Email Book Marketing, Santa Claus and Amazon Bestsellers

by Jonathan

Email book marketing is all the rage…but is it smoke and mirrors?

A couple of years back, someone realized you could essentially game amazon to push your book’s rank to #1 in it’s category for an hour or two by getting as little as 25-100 people to all buy at once, then call yourself a “bestseller.”

It didn’t take long for this strategy to evolve into a more organized campaign that rallied hundreds of people to email their lists, telling them if they bought at a designated day and time, they could then go back to a centralized bonus page, provide their email and download “thousands” of dollars worth of bonuses.

Soon after, some folks started charging thousands to run these campaigns for authors and even a few grand to teach people how to do it themselves. Problem is…

It’s not like hitting the big print lists – Being #1 in your category on amazon is nice, but now that it’s well known how easy it is to game your rank for a short burst of time, a single hour/day amazon rank means very little to those who matter. Event organizers, major market media and big publishers are not going to be banging down your door.
Because you don’t need to sell that many books (and often don’t), if you pay more than a few hundred dollars, there’s a good chance you’ll still end up making far less in royalties than it took to execute the campaign.

So, is it potentially nice for the ego? Sure. Does it get you much farther than that? Rarely.

Fair disclosure, though. If you don’t really care about your amazon rank and you’re keeping a hefty percentage of the cover price because you’re self-publishing, this may still be an interesting option as a way to simply make a bit of money. In fact, the amazon campaign is really just a modified version of the launch campaigns many internet-marketers use to sell a wide variety of ebooks and info-products.

So, if you have relationships with people who happen to have giant lists, go ahead and ask them to mail. Do favors. Work out side deals. Barter. You may sell some books in a short burst. Or, if you’re self-publishing, you may actually be able to give enough of your cover price away to affiliates to incentivize list holders to mail for you without having to pony up any of your hard earned money up front.

But, I’d think seriously before you drop a boatload of money to either pay someone else to handle what’s now commonly known as an “amazon bombing” campaign or just teach you how to do it yourself.

Before you even consider it, ask them to show you how much their clients have paid to run their last 10 campaigns, how many books were sold as a direct result of their efforts and what those books’ amazon ranks were 6 months later. My bet is, the answer you’ll get will be a whole lot of hemming and hawing and “well, ya know, it’s near impossible to really calculate…blah, blah, blah.”

Not good enough…show me the money!

Understand, too, there’s a social media analog to this type of campaign that actually CAN yield tremendous results and sustained high-level sales. Get 20 top blogs to post reviews and interviews in a very condensed period of time and magic often ensues. In part, because of the power of authentic endorsed content. But, also, because while an e-mail has a shelf life of seconds and a finite number of recipients, a blog post often stays on the front page for a week and then remains public forever, driving traffic to your book indefinitely.

The question, of course, is…how do you make that happen?

Email Book Marketing, Santa Claus and Amazon Bestsellers

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