"You Market My Book, Then When I See It Working, I'll Pay You."

BookMarketing.pro with Bo Bennett, PhD

This is a podcast for book marketing and promotion success stories, industry insider secrets, and strategies.

Virtually every day, I am asked if we can collect our fees based on books sold rather than getting paid upfront. It's often more of an angry demand than a sincere question because so many authors have been promised fame and fortune by marketers, found neither fame nor fortune, and left the experience feeling "ripped off." This is an understandable reaction and a reasonable request. However, it simply doesn't work for self-published authors or what we do.

Reason #1: The Promotions from the Vendors We Offer Demand Payment Up Front

If we run an Amazon ad for you, we can't tell Amazon "Look, you run my ad and I'll pay you when I make money!" Amazon does not work that way, neither does Facebook, nor do any of the media companies, influences bloggers, PR services, and promoters we work with. The managers, agents, and publicists who do work on royalties (they don't work with self-published authors) still require that the author (or the publisher) cover all expenses associated with advertising.

Reason #2: We Can't Possibly Track Sales When We Don't Control The Publishing

If an author's book was traditionally published, the author's publisher would have direct relationships with all of the retailers or distributors. This includes having reliable access to sales reports. A traditional publisher's entire business is based on providing accurate sales numbers. If an author's book is self-published, we have no access to sales figures, no way of knowing all the places it is published—no way of tracking sales. And no, we can't set up a special page or promotion code to sell books for tracking. Virtually all readers are savvy enough to simply go to the retailer of their choice and search for the book, bypassing any code or page we might want them to use.

Reason #3: Sales is an Indirect Result of Many of our Services; Therefore, Literally Impossible to Track

Take, for example, our Amazon Review Push. The direct result of this service is reviews, not sales. All things being equal, the more favorable reviews a book has the more books sold. There is absolutely no way to accurately track how many books were sold as a result of the reviews. The same thing goes with business cards, social media images, keywords and categories, author central setup, etc. In fact, the majority of our services offered result in indirect rather than direct sales.

Reason #4: Many Effective Marketing Campaigns Produce Long-Term Rather than Immediate Results

There are several components to advertising: direct sales is only one of them. Also included is branding, exposure, and name recognition—all contributing to future sales and organic growth. We tell our authors that Facebook is a great way to promote your book to a specific audience, but not to expect your investment back right away. In other words, Facebook does not work well for authors for direct sales who are looking for an immediate return on investment, but it does expose their book to their market, which does contribute to long-term sales and consistent, organic growth (all untrackable).

Reason #5: Direct Sales Rarely Work for Book Sales

The reason we offer very few direct sales services is because they rarely work. These are services where an author can invest a sum of money in a month and see an immediate positive return as a direct result. An example would be a Google Ad. With Google Ads, one can track the sales that occurred as a direct result. Google Ads don't work for 99.99% of books because the profit margin is so low that bids cannot be competitive. Amazon Ads have a much better chance of success but still only work really well for a small percentage of books, and even then, the profits are usually low because Amazon won't run many profitable ads. This is because the author is competing against authors who don't know what they are doing and grossly overbidding.

Reason #6: Nobody Believes in Your Work More Than You

If we were to act as a traditional publisher, take over ownership of authors' books, and pay the author a royalty based on sales, besides having to change our entire business model, we would need to be extremely selective about the books we choose. Given that a very small percentage of books do well, statistically, we would not select your book. The reason self-publishing has exploded in the last decade is that authors have grown tired of publishers telling them that their books won't sell—and publishers are often wrong.

Again, the request is understandable. I would love to tell Facebook to run all of my ads and I'll pay them only when and if I make money from them. But they insist on charging me for the clicks, regardless of my sales figures. Likewise, we at Bookmarketing.pro charge for the services—the editing, the design work, the copywriting, the placement of ads, etc. If you are skeptical of our services and the results, we encourage you to start small. Our Just Kindle Books promotion is about forty bucks... not a huge investment nor risk. If that works for you, get another service, then another. We can't accept payment based on the books you sell, but we can help you sell more books if you're willing to invest in your own book.