doors promised to you. These days, national and even local media, conference organizers and others know how easy it is to game amazon. The first question most will ask if you present yourself as a bestselling author is “what list?” And, when you tell them you were #1 in your category on amazon for 10 minutes, you’re far more likely to get rolled eyeballs than offers of cash and fame. It just doesn’t mean anything to anyone with enough savvy to pay you serious money or expose you to serious audiences.

But, what about the promise of selling tons of books?

Here, there may be some truth. But then again, maybe not.

If you get list-holders to mail millions of people, chances are you’ll end up selling books. Truth is, though, many email lists have very low open rates, so 1 million names mailed may get 50,000 – 200,000 emails opened. From there, if you’ve got home-run copy, maybe 10% click to the book sales page. So, now we’re down to 5,000 – 20,000 people. From there, a good conversion to the amazon buy page would be 10%. So, 500 – 2,000 people make it through to amazon. Then, assuming a giant conversion on the amazon page of 25%, that leaves us with 125 – 500 books sold.

Now, that’s not chump change. And, if you get 10 million people to mail, you may actually sell enough to hit #1 on amazon overall for a few hours or even a few days and make a run at the real lists.

But, truth is, it’s unlikely you’ll get anywhere near that volume of people mailing.

You’ll likely get a small fraction of that. Unless you’ve already got personal relationships who’d have mailed for you anyway, without having to pay someone else for privilege of organizing your existing friends. And, at that point, the organizers don’t provide a whole lot of value.

So, knowing that calling yourself an “amazon” bestseller has very little value and chances are the costs of your campaign were substantially more than the money you made selling those books…was it really worth it?

On to the list-holders.

These campaigns are actually adaptations of classic internet marketing affiliate campaigns. Difference being, with affiliate marketing, the merchant controls the shopping cart, they can track sales and incentivize affiliates with a substantial percentage of each sale. If you self publish your book and price it as a course ($50-100), and you care about money, not trumped up bestseller claims, you can still do a traditional affiliate campaign and make real money.

But, that becomes near impossible when you run the campaign to an amazon or even bn.com shopping cart. Because you can’t track which sales came from who. And, if you’re traditionally published, there isn’t anywhere near enough money to give list-holders to incentivize them to mail.

So, in the early days of the amazon bombing campaigns, big list-holders would join in for one of three reasons:

1. The promise to rapidly grow their lists from opt-ins on the bonus page,
2. Reciprocity – they did it for other big list holder authors, knowing their time would come,
3. Friendship – they did it as a favor for a friend or colleague.

Problem was, every serious list-holder knows that every time you mail your list, you burn a little piece of the list. People opt-out. And, the more commercial the email, as a general rule, the more people opt-out. To make it worthwhile, then, you need to derive some benefit that’s greater than the loss of subscribers. Translation, either you need to gain a lot more subscribers or make a lot of money.

But, what the savvy list-holders learned was, people weren’t returning to the bonus page or opting into their lists to get the promised bonuses on anywhere near a level that would justify the number of subscribers burned off the list by emailing. Nor were they getting paid to mail.

So, pretty much every smart big list-holder I know refuses to mail for amazon campaigns anymore.

Unless it’s as a personal favor or it’s a clear quid-pro-quo reciprocity play. But, even then, they’ll only do it for an author they know also has a giant list and who will “pay them back” when the time comes.

And, that leaves a sea of less sophisticated list-holders mailing for you.

Folks who still buy into the organizers’ promise of massive list growth and don’t quite get the concept of burning their lists. In the end, all too often, they’re the ones who get burned. They end up with a net loss of subscribers or a modest gain and a net loss of credibility and value.

Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I just don’t think that’s too cool.

On to the book buyers.

So, what about the people who buy the book on the designated day? Truth is, most either never return to the bonus page with proof of purchase. Or, when they finally get access to it, they realize the vast majority of bonuses are some form of audio, video or ebook that’s been slapped with an arbitrary value and may well have been given away for free on a number of different sites or campaigns. So, they don’t opt-in to anyone’s list. And, they lose a bit of respect for the person who mailed them to buy in the first place. Is this an across-the-board phenomenon? Of course not. But, it’s the bigger part of what happens.

And, trying like crazy to resuscitate these campaigns, some organizers have been adding high value tangible product giveaways, like iPads or cash, for people who buy the book on the campaign date. Problem is, they’re almost always run as sweepstakes or giveaways. And if you’re running this campaign in the U.S., you can’t actually require people to purchase a book in order to be eligible for the prize. If you do and you get caught, the author, publisher and campaign organizer could be on the hook for massive fines. Not something I’d want to risk…even though I’ve seen it done a number of times.

In the end…

For all but a few people who were likely already connected before the campaign, list-holders don’t get what they were looking for, authors make less money than they spent and eventually realize how little weight being a fleeting amazon #1 in your category seller carries in the worlds of media and speaking.

Then, why did I say I’m still a big fan or coordinated email campaigns as part of a launch?

Because, done right and without sketchy promises, they CAN:

• Sell a lot of books, both in bursts and over time,
• Deliver “genuine” benefit beyond reading the book to both readers and list-holders,
• Lead people into a bigger business funnel that generates far more money than you’ll ever make on the book, and
• Help drive sales in a way that truly opens doors to media and speaking.

I had coordinated emails and posts go live when I launched Career Renegade that exposed the book to millions and expect to have many times that number for my next book. But, they’ll be mailed and published not on the basis of gaming amazon or making promises that are near impossible to meet. Because, there are just too many ways to do it right, sell a lot more books and incentive both buyers and list-holders with things far more beneficial and tangible.

Something to think about when putting together your next launch campaign.

———–Tribal Shout Outs———————-

• Art of Noncoformity – If you don’t already follow Chris Guillebeau’s Art of Noncoformity blog, check it out. He’s doing great things AND launching a book this fall with a great, super-innovative campaign. Watch and learn.
• Happier at Work - Srikumar Rao, former Columbia B-School professor and genius behind the Creativity & Personal Mastery Institute is launching his new book, Happier at Work in a few weeks. It’s a great read, check it out.
• Tribal author Camp NYC | April 23-25 - Join me in this 3-day intensive workshop on author platform-building, book marketing and launch strategy (and, yes, I’ll even detail how to run ethical, highly-effective email campaigns, lol)