This episode is being released on November 1st, when holiday shopping season is upon us. That begs the question: how can you make sure your book makes it into gift bags and stockings this year? Many authors will offer sales on their books on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. And, although price cut can definitely entice shoppers to buy your book, sometimes you need to sweeten the deal even more to actually make the sale.
Today’s episode will walk you through some ideas for how you can get a Black Friday boost for your book sales, beyond simply marking your book down for a day or two. If you find the right offer that your audience really wants, you’ll sell so many more books than you would have by just offering 20 or 30% off your book. And, toward the end of the episode, I’ll walk you through the steps that you should take NOW in the beginning of November so you’re prepared for your sale when it happens.
TRANSCRIPT: BLACK FRIDAY BOOK SALE IDEAS (BEYOND A SIMPLE DISCOUNT)
(This is a direct transcript of the episode. Please excuse any typos.)
I have four ideas to share with you today for different sales that you could offer for your book, besides just offering a discount and the first idea is to bundle your book with other books or eBooks that you have. So here are some examples of this idea. The first example would be to just take that book and to bundle together all of the different versions. You have it, all of the different formats so you can bundle your eBook and your print book, for example. If you have an audio book version of that book, make sure to include it in that bundle to. But what that does is it gives people different ways to digest your book and that can be really nice for a lot of people who say somebody likes to read ideally from a paperback, but maybe they’re traveling somewhere or they get stuck somewhere and they want to read the eBook because they don’t have the paper book with them.
Well, if they have all of the different options available, it makes it a lot easier for them to digest your book in different ways. So just offering that bundle of all of the different formats of your book can be really valuable, so consider doing that. Another option would be to bundle all of your books together at a discounted price if you’ve written and published more than one book. So, you could do this for eBooks, you could bundle them together, either bundle, like if you’ve written more than two eBooks, you could bundle all of them together or you could create bundles of similar books if you’ve made a lot of them. So one’s that kind of go together with a theme. So it just kinda depends on how many books you’ve written, what kind of topics they’re on and what would make sense in terms of marketing a bundle to your readers.
Similarly, if you have print books, you offer a sale where people could get a discount if they buy all of your paper books together at once and then they get a nice little library of books and you wind up making some good money from the sales. Another option here would be to bundle your eBook with other digital downloads you offer or if you have other physical products that you create, you could bundle your book with that to say that you also have a journal while you could send out your paper back with your journal or if you have water bottles or some sort of other swag. You could have a sale where if somebody gets a water bottle and a tee shirt and your book that gets marked down for example, or if you have workbooks that you sell online, like digital workbooks, you could always bundle those with your eBook and have a sale on that, but the idea here is that you’re providing more value by including more things in the bundle and then giving a discount on that bundle.
So what you would do essentially is add up all of the individual prices for all of the things you’re selling. Have that total, and then take a discount off of that. And in general, a lot of people will do 20 to 30 percent and that works. If you want to discount it deeper than that, you can. If you feel like you’re providing a lot of value already and you don’t want to do a deeper discount than that, or if you want to even do 10 to 15 percent off, that’s fine too. It really depends on you and your audience of what will motivate them to buy. So just keep that in mind when you are pricing your bundles and that really applies to any of these ideas and then also make sure that you have that total. So the total value, what they would pay if they bought everything individually because you can use that in your marketing and say, hey, instead of paying $50 for all of these books, you’re only gonna pay $30 today if you buy on black Friday.
So take advantage of that sale. And just knowing that price difference in hearing or seeing that price difference can actually really entice a lot of people to go ahead and jump in on the deal. So just keep that in mind. Idea number two for a bundle is to bundle your book with your course. And this of course works if you have a course. Uh, but so this can be a great way to boost your sales over black Friday. So, if your big goal was to get a lot of people enrolled in your course by having a sale on your course on black Friday, if you bundle it with your book or eBook, it can make that seem even more valuable. And this is especially effective if your book compliments the content of your course. Like if you talk about some similar things because your book is just another medium where you’re teaching the same ideas, but if it’s just kind of vaguely complimentary, it can still be a good bonus as well.
So some examples for how you might put together this type of bundle. It could say if somebody buys your course at full price, they’ll get a free copy of your book, whether it’s print or eBook or you could even offer. If you have multiple books, you could offer copies of all of your books if they’re related. Another option would be to discount the course and give away a free copy of your book. So when you bundle with the book automatically the value goes up. Because you’re attacking the value of the book onto the value of the course, but if you want to do an even deeper discount and again try and get even more people to buy the course than offering a discount off of the course and then also adding in a free copy of your book as a bonus. That can be really, really enticing.
I do want to note that this works amazingly when you have a print book and I know it can be really tempting to just send out any books, send out a pdf because it doesn’t really cost you anything to do that, but getting something in the mail, getting something like actual physical, tangible that can really set people over the edge of, I’m not sure if I want to buy two, I am in. I want this, so if you do have your book in print, really consider having your black Friday bonus be a print copy of the book because that can really be extremely enticing to a lot of people who doesn’t love getting stale male these days. Right? Idea number three is to bundle your book with your services. So how would you do this? You would send out a copy of your book, ideally a print copy, because again, people love getting things in the mail, but it can be an eBook and send it out to anyone who buys a package of your services from you or you know if you have a consulting package or even if for example, if you have a service that’s a sort of a monthly retainer sort of service where somebody signs on and they sign up for it, let’s say like a three month contract or even a one year contract.
You could send them a free copy of your book or if they have clients who might benefit from your book. You could even do something where if they send up for three months with you, they get one copy of your book. If they sign up for 12 months with you, they get five copies of your book or something like that. It really varies from Nice Niche and what you do, but just something to think about in terms of additional ways to bundle to really entice people to sign up for bigger packages with you and longer term contracts with you really just to help bring in your income and for this, again, you could either also include a discount on your services or you could have the bonus just be your book. It works either way, really comes down to what your audience is looking for, how big of a deal they’re looking for, and really how your services are especially priced on what they’re at.
So why does this work? Well, people can get started with your book and then when they’re ready to jump in with your service, they’re ready for that. So this is particularly true. For example, if you meet with people and do strategy sessions, maybe they book their first strategy session a couple of weeks after they buy it and that’s particularly true. If your calendar is already booked up for the next couple of weeks, well your book and give them a way to get started immediately, and this can actually be really effective if you give them both a digital and a print copy of your book because you can send out that eBook immediately. There are ways to automate the delivery of that eBook so they can get started right away. They can dive in while they’re excited and they just got this and then your print book comes in the mail a couple of days later and then they are ready to jump in with you because they’ve already gotten started.
They’ve already figured out the first steps where they need to be going. So it can just be a really great way to complement your services. Especially if your book relates to your services, which in most cases it well and it can be a good starting off point to. For somebody who’s new to working with you. If your book helps them get started and helps them ask the right questions. While that can speed up the whole onboarding process to working with you and ultimately it can make the process of working with you more efficient and it can help you in the long run. And then the fourth idea I want to share with you today for bundling your book and making it really enticing for black Friday sales is to do a partner bundle with other authors. So this you’ll usually see called something either just calling it a bundle.
Sometimes you’ll see it called a compilation. Sometimes you’ll see these listed as a box set and you can even call it a puck set if it’s a digital version. If it’s an eBook that’s absolutely done regularly, so you can use that term too if you’re an eBook author. So what do you do for this? You find other authors in your niche who are interested in bundling their books with yours. It’s pretty simple. You can just email them, let them know about your idea, let them know maybe around how many books that you are hoping to include in the bundle. It could be as simple as two or three. You could do up to five, even up to 10. It just depends on how you want to do things and how many books you want to include in the set. Some benefits of doing this is that you’ll reach a wider audience when everybody, all of the authors in the bundle promotes it, so you’ll actually make more sales and you’ll reach a bigger number of people too, so essentially work will get introduced to more people and that’s more people who know about you and it just helps expand your visibility and your reach.
One thing that I want to make sure you think about is that this can get a little tricky in terms of who gets paid what. It’s definitely doable, but I think that you should sit down and figure out some ground rules, so think about who’s going to get paid, what percentage and if your taking care of putting the bundle together. For example, if you are coordinating everything, if you are spearheading it, you might want to negotiate that. You’re going to get a slightly larger cut of the profits because you’re doing some extra work, so just something to think about. Really what I want you to do is get everything, all of the terms in writing before you get started, before you sell the bundle, just to make sure that everybody’s on the same page. And something else you might want to talk about too, is that if the system you’re using to sell those bundles, if it collects email addresses, you may want to talk through whether or not everybody will get access to those email addresses.
Because those could actually be valuable people to add to your list. Depending on where you live. Uh, just make sure that you have the rights to email them. Some countries don’t allow that, but if your country does or again, look at your local laws, but if it’s an option, you could either email the people and ask them if they would like to be on your list. Or You could simply add them to your list. Again, figure out what’s legal in your country or the countries from which the people are subscribing to make sure that you’re not breaking any laws, but that can be a great way to build your list and again, get in front of more people and have a wider base of leads for your business. You can make more money and that’s even true if you’re just an author, you should still have a mailing list and when you have a bigger mailing list of people who are interested in your books, when your next book comes around, you have more people to email to buy your new books.
So just keep that in mind when you are doing those partner bundles because it can be a great way to build your list as well. So those are my four ways that you can do some clever bundles on black Friday or cyber Monday so that you can sell even more books. So what do you need to do now though to get ready for that? How should you be marketing your sale? And really how should you get started? So we’re in the beginning of November. I think you should start hinting at your sale right now or as soon as you finalize it, even now you can say to your audience that you are working on a special black Friday deal or cyber Monday deal or however you want to do it. Just make sure that you’re talking about it often, like multiple times a week if not every day because we’re just a few weeks out at this point so you want to make sure people are hearing about it because here’s the deal.
People get inundated with messaging really all November long, but especially the closer it gets to Thanksgiving and the holiday shopping season. People are going to be getting all sorts of advertising through social media on websites. They’ll be getting it in their emails and so you have to really mention it a lot of times so it sticks in their brain so that they will then want to go ahead and buy it. At this point, you don’t necessarily need to give away all the details. In fact, you could wait until sale day to give away the details or maybe the day before, you don’t have to know it all, but just get them interested. Say that you’re putting together a really special package for them that you think that they’re going to love and keep an eye out for more details and you can even say that you’ll release all the information on Black Friday, but make sure that they’re on your list and that they’re following you on social so that they get notified.
But then keep mentioning it day after day, like I said, at least multiple times per week, if not daily so it sticks in their head so that when the sale rolls around again, they’re excited for it. They’re ready for it. They’re watching for your email so it doesn’t get lost in all of the other emails and all of the other sale messaging that they’re going to be getting around this time of year, which you know it because you’ve experienced it. So again, just make sure that you’re talking about it now. Talking about it often. And then also, I would encourage you now early in the month to plan out your marketing for the sale and particularly the week leading up to your sale. Make sure that you know what you’re going to talk about, how you’re going to entice people to buy the bundle, and if you can write it out ahead of time and schedule it ahead of time.
This includes your social media posts, your emails. You can use different scheduling software or some platforms like Facebook allow native scheduling. Most email providers will allow you to schedule emails, just kit all of that lined up because I know so many of us that week, especially if you’re doing things with your family or friends for Thanksgiving, it gets really busy and so that can make it hard to set aside time to stay on track with your marketing. So as much as you can automate it and schedule it now or even make it easier for yourself. If you can’t automatically things, then at least have your graphics and your copy. The words of your posts written out. So all you have to do is copy and paste that and make it really easy for you the week that you’re going to be busy and to do that, really just have it all done ahead of time.
If you can, again, I really encourage you to take some steps now at the beginning of the month to get prepared. That’s gonna. Make your life so much easier on black Friday or cyber Monday you prefer to do with your sale and you might even consider doing the same thing for December to just to make sure that you are not getting behind with all of the staff that goes on with the holidays. It gets to be a very busy time and so the more you can do the work ahead of time, the more you can get scheduled now, the easier it’s gonna. Be on you later. Okay, so I hope that I have sparked your imagination that I have given you some great ideas that hopefully you’ll act on at least one of them to help you increase your book sales on Black Friday or cyber Monday. Good luck with that and I hope that you can find a bundle that truly speaks to your audience so that you can really pad your bank account and make the most of this holiday shopping season. If you have enjoyed this episode, please go rate the podcast wherever you subscribe to your podcast, whether that’s apple podcasts, Stitcher, I know I personally use podcast addict. Whatever it is, please go and leave a rating. Those really helped me reach more people, which means that more listeners are going to become authors, make more books, and be able to grow their businesses with their books. So all good stuff. Thank you for listening and until next time, happy writing.
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