Market Your Book by Mail?
September 6, 2007 by gibsondirect
I’m often contacted by self-published authors wanting to know how to promote their book through the mail. I normally tell them two things:
- It’s nearly impossible these days to make money selling a single title book through the mail. That doesn’t mean mail in general doesn’t work any more, because it does. But response rates for a single title promotion are generally too low to pay for the cost of a mailing. It’s not impossible, but the risk is very, very high.
- There are many other cheaper marketing channels available—especially the Internet—that should be explored and tested.
Of course, if you are an author and are convinced that your book will be the exception rather than the rule, here are a few quick tips for marketing a single title through the mail.
“I’ll use an inexpensive postcard.”
Normally, the smaller the piece, the less the response. Postcards typically get very low response for book products. It’s cheaper, but it also gets less notice in the mailbox, so the risk is still very high.
“I’ll write a simple, one-page personal letter,”
Letters are probably a good way to go if you must test selling a single title book. However, while letters generally pull better response than postcards, tests show the longer the letter the better the response. A 4-page letter will normally out pull a 2-page letter. An 8-page letter will out pull a 4-page letter.
“I’ll design a large self-mailer that’s four color and looks great.”
A large, four color piece will get a lot of attention, but the cost of this more expensive piece will increase the need for even higher response. While the response may be greater than say, a postcard, it probably will not be proportionally great enough to overcome the additional costs of the more expensive piece. So, the risk is still high.
“I’ll simply pull names from my local phone book and test them.”
Mailing lists is a sophisticated, highly scientific business these days. Ideally, you will want a mailing list of customers who purchase books through the mail. Also, demographics and other factors can play a key role. As an example, gender, age, and the date of last purchase can be key segmentation elements for book products. There are professional list brokers who specialize in the list business and it’s usually wise to seek their help.
“I’ll mail in May so that readers can have my book for summer reading.”
Seasonality is important; however May normally is not a great time to mail. Typically, but not always, late December after Christmas is the best time for books. Christmas is over and cold January is coming up—folks are looking for a good book to read.
Once again, using the mail to sell your book these days is very risky, so if you must go this route, be very careful.
Having studied under you, Steve, early in my marketing career, I learned a lot of these lessons and they have proven true when I’ve used them in the future.
One thing you didn’t mention was the use of a premium to drive response. For example, if someone develops a book, it would be great to “get a free DVD” that compliments the book somehow. With today’s technology, DVDs are pretty cheap to recreate but have a good perceived value. For example, if an author is also a speaker, the DVD could be a talk or two of the author speaking on that topic. You could also have a web page with mp3 files of talks from the author, and make them password protected, with the only way to get the password being to get a code out of the book.
In nonprofits, challenge grants are similar to premiums. Our annual mailing had traditionally returned about $18,000 when we mailed it at the end of November. I was able to put a $10,000 challenge grant with it last year and it drove the response to $36,000. I talked to one man recently who told me that he had never given before, but he gave to that campaign because of the challenge. My wife always waits to give to NPR until someone is doing a challenge so her money will go further. This year I have two different $10,000 challenge grants to go with my mailing, meaning the first $10,000 that comes in will get an extra $2 for every $1. I am interested to see how this drives response.
Okay, this was too long, but, given your previous post, I’m not going to try to edit it down to one page.
John, thanks for the response. Yes indeed, premiums do help boost response, and I use them a lot. However, on a book that will bring only $15-$20, it’s still going to be tough to make it work. Even with a free premium, you’d be doing good to spend only $45 or so to get an order. Or, let’s back into it another way. Let’s say our selling price is $20. Taking into consideration print costs for the book and other minor costs, let’s say we can’t afford to pay more than $8 in advertising per customer. Without going into all of the calculations, we’d need to acheive a 6% response to reach our $8 goal. From my experience, a 2% response (even with a free premium) would be outstanding. So, while the 6% isn’t impossible, it’s a tough, tough goal to reach. The average order of only $20 is difficult to overcome with current mail costs.
Now, if you can increase the average order, say by selling more books to each customer as gifts (”buy one for yourself, buy one for your friends”), you’ll increase your chance of success. But I’d still be very careful.
As a writer, I must admit that the amount of work you are talking about is so depressing. When would you have time to do your real work - writing?
No good answer to this. We live in a world of hard realities.
Yes indeed. I bet Rod Sterling could have written a nifty script for his Twilight Zone series with this scenario in mind. The author who spends countless hours on marketing plans for his new book, and then he spends countless more hours making sure all those plans are put into action. Then the big day comes for the book to be released into stores. He’s at a book table in a big bookstore. Reporters are there. Long lines of people eagerly wait to get a signed copy. Then, the author picks up the first book, opens it, and… the pages are blank. Oooops, he forgot to write the book.
Most people think that direct mail is the easiest way to sell something. Thanks for the summary of reality.
This is a truly great post, Steve. People need to see this stuff.
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