Thursday, September 2, 2010

Marketing Really Does Pay Off

The past two months have been the most successful months financially since I entered the realm of self-publishing. Given the current state of the national economy I am really pleased with these results.

Since I want to replicate and improve on these results, I have spent a good bit of time in the last few days thinking about my good fortune as a self-publishing author.

The first cause I will attribute to a principle advocated by Aaron Shepard. He states in his book Aiming for Amazon that it will take a year for a book to mature and hit its stride on Amazon. The two books that resulted in the bulk of the sales have been on sale for 15 and 14 months respectively.

The second reason is one of these books peaks in sales seasonally. The book in question, Game Strategy and Tactics for Basketball, does well in the fall when school starts as basketball coaches begin to prepare for the coming season. The other season or month when sales for this title peak is during the NCAA Basketball Tournament in March and April when interest in basketball peaks.

The third reason is better marketing efforts on my part. Having recognized the fact that sales for this book are seasonal, I have done a much better job focusing my marketing efforts to the months prior to the start of the seasonal sales peak. While I promote the book year round, recognizing that there will be periods of time when interest and demand for the book will be higher has been valuable. As far as I can tell focusing my efforts during a specific time period has paid dividends.

How does this translate for a book that should sell year round? My guess at this stage is that focused year round marketing should result into improved sales on an annual basis.

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