64: Book Launch to Consistent Sales Case Study

Welcome to the Book Marketing Show Podcast, where each week we'll show you exactly how to sell more books and have fun doing it. And now, your host, Dave Cheson.

Hey guys, welcome to the Book Marketing Show podcast. I am so glad you were here. Today, we're going to do another one of our case studies, and I've got a really cool treat. Amy Lyle. who is the writer of the Book of Failures. Amy, thank you so much for coming on to the show. Thank you for inviting me and hello from Atlanta. Hello from Franklin.

One of the things I love most about your story is the thing that got you to actually write the book. Would you mind sharing with us what that was? Yes. It's also an embarrassing moment, a failure of sorts. It was a corporate trainer. I wrote a lot and a playwright. I was a playwright for a big nonprofit group. And I wrote a full feature film, a comedy, 90 pages. And I wrote it under the mentorship of a guy that worked for Disney. He vetted films for Disney.

And when we were done, he's like, hey, you're done. You need to contact an entertainment attorney. You need to get representation. I said, okay. He gave me his attorney. It's a guy in LA. He warmed up the call, sent him an email that I was going to be calling.

And I called him. I said, hi, this is Amy Lyle. And he said, I know who you are. I don't care how funny you are. I don't care how funny the screenplay is. You're no one. You don't know anyone. You don't have any money. I'm not representing you. I said, that makes me very, very sad. And he started giggling and he said, actually put an expletive in there, Dave. I figured. Good for you for keeping us clean.

And he started laughing. He said, call me back tomorrow. I'm going to give you some free advice. He said, you need to get on the map. When I search your name, Amy Lyle, your name better come up tied to something in comedy. And he said, so you need to write a book or start a blog. And I said, what would I write about? And he said, write what you know. And he put an expletive in his sentence with that too. And hung up.

And immediately my mind went to, I have had a lot of failures. I started writing it that day and that's how that started. And I wrote the book of failures. Less than a year later, the book of failures came out. All right. So you, out of the blue, decide to write a book, right? Yes. Now, of course, you've got the chops, which is cool. And you constructed an incredible book. I mean, 194 reviews.

We're, what, 4.3 stars. So, I mean, you really knocked it out of the park. So, what was your thought process like? I'm just going to release it into the world. What was your plan? Time was of the essence and so I needed to get this book out and get as much press as possible.

I do stand-up comedy. I love comedy. My movie is a comedy. And so it felt really natural for me to write little vignettes, their essays, funny essays. And so I wanted to get to market as fast as I could. And so that's why I did Create Space.

Okay. So you then created it. And what was your launch like? I'm not going to lie. I've heard this story before, guys, and I love this one. Okay. I didn't know what I was doing other than I didn't know how to do AMS ads because I'd watched every single video that you had ever done. So I was prepared that way, but I was kind of like go big or go home. So I had a launch. I have some girlfriends that are big time event planners.

I have a girlfriend that's a plastic surgeon. She was on Atlanta Housewives. I invited her to be my emcee. We gave away over 200 prizes, including plastic surgery, different gift certificates and things. I also offered free booze. That is always helpful. And we had 333 women come. I mean, a lot of people came in. They invited their whole book club. And so it was an amazing event.

I read a few chapters. People were laughing. There was dancing. There was a DJ. But really, it was like a night of celebrating women. It wasn't just my book and me reading the book. I had guests there that had changed their life after 40 or pursued their passions and things like that. I had studied your stuff enough to know that what I wanted was to everybody to buy the book, the ebook, you know, like a three, two, one, buy it because I wanted my book to rank it number one out of the park.

And so it was like three, two, one after this party. And when 333 women try to get on the internet, it crashed the server. And so nobody could buy a book at the launch that cost more than a wedding. The next day, I sold 500 books. And the next day after that, I sold 500 books. And the next day after that. And so it launched beautifully, expensively, but beautifully and got off to a big boom to start out with.

What I love most about this story is it contradicts a bit about what I talk about, which is awesome because I've always been kind of against a lot of the, what I call traditional marketing efforts. There are a lot of authors that come up and say, oh, I'm going to go to a... book fair. I'm going to set up a table and I'm going to sit there. I got my local bookstore to do a signing and they get excited about it. I'm like, that is cool and that is awesome and I love the whole community thing.

But the sad truth is most of you are going to kind of sit there by yourself and be like, oh man, you know, and it might get a bit awkward. And there were a couple of these traditional marketing efforts out there that just don't have teeth. But what I love about what Amy said was that she went for it.

She created something incredible. She had a background with connections and networking. She didn't just do something kind of laissez-faire here. I mean, this just sounds awesome. I'm not gonna lie. Like, I mean, I know it's like a women's group, but I would have gone if I had gotten an invitation because that would have been cool.

And she got incredible results from that very traditional in-person network point. I wanted to highlight that for any of you guys who've heard me talk about it. There's a difference between what I was talking about before. and what Amy did. So, that is just a good example of you could hear about a tactic, and if you don't do it really well, it's just not going to come to fruition. So, Amy, I really loved that you shared that.

All right. So you just got this huge push, right? I mean, we're talking 500 sales the first day, 500 sales the next day. Your Amazon bestseller rank must have been awesome. Yes. Okay. So then what happened?

Okay, well, it went great. Really, it went great. And I booked out of that large engagement. I got a lot of press about it. And so that gave me something to kind of talk about with social media. That was fun. Nobody wants to hear buy my book, buy my book every day on social media. You could put fun things on there like, thanks for featuring me. And I mean, some bigger things like I'm in Atlanta, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Okay, I'm not saying this is going to happen to your audience. I'm just saying this happened to me. But I got picked up by a television show that I've been on every two weeks for the past year and a half, a morning show. And so that was fun. And I do a lot of speaking engagements to large groups, large groups, over 100. When I say speaking engagements, truly speaking engagements, talking about changing your life after 40 or following your passion or.

So publishing type things with library systems, but I also do a lot of speaking engagements like emceeing events. I emcee charity events. Just recently I emceed, this was so fun, it was called Buzz Before the Bee, and it was an adult spelling bee charity event. All the money went towards literacy.

And what they do is they get you all boozed up on drinks and then you have to spell things. Super fun. And out of that, they introduced me several times. Plus I was in their marketing as an author with the book name. I was on their social media. I was on what they handed out. The local paper was there and invited me to do a podcast. It cost me a lot of money to launch something big, but almost every time I've done an event, I'm able to book the next event.

And I would agree with you, Dave, 100%. If somebody asked me what you should spend your money on, I would say Amazon advertising. Do not get in your car and drive two hours to do a book signing and sell four books. But if you can get larger speaking engagements, then you will sell a lot of books.

So a big thing that happened here was that you did a huge launch, but you didn't just kind of sit back on your laurels and ride it out. Instead, you had a systematic plan. Now, a lot of people may be saying... And, you know, Amy alluded to this too. I can't throw an event like that. Okay, I got it. Or it's not going to be you who's going to be put on these TV shows or have any of those connections. Got it. But this is symbolic of marketing across the board.

Amy did a big promotion, a big push, and then immediately had plans for more things. She was on podcasts, blogs, TV shows, and so forth, and those kind of things helped to keep... people talking and seeing, but she also included Amazon ads. And we're going to get into that in a bit. I want to kind of dig into what she did and what effect that had. But here's the kicker part, guys.

If you have a big sales spike, if say she had just gotten those couple days of 500 and then she just stopped everything, her sales would have dropped. And when your sales drop, a couple of things happen. Number one, well, you don't have more sales, got it. But number two though, is that Amazon as a search engine is thinking, oh, she's no longer relevant. This book is no longer something we should be pushing and showing and having in the search results. And all of that would have dropped.

But because she started to continue to do these things, to have it be seen, have people be drawn to it, it only kept the book in relevancy and kept making it show up in front of more customers every day. All right, so...

While you were doing all these things, you were doing Amazon ads. What was that like for you? I fumbled around. I think I had like 20 ads going at first. I was a little gung-ho. I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing, so I'm going to do everything and a lot of it. That was my strategy. Throw it everywhere. So I would look at the return on investment and the conversion rate. And within a few months, you started to see really where your buyers are.

I was like, funny memoir, funny essay, humor essays, humorous essays, funny nonfiction, funny short stories. I mean, you name it, I was doing it and it weeds itself out. And so now, you know, I've got it down to less ads, but they're more effective.

And what I like about that too, though, is that you were experimenting and you were gaining insight. I try to tell people every day that when you're doing Amazon ads, you never know what's going to happen. You never know what's going to be the keyword that's like, oh, like this is totally working. But as you go through and you test, you'll start to learn where your market is, what they're engaging with. And you also start to feel out where Amazon lets you actually.

bid to slash get impressions. But all of this is all about experience. You said you took my course. There's enough knowledge right there. And it's a free course, everybody. Just go to amscourse.com. That's enough knowledge to give you an understanding of what to expect and do it. But Amy, you then kept doing it and you were learning and gaining that super crucial thing called experience. And when you combine knowledge plus experience, you develop...

intuition and intuition is key. So you were doing AMS ads and then you had a hiccup. Okay. Tell me about the crash. Okay. Well, something very exciting happened. Amazon sent me an email. And they said, hey, we'd like to feature your book as a book of the month or feature daily deal or something. They say, you don't have to do anything with your pricing. We handle it for you.

However, there's this weird spacing issue in your book. We would like you to fix it. And I was like, oh, no problem. So I sent it to someone to reconvert it. And it looked perfect before. I couldn't even find the spacing issue. They gave me the page and I gave it to the person. But when the person reconverted it, it created a disaster.

And I didn't look at it. She just loaded it up. The pictures were crazy. If there was a footnote, it had like a giant number. It was a mess. This went on for months. The odd thing is Amazon ran the daily deal with this book like this. And so it's like, it must've just been looking for the correction. I don't know. But my sales plummeted. I didn't know until somebody did a review and they're like, oh my gosh, this book is hilarious.

However, the formatting is really wonky. And I was like, what? And so then I had it reformatted and then I kind of had to start over again. And I really needed something to kind of like refresh the book. And that's when I started applying, which I got from your list, you know, top book marketing firms. And I had been rejected three times by BookBub.

And I only got accepted in the UK and I think India, the markets. But the couple days before the BookBub launch in those markets, they emailed me and they said, hey, somebody canceled, dropped out. for the United States launch. Would you like that promotion? And I said, yes. And so I finally got a BookBub deal. What do you think was kind of a key reason as to why you finally landed the BookBub deal?

I think it was a combination of steady because book pub normally honestly only takes to my understanding because I'm a subscriber to them. It's like Tina Fey's book, Kevin Hart's book, Trevor Noah's book. They're big names. It's John Grisham. But I had steady sales and I was in the top bestseller list in a big category, you know, humor and entertainment for over a year. My sales were steady and I went ahead and dropped it to 99 cents.

Nice. All right. So a lot of that was that consistency that we talked about. Again, not sitting back on your laurels with a good first launch, but the things you kept doing. Bummer about running into the formatting. And by the way, other than the obvious one of be sure to check the product before you put it out there, was there any lessons learned that you got from that or anything you would have done differently?

Dave, the list is so long, I don't even know where to start. I released a second book recently, and I thought I nailed it on the keywords. You and I talked about that in the subtitle has a funny memoir. And so if somebody searches a funny memoir, it comes up very high. My second book, it has as a subtitle, a collection of funny essays. So it ranks very high.

As far as the search ability on search engine, it ranks really high. And I've learned to study back and forth and back and forth the keywords that you put in AMS. And that's really what they are. People are like, oh, it's just a subtitle. It's just a title. You're missing the mark if you think that way. That drives the SEO as well. Very powerful tools are your title and your subtitle. Yeah, absolutely. So I think I nailed it the second time better than the first time. Well, that's awesome.

You had your snafu, but then you had your BookBub deal. What were the results from BookBub? And then what did you do after that? Okay, the results were great. It's debatable. I stayed in KDP. I'm a KDP select member and I make about $500 a month from the page reads. I've been really happy with KDP and I kind of didn't remember to get out of KDP select going into the book bub.

promotion. So it was limited. People had to buy the ebook from Amazon. However, I sold around a thousand books that month because my book bub hit October 1st and I sold 500 books that day. And then, you know, people don't open their emails for a couple of days or whatever. And so you could see the next day I sold 100 and then the next day I sold another 100. And then after that, 50 and after that, 40. And so, you know, it had kind of a residual thing.

So it really rejuvenated the book. I made a little bit of money dropping the book to 99 cents is hard, but I did get a return on my investment. I got a lot of reviews and refreshed my reviews on Amazon. And I also got a lot of reviews popping up that people recommend the book that read it from BookBub, which was really exciting. And it prompted me to advertise on BookBub, which I had never done before. Nice.

What came next after BookBub? What did you kind of keep doing? Or did you just kind of stick with AMS? And wasn't there something that came to fruition after all this? Great, exciting things for the book. It relaunched it. But something even bigger, which is what I wanted when I wrote a book in the first place, was I landed a movie deal, which was very exciting with films fall 2019. That is so cool. So exciting.

That's awesome. And I'm not gonna lie, after it's all said and done, after the movie is out and everything, I would really love to have you come back on the podcast because I would love to hear about the whole screenplay process. There are a lot of authors out there that have...

done incredible things with their books and believe that their books could be converted into a movie deal. And I would love to just pick your brain about some of the things you learned about writing for movies and anything you learn from book to movie transitions, things like that. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. It's funny because in a screenplay, I'll just share this really quickly. If you can say something in three words rather than four, say it in three. It's kind of the opposite where everybody's obsessed with your word count, word count, word count in a book.

But in a movie, you want to show and not tell. But my books really reflect that too. As I mentioned, I'm a stand-up comedian. And so my books aren't wordy. They're not flowery. They're really like little Saturday Night Live vignettes. So I have to get my word count from just writing more stories, more chapters. When reading your book, it felt like you were up there, you were talking, you know, it was being entertained.

good to have with a scotch, you know? So that's excellent. That's the best review, Dave, is when someone's like, I had a bad day and I read your book and I feel better. I feel better about being a mom. I feel better about being a wife. I feel better about everything.

These people are lying on Facebook. I know this is what's really going on in people's homes. That tickles me when they feel better about themselves. Like, I'm not doing so bad. Everybody's got failures in their lives. That's right. The book of failures. Well, awesome. Well, hey, Amy, thank you so much for coming on to the show, really. We'll have to have you back. I would love to come back. This was a dream of mine. You are the Dalai Lama of self-publishing. I recommend you to everyone.

If you're listening and you haven't gotten into Dave's stuff, they're organized so beautifully. So if you're looking for AMS information, there it is. If you're looking for where to promote your books, it's titled so easily that you can easily find. what you're looking for i just love it well thank you thank you so much seriously and again great having you on thank you

All right, guys, so you just heard from Amy Lyle. And I know maybe some of you are thinking, okay, she's in humor. She's got an incredible platform. She's done incredible things and everything like that. That probably doesn't pertain to me. But let's break this down and really discuss how, while she did a different flavor, the structure really feels right and can be applied for just about anybody out there.

highlights the importance of a big launch, okay? Having a plan. Now, in her case, she did something very different. But the truth was is that she made it into a big deal. She had people ready. She launched it. It drove a lot of great sales. But the most important part was she actually had a plan for how to continue sales. She wasn't making 500 book sales a day, but she was actually getting about 10 to 20 book sales a day. And that consistency has huge effects on Amazon.

Amazon loves to see books that consistently show that they're worthy of being praised. You do just this giant spike of sales and Amazon will see that afterwards it drops. And so, okay, well, you just had something. But if you're a book that no matter what, when they show, people buy. When they look at your book, it's continuing to show life.

Amazon will actually index your book more. It'll show your book more and it will raise your rankings in search results more. So she initiated Amos ads. And what I loved about her story on this one was, is that she didn't just. try it and then be like, oh, you know, this isn't that good of an ROI and then just stop. Instead,

She gained experience. She kept playing around with it. She started to learn more about her market. She started to see where her book fit and what she should target. And when she started to do that better, her ROI started to improve. more and more. And finally, she was getting eight causes of 19.86% and below. That is a huge ROI. But more importantly, it gave her a marketing method to continuously show

sales. And what did we just discuss? How that affects everything. So she had her marketing efforts and then she had a stumble. All right. We talked about that. Yeah, make sure to always check. If you do just a slight edit to the source file, always check it. Go through with a fine tooth comb. Make sure that one page doesn't go wonky. She actually...

realized there was a problem when the reviews started to reflect it. Ouch, those reviews stick. But she went, she corrected it, and she got right back on her feet. Luckily, that doesn't stop her AMS ads, and they kept going. Now, she had been trying multiple, multiple times to get a BookBub deal. And anybody who's tried that knows that rejections come like crazy.

You can't have a weak stomach if you're trying to go for BookBub. But she finally landed a BookBub deal, and it had a large effect on, again, raising her sales. One thing that she said that really affected her ability to finally get that deal was the fact that she had consistent sales, that she was consistently showing good numbers. So that meant to them that it was worth...

investing in and giving her that spot. And fast forward, she finally landed her true goal. In her case, it was to get her screenplay turned into a movie, and that is super cool. For others, though, it's just to land... a publishing deal and publishers are just the same as movie executives okay it's about what movie is going to bring them the most money or in this case what book is going to bring the publisher more money

And being able to come up and show to the publishing company that your writing has consistently shown to have interest is a huge foot in the door. OK, having a large email is a big number they love. Having consistent sales is another way to make yourself stick out. The point, though, is we as self-published authors need to show these executives, show these business minded.

businesses that our book is a good investment, that our writing is worth their time, energy, and resources. And consistent sales can do that. And we just saw that happen for Amy. I was really happy to have her on. I know it's a bit of a cool, crazy story, but understand that the skeleton of it all is the same kind of skeleton and can be a great lesson learned for each and every one of us.

In this case, it was just a different flavor. And before I let you guys go, I want you to know that Amy's book is hilarious. I didn't go over it that much in the thing, but I'm a huge Audible fan. I had a lot of fun just kind of listening to it. And I'm not gonna lie, when I do listen to Audible, I always have like a glass of scotch. But once or twice, I did maybe just about lose my scotch when some of the punchlines came through.

Be aware of that. But again, just major hats off to Amy for following her dream, taking that advice, really researching, really applying everything she learned. And now she's got her own movie deal. So with that, I am Dave Chesson of the Book Marketing Show podcast, signing off. Cheers.