Marketing a book

There are authors out there who will remain in humankind’s memory forever.
But I will write about the others today.
First, I will mention some performances of my books.
I have sold over 800 copies of my five books published on Amazon (print and eBook). My best-selling is These Lives with English and Romanian versions (Aceste Vieti in Romanian).
Considering that more than 10,000 pages are read on KENP (those readers paying a monthly subscription to Amazon), I can add 30-40 more (depending on how many readers went through the book entirely).
My trilogy Fracony was initially published with Ingram Spark on many channels other than Amazon, with nearly 200 copies sold worldwide. If I add all the numbers, I will be around 1000.
But I gave up publishing on Ingram Spark and republished only on Amazon. The main reasons are that Ingram Spark asks for money to publish your book, and changing your script or cover is challenging after publication. Besides, I knew some channels where they published my book (like Barnes & Noble), but I had no clue about most other places.
It is free to publish on Amazon. My author account is easy to manage and publish, and they have tools to monitor the sales. Amazon makes money from the royalties they keep for themselves for each sale. It is very easy to change the script and republish it. I did it mainly by figuring out some mistakes or changing the narrative slightly based on the readers’ feedback. It is great to have full access to your books.
Now, here comes the tricky part with Amazon. They offer specific promotions only for books published exclusively by them. And believe me, they know if you published the book elsewhere. I wanted those promotions, another reason I gave up Ingram Spark.
Why are promotions important? Amazon pushes forward a book based on sales. If, for example, someone is looking for History in Eastern Europe, the first to show up in your research are those books in the category with the most sales and reviews.
But there are no sales after publishing. So,  how do you get there? Well, Amazon promotions or other more or less dirty ways.
Let’s talk about dirty ways. Say someone wrote a good book, and the author has a confirmation with an unbiased editorial review (it costs anything from $250 to $600 CND for one editorial review from a well-known house). The writer wants to go ahead of other good books (as everyone does), and he is rich, and writing is a hobby or a sport (seeing all this as a competition). One way is to pay librarians to buy your books. If a print book is $20, you may visit a librarian and say, “Here is $600; it will cost you $400 to buy 20 of my books, plus $50 for shipping, plus $100 for you. And everything you sell is yours.”
With a few such deals, I bet a book will be #1 on new releases (whatever the book category is) for the whole period. I know that because my book THESE LIVES was #1 in the Romanian History category as a new release, with 10 (or so) print books and 4 or 5 eBooks sold. How did I do it? I announced my book’s publication on Facebook and LinkedIn (I have hundreds of connections on both), and some colleagues, friends, and maybe a few who were interested bought it.
It is similar to reader reviews. You can pay people to buy and review your book. Amazon tries to catch all this, and it is successful sometimes. Some of my reviews are from friends. Amazon deleted 2 of them (I wonder how they figured it out) but let the other 2 be posted because the guys were honest and said something like (… I know the author, and I am impressed bla bla bla…). The Amazon algorithm used to post reviews is evolving. I had a reader who said briefly, “I really liked this item,” and gave me 5 stars (thank you). That was an unusual reader review without comments about the subject. Amazon posted it only on the US site where the reader bought my eBook. Three months later, Amazon posted it on all sites I checked, including Canada, the UK, and Australia. I bet Amazon is using AI to look into the problem, and maybe the guy bought more from Amazon, and AI assumed my book might have a role. Or, maybe that simple review had another impact in some way, and Amazon promoted the review on other sites.
I found that Amazon has more than 32.8 million books when I wrote this article. The only way people see your book is through marketing. You can do it yourself on Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and X, but for most of us, sales are less than the amount spent on ads. This is the way I did it.
Also, specialized companies are doing it, and they come after you. I suspect that if you give them $2000, all they do is buy books for a few hundred dollars, and no one is reading them, and say, “See, marketing worked,” and that’s all.
Some are legitimate, doing what they are supposed to, and you must contact them. They make a selection, and you have to pay for an evaluation, which will not guarantee they will work for you. They may ask for anything between 2,000 and 20,000 or even more. But my take is that only in exceptional cases do you recoup the money from sales.
Think of someone with tons of money and wants to have fun with his books. Assuming it is a good one, spending $200,000, he may sell for $100,000 and start shouting that he has sales into 6 digits. With a few hundred good reviews, the author would be on the first page of “book search” in his category, and the sales keep coming; eventually, he will break even (marketing vs. sales) from that point on. What pisses me off is that those saying they have sales into 6 digits never mention how much they spent on marketing,
That’s the world we live in. Whoever has more money always takes a front seat, even with similar value provided.
I am an avid reader; I read a book every two or three months. I see books with 20 reviews that are not on the first page, which is better than others with 10,000 reviews and, say, have 6-digit sales.
Warning: If you randomly take a book to read, it is a good chance it is a shitty book, and you cannot go more than two pages, three pages if you are a hero, and some of them have 40-50 reviews, only 4 and 5 stars!
Maybe in one of my next posts, I will write about how I search for books I might like to read.