Google Adwords

The published version of Print-on-Demand Book Publishing can be purchased direct from the publisher, from online bookstores, or ordered through your local bookshop.

$14.95 from Amazon

Starting a Self Publishing Company

Questions? Comments?

Learning About the Book Market

Print advertising is for publishers who have run out of book marketing ideas. Direct mail campaigns, usually the last stop before print advertising, are expensive in proportion to the number of pieces mailed. Most direct mail pieces and magazine ads are never even read, so they can hardly have a positive impact on sales. Marketing books with Adwords or Overture is unique in that you only pay if you get a serious bite. You don't get charged just because your ad appears on a page, or even because somebody reads it. You only pay for the ad if somebody is sufficiently interested to click through to your website. Not only that, but you can start tweaking both your pitch and the audience you're pitching to within a few days and a few dollars of starting the campaign. Trying to fine-tune a print campaign requires many months and many thousands of dollars, and the result will never approach the precision of an online campaign. Just keep in mind that once you get potential customers to your website, you can't force them to buy books.

There are plenty of places you can spend advertising dollars on the Internet, some cheap and some as expensive as print ads. Generally speaking, I use advertising campaigns more to learn about the market and how demand for our titles is generated than to actually sell books. While Internet advertising can be implemented with a laser sharp focus that results in a relatively high sell-through, the cost for each successful impression, each time somebody sees your ad and clicks through to your website, can cost over a dollar in competitive areas. It's primarily a question of cost effectiveness; since our titles carry low cover prices, we can't justify much ongoing expense for each incremental sale. The two primary services that publishers can use to advertise their websites along with search engine results are Google Adwords and Overture. Amazon has also introduced paid placements for both authors and publishers, which can give quite a boost to a title's sales, considering the number of books sold through the Amazon site.

Google Adwords

The best way to learn about how people search for books on the web, as both an advertiser and an Internet user, is Google Adwords. Google continues to focus on presenting search results ranked in accordance with their industry-best algorithm, which means you can quickly find the information you're looking for without having to sort through or skip by a bunch of paid listings. The small, almost elegant, Adwords notices appear in the margin of the page, out of the way of the search results. You might think this means that nobody ever clicks on the ads, but nothing could be further from the truth. It turns out that many people go to Google because they are shopping for something. I've learned for myself, when looking to purchase electronics and computer components, that clicking on the ads that come up is a more efficient way to shop than going to the web pages that appear in the search results. While the search results are likely to be right on target for the search term, it doesn't mean that those websites have the items for sale. My own websites come out at the top of Google searches for all sorts of computer related terms, but I'm not selling those parts, just offering descriptions of how they work or how to assemble or repair them.

Google Adwords has evolved over time such that it can be efficiently applied to even the smallest book marketing campaign, simultaneously providing great insight into how people search for information. After signing up with a credit card, you start by creating a new campaign, which can contain different ads, keywords, and maximum payments. The first step is to create an ad of three short lines of text, consisting of an attention grabbing title followed by two lines (up to 35 characters per line) of detail. Then you assign the URL you want displayed, like:

www.fonerbooks.com

And the URL you want the people who click on the ad to be sent to, which may be much longer, like:

www.fonerbooks.com/book_title/adwords_campaign.htm

Next you select the key terms you want to compete with for ad placement.

After you save a list of search terms, you're prompted to give the maximum amount you're willing to pay per click-through, which I usually limit to $0.25 for book marketing. For less popular search terms where there's little competition, Adwords will often charge you quite a bit less than the maximum you select. The more you're willing to pay, the higher up the page your ad will initially appear. If there's no competition, you get promoted to the top spot at the minimum charge. Adwords also tracks the success of your ad and may promote it above other advertisers who are willing to pay more if your ad is more efficient. Simply put, if your ad attracts more people to click on it, it means more visitors for you and more revenue for Adwords than if they promoted an ad from somebody who was willing to pay more, but who's ad didn't tempt anybody.

After reviewing your search terms, the estimated cost per day of the campaign, and deciding if you want to raise or lower you maximum cost per click, you set a maximum cost per day for the campaign. Adwords will suggest an amount that should guarantee your campaign can run 24 hours a day without stopping because the day's allowance is exhausted, but you can choose a lower amount if you want. Try to resist the urge of going to Google, searching on all your terms and clicking through to your website, or you'll be costing yourself money for no reason and impacting the actual data on how successful your campaign is, which is crucial for fine-tuning.

In stock and shipping next business day.

U.S. residents can order the 171 page paperback direct from the publisher for $14.95 plus $2.25 shipping and handling (media mail - normally 4 to 14 business days). The book can also be ordered through any retail store by the title "Print-On-Demand Book Publishing" or ISBN which is: 0-9723801-3-2.

Click here for Credit Card or Amazon Orders

Starting a Self Publishing Company | Print on Demand Publishing | Offset Press Publishing | Getting Published | E-mail Morris