The Book Marketing Network

For book/ebook authors, publishers, & self-publishers

I'm curious if anyone here has had any success using per-per-click advertising such as Google Adwords to market their books.

Personally, I'm a bit skeptical about using pay-per-click for marketing most books (it's very expensive), but I think it's a valuable way to discover keywords that people use to search for your topic. Lots of authors also use the Overture Keyword Selector Tool to see what people are searching for.

Those who are looking for more sources of keywords should consider opening an account with ClickRiver.com, Amazon's pay-per-click advertising network that's now in beta. It has a very powerful keyword-suggestion feature.

ClickRiver is very similar to Google Adwords, but it's a bit easier to use. The keyword-suggestion tool, I think, is its strongest feature. The suggested keywords are very appropriate to books -- for example, if you were compiling keywords about "bread baking," ClickRiver would suggest author names, title phrases, and other words and phrases that customers have used to search for books about bread. With Adwords and other keyword tools, you don't know what the mindset of the searcher was. With ClickRiver, you can be fairly sure that the objective of the search was to find a book (or other product), very possibly with the intention of making a purchase.

By the way, I don't think ClickRiver is going to be an effective tool for people who are marketing consumer books. In my opinion, there's not enough profit margin in a $20 book to pay for per-per-click ads. But I still think it's worth having a ClickRiver account, just to have access to the keyword tool.

If you want more detail on this, see my blog post.

Thoughts?

Steve Weber
Author: "Plug Your Book: Online Book Marketing for Authors"

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The one area where pay-per-click might work (at least one person has used it) is for novelists to pay to be featured when people type in their favorite authors' names. For example, if your novel is like Hemingway's writing, themes, or style, then pay to be featured when people type in Ernest Hemingway or Hemingway. Bid 5 cents or a bit more to be featured, write a good classified ad, and see whether or not it pays to have such people come to read about your novel. Be sure your novel matches Hemingway or it won't pay. Be sure your ad mentions your style, theme, or writing is like Hemingway (e.g., To read the newest novel from a writer hailed as the next Hemingway, click here for a sample chapter, or something like that).
I dropped my Google Ad Sense account, and so did our company. That said, I personally bought a book from a linked ad that appeared in my gmail...
Steve,
You might want to check out Randy Ingermanson's sites and email him about this. He has discussed it in one of his ezine newsletters...http://www.ingermanson.com/, http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/, http://www.madgeniuswriter.com/. He's a really cool guy, to boot.
Kind regards,
Deborah
The21writer@alumni.marymount.edu

My second novel is now audio – like old time radio. All you have to do is listen. It’ll make you laff. Go to www.NewFiction,com

Choose ‘Senate Parking’

Skeeze Whitlow

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