Is it worth it to market your book at a discount?

It surprises me how often authors come to me and ask “Is it worth it to market my book?” Approaching a book marketer and asking that is like asking a baker if it’s worth it to try a new cake. The answer is always going to be yes. But this doesn’t stem from greed or a desire for authors to pour all their life savings into marketing only to make a small amount of it back. This instinct to market your book stems from the understanding of a very simple formula:

More books sold (or given away) = Higher chance of reader follow through
High reader follow through = High buzz and word of mouth marketing

The simple truth of the matter is that in order for you book to sell well, people must be reading it. And in order for people to read it, they must have copies to read.

This is why a major component in all pre-release book marketing is Advance Reader Copy (ARC) distribution. The more readers you can gain before the book comes out the bigger your splash on release day will be.

However, once the book is released, it is more common to run a price drop sale on the ebook instead of running giveaways. This price drop campaign sets the price of your ebook at a discount in order to entice potential readers to buy before the price returns to normal. (This is the same sales tactic major corporations use for Black Friday sales and Memorial Sales and any other Sale you can think of. Lower Price = Higher probability of sales.)

Now. There are two conflicting pieces at play here. The first is the unfortunate conundrum of publishing: It is often incredibly difficult to make money as an author. Authors, as any sane business person would, want to make money. They want to make a profit. Printed books are expensive to produce, and everyone who had a part in that sale wants their cut. The retailer, the publisher, the author, the marketing firm… All of them want their cut of the book sales. This means that even when a book is priced at $20 for a paperback, the author (at 20% royalty)* is only getting about 2 dollars per book. Why?

Print cost + Retailer discount (50%) markup + Publisher cut (minimum 20%) + Author cut (15-20% standard) = Suggested Retail Price

Example:
$13 + $6.5 + $2.6 + $2.6 = $19.50 Retail price (rounded up to 19.99 so that the publisher and the author both get a little more per sale.)

Where does an agent’s cut come in, then?

Out of the author’s royalties.

So of the author’s $2.60, 15% goes to the agent. Meaning the agent gets $0.39 per book sold and the author gets the remaining $2.20.

What about ebooks?

The production and delivery cost for an ebook is significantly cheaper. Rather than the $13 to print the book, we’re talking about maybe $0.50 to deliver the book to the reader.

Because of this, with all the math staying the same, we see something more like this:

$6.99 (suggested retail price) = $0.50 + $3.50 + $1.50 + $1.50
OR
$12.99 = $0.50 + $6.50 + $3.5 + $3.5

This is, of course, assuming that the author and the publisher are sharing profits equitably. Suddenly those $12.99 ebooks from large publishing houses make more sense.

This is also why, however, ebooks can be dropped to $0.99 for a featured deal because the production cost is still covered (that $0.50 delivery fee). Authors, in turn, make $0.10-0.20 per book sold, but the quantity of sales can occasionally make up for this.

The second conflict at play, here, is that in order to make that sales quantity to make up for the cents per sale rather than dollars per sale, an author often has to put money into marketing. This is money they are not likely to get back.

So why is it worth it to market your book even if it’s going to be a low return on investment (ROI) and is not likely to be profitable?

Intention in Book Marketing determines your view of success.

If your only intention in writing and selling books is to make a profit, I’m sorry but you’ve entered the wrong industry.

As of 2022, it was estimated one book was published every 8 seconds. (This estimate includes trade books, textbooks, and self-published books.)

To compete in that type of inundated market, you have to be willing to eat some costs in order to make your brand known.

Enter the discount ebook marketing cycle, in which you drop your ebook’s price, sell 100+ copies in a week, hit the bestseller ranking in your category on Amazon (or at least get pretty close), and then slowly return to normal sales.

Knowing ahead of time that you’re likely to make $0.20 per sale, if you spend $200 on marketing you’ll have to sell 1000 copies in order to break even. That means you have to sell more than 1000 copies to turn a profit.

Don’t get me wrong! That would be potentially life changing types of sales, not because of the money but because of the impact. More in a moment.

But if you’re measuring this by profit, that marketing was mediocre at best and a failure at worst.

However, if you’re measuring your success by number of books sold, anything that is higher than your average monthly sales would be counted as a success.

If you usually sell 300 copies and you suddenly one month sell 500 copies, that is a success (even if you only made $20).

Remember the formula from earlier on in this blog post:

More Readers = More Buzz = More Word of Mouth = More Organic Sales

The intention behind large marketing pushes like these is to create such a strong foundation of sales that as those buyers eventually turn to readers your organic sales, the sales you don’t spend money on, grow out of control.

This doesn’t always work. There is no proven formula of “run this ebook price drop six times and market it for $200 each time and then you’ll be succeeding without the marketing budget.” But statistically, the more copies you have out in the world the more likely people are to read your book. And the more likely they are to read, the more likely your sales are to grow in the future.

The return on this investment comes in the future. Not in the present.

So yes, it is always worth it to market your book if you can afford to eat the cost for a while. Because the more often you can do that, the more readers you will get, and the more full-price sales you’ll receive in return (with your higher royalty percentages).

Publishing a book requires a long-view perspective on how you’re investing in your work. This is an endurance sport, so to speak. Writing a book takes a long time. Landing an agent can take a long time. Finding a publishing house can take a long time. Editing the book to release with the publishing house can take a long time. But all of those things have an end date when eventually you no longer have to do that task for that book.

That is not the case with marketing. Marketing continues from the day you get your book contract to the day you decide you’re ready to retire from being an author. Sometimes that marketing budget will be $20. Sometimes that marketing budget will be $600. Do what you can to help your book succeed. It will always be a worthy investment. And if you’re three years in and not seeing the sales you want to see, write another book. Re-spark your passion. New books sell old books most of the time.

And if you need any help getting started with this, let’s hop on a consultation call and see where you can begin.

*This math was done with a traditional publishing contract in mind. It may not be entirely accurate as there are often other costs involved, like the shipping and distribution fees, that may either raise the retail price or decrease the publisher/author cut. Self published authors routinely make 60-70% royalties on their books because they are getting the publisher, distributor, and author cuts of the cost of the book.