You Can’t Screw Up Your Marketing If You Give it to Your Fans

Over the past few months I’ve been sharing with you what I’ve been learning from the process of creating my book Think Like a Rock Star, and then marketing it, etc.  Today I wanted to give you an update on how the book’s doing and also talk about my marketing efforts to this point.

First, here’s the Amazon average sales rank for each month so far this year for TLARS:

January – 713,959

February – 524,232

March – 415,237

April – 68,196 (The book was released on Amazon in paperback on April 1st)

May – 88,169

This is what you expect from the typical business book launch.  Sales peak at launch, then start going down.

But guess what?  The current Amazon average sales rank for June is currently 34,339.  TLARS is currently experiencing its best sales ever, even better than it did at launch back in April.

That’s interesting, but even moreso when you factor in that I’ve done almost no marketing for the book.  I”m not a big-name author and simply couldn’t afford to hire a publicist and a marketing team to promote the book for me.  You won’t see any banner ads for the book, and other than writing a few posts here and tweeting about it and Facebooking about it, I’ve really done no marketing for the book.

So why is it selling?  And better yet, why is it selling more copies?

First, it’s a pretty damn good book.  I think everyone knows that I’m not exactly prone to bragging, but I am incredibly proud of Think Like a Rock Star.

Second, the book has some killer marketing.

Ok so the book is being marketed, but not by me.  Originally, I wanted to create this elaborate plan to market Think Like a Rock Star.  But due to several events/misshaps (the main one being Amazon releasing the book 3 weeks early), a lot of the big marketing push that I was envisioning for the book’s launch fell away.

Then I realized that this was actually a perfect opportunity to apply Think Like a Rock Star’s core message to its own marketing.  The core lesson I teach in Think Like a Rock Star is the value of embracing your fans.  So I decided in March that since I couldn’t do an elaborate marketing push myself for the book, that I was going to let the fans of the book market it, especially via reviews on Amazon.

So what I started doing was engaging with anyone that mentioned the book online, especially positively.  I thanked them profusely, and then started interacting with them.  And part of that interaction was to ask them to please review the book on Amazon.

My thinking was this:  I knew the book was good.  So if more of the book’s fans were talking about the book, that would drive sales.  So the more reviews up on Amazon, the better!

As of today, there are 40 reviews on Amazon for the book, and 35 of them are 5-star.  The remaining reviews are 4-stars.  I am convinced that those reviews are now driving sales of the book.  Sales are going up on Amazon, but the only thing that’s changed is the number of reviews on the site has gone up.

The fans are driving sales of the book.   Seriously, check out the reviews, they are glowingly positive.  In fact two of them are so complimentary of the book that they actually embarrassed me a lil bit.  See if you can figure out which ones they are.

And to clarify, only 14 of the 40 reviews came from people that I knew on January 1st.  18 of the 40 reviews came from people that I didn’t know when I asked them to please review the book.  These were people that I saw either mentioning that they had read the book, or they had reviewed it on another site like GoodReads, and I asked them to review it on Amazon.

Want to hear the amazing part?  When I asked these strangers to please review the book, several of them thanked me for asking them to review it!  Are you kidding?!?  But fans want you to connect with them!  And it’s a lot of fun to do so!

The point of all of this isn’t to brag on the success of my book.  It’s to show you how easy it is to generate new business by simply embracing your existing fans.  All I did was connect with people that were already talking about this book.  That’s it.  If I can do this, surely you can too.

And BTW, if you have read Think Like a Rock Star (thank you!) would you please consider reviewing it on Amazon for me? 😉