Tao Wong
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Business Post: Why Your Books Don't Sell
🕑 Added 2025-01-29 14:00:01 +0000 UTCYou've got a new book out, it's not selling. Or isn't selling well at all. You're wondering why, and you just don't know how to figure it out. Well, that's what this entire article is going to be about. Think of this more as a flowchart than a prescription, though obviously, once you understand the problem, it can often lead to finding the solution.
Generally speaking, I break up problems on why a book doesn't sell into three categories:
Awareness Issues
Distribution Issues
Conversion Issues
Awareness Issues
Simply put, are enough people aware of your book so that you are able to generate sales? It's worth realising that most ecommerce stores see a conversion rate of 1-3%. That is, of 100 people coming to their store, 1-3 of these visitors will buy anything. Obviously, it depends on the type of traffic driven; but it's a good rule of thumb.
So, the first and major question is - are enough people aware of your book?
- what promotional efforts are you taking, what is the effectiveness of those promotional efforts and how many people (in total) are seeing your promotions for the book?
- secondly, if you are getting a lot of views and impressions, who is seeing these promotional posts? Are they the correct audience? Are they book buyers or someone entirely unrelated?
If you are not certain if you are targeting the right people, it's always worthwhile to look at your competitors. Do competitor research, to see not only where they are selling and how they're selling / promoting their work, but also; review their ratings and rankings. If they have a lot of ratings and reviews, there is likely a market out there - especially if it's not just a single outlier but a large number of competitors.
If you have no competitors on the other hand, or have trouble finding them, or they have few ratings and reviews and their Amazon ranks are really low, it might be a market problem. It's possible your market is either hard to target or very small.
Distribution Issues
The next problem, if you are selling to a larger - or decently sized - market can be a distribution problem. The questions to check here - often by checking against your competitors are -:
- what kind of products do they have (print, ebooks, audiobooks, etc.) and how do they distribute? Are they more traditionally published or indie published? Do they do most sales in bookstores or online? It's possible you're targeting for sales online when the sales are in print and vice versa.
- furthermore, this is the time to look at the wide vs kindle unlimited / exclusive discussion. What are your competitors doing? If the majority of your competitors are doing one or the other, it's quite possible that is the way for you to go.
On a caveat on this - it can sometimes be useful to go opposite, to target the smaller market because there are fewer competitors (i.e. being in KU when everyone else is wide or vice versa). However, it's also worth noting that being widely distributed makes your awareness issue greater, as you need to work on increasing awareness in ALL the retailers, rather than just to Amazon.
Conversion Issues
More often than not, this is where many new independent authors fall short. This is where their ability to package their book falls short and why, they often find themselves far below the 1-3% conversion rate I've spoke of before.
For book packaging, we are often talking of one of three things - cover, title and the product description (often called a blurb).
- for covers, check the top 100 in your category. See if your cover matches similar books, gives people at a glance (1 second or so) enough information to decide that your book is in the right genre, that it includes things that they are interested in. Remember, your book cover is a billboard, flashing by a reader moving at a hundred kilometers an hour. They are not taking the time to look at your work closely, they have a fraction of a second to decide before they flip to the next thing.
A bad cover doesn't necessarily mean bad art - it means that the cover does not signal the tropes and genre and contents at a glance, in a thumbnail and in B&W.
- this is, for the same reason, why reviews and ratings and other social media proof can be so powerful. Ways to showcase that others have bought and read the work, even if the reviews are generally lower than 5 stars, can still be good. At the very least, if you have a few good reviews, it shows that the product has been tested by someone else.
- furthermore, look at your title. If your title is boring, it's not the end of the world. If your title is off-putting, it might be a problem.
- product descriptions (blurbs) and titles MUST be checked for spelling errors, for grammar issues, for clarity. If you have problems with any of those, the visitor to that page will assume they'll see that same problems in your book and you'll lose the sale(s).
- finally, as a bonus, check your 'look inside' or sample sections. See if your sample reads well, if it's interesting. Not everyone checks the sample, but it can be very important to readers. So, make sure your front page catches readers.
Final Thoughts
Note, I've not said anything about the content beyond the final bonus option. The reason for that is that with the right packaging, the right covers and with a wide enough net, you should be able to generate some sales. The tricky part, of course, is getting more than a few sales - and getting readers for future books.
That's where craft comes in, where writing a good book and leaving your readers happy and hungering for more becomes important.
This? This is just a checklist to look at if you're doing enough to get the first few books sold.
Comments
Tao Wong
Yup! So very true. Without traffic, what's the point? And it's not just traffic, but the right kind of traffic too. We get a lot of traffic too the Shopify but at least half are there to read Climbing so wrong traffic for direct conversion
Tao Wong
That's certainly a thought! We can try don't that in the future.
David Packer
Solid advice. We had similar guidelines in Merchant Support at Shopify. If a shop was getting less than a 1000 visitors a day, then we advised them to spend all of their efforts on getting more traffic. Once they passed that threshold, then we would get them to 2% conversion by looking at the layout, flow to checkout, etc. After that, we'd start to look at SEO tuning, pageload, product layout, A/B testing and all the other fun stuff. But without that initial traffic load? We found the return on doing the fancy stuff was pointless. Awareness is #1
Bea Winters
Thanks for this! It's good to see such a clear, concise distillation of the marketing advice out there, which can be pretty overwhelming sometimes. This streamlines and organizes the thought process behind it all. If you ever feel like posting a "case study" of how you've diagnosed and fixed a particular sales issue with one of your new or past releases, I'd be interested in reading that too. Seeing how the principles apply to a working problem is valuable.
