How to Sell More Books With Email
By Ruth Barringham
It’s true what they say about making a living as an author; it’s easier to write a book than to market it.
If you love writing and you’re a good writer, then writing a book is easy (well, quite easy).
But the hardest part is making sales.
That’s because you’ve written a book, you’ve published it, but how do you let readers know it’s there?
This is where email comes in.
There are several different ways to market your books, but email is one of the best because you can not only reach a wide audience but you can market to them over and over again.
This means that every time you write and publish a book, you can email your potential readers straight away.
Setting Up An Email Account
The first thing you need to do is set up an email account with an email provider.
I use Aweber because they have everything I need to send and track emails plus they are easy to use.
Once you sign up for an account you have immediate access to Aweber’s whole emailing platform.
Sending and Tracking Emails
People can sign up to receive your emails through a subscription form which you create using the drag & drop form-creating tools provided.
You can have Aweber host your form on their site, or copy and paste the form’s HTML code onto your own blog.
If you don’t have a blog, you can use social media to let people know where your form is instead.
Then you can begin writing and sending emails.
You can send plain text or HTML emails using the WYSIWYG editor.
Or you can use Aweber’s email editor and free image gallery (over 6,000 images) to create a beautifully designed email template.
Your emails should engage your subscribers so that they look forward to receiving them.
Through Aweber’s dashboard you can track how many people subscribe to your list, how many unsubscribe, and track how many people open your emails and what they click on (if you’ve provided html links in your messages).
You can even link your book’s order confirmation page (or download page if it’s an ebook) so that Aweber can keep track of your sales and calculate your click-through rate, so that you know how many subscribers clicked on the link compared to how many actually bought a copy.
You can also link your blog to your account and instead of sending separate emails, Aweber will send your blog posts to your subscribers automatically. You just write and publish a post and Aweber picks it up and emails it. So easy.
Aweber isn’t expensive to use either.
And if you want to see what it’s like, you can sign up for Free.
Email marketing is something that I’ve been using for years and I earn all my income online.
So it’s definitely working for me.
And having an email provider like Aweber makes the whole process easy.