Today I’ve got a special treat for you. Penny C. Sansevieri, author of many best selling books including How to Sell Books By the Truckload on Amazon and 52 Ways to Sell More Books, has recently made her book How to Revise and Re-Release Your Book: Simple and Smart Strategies to Sell More Books available in print. To celebrate, Penny has kindly shared an excerpt of her book. Read on to learn why re-releasing a book is a lucrative marketing strategy, how to determine if a book is a good re-release candidate, how to make your new version stand out on Amazon, and more.
Penny is also offering a special offer to all Digital Pubbing readers! If you buy a print version of How to Revise and Re-Release Your Book: Simple and Smart Strategies to Sell More Books, she will give you a free ebook. All you need to do is email [email protected] with your Amazon purchase receipt and a note that you are taking advantage of the offer and would like the ebook version. Enjoy!
By Penny Sansevieri
For some authors, putting out a book is enough. They did a great job with it, they’re happy with the cover, and the reviews are good.
But for many others, this isn’t the case at all.
Perhaps you released a book and didn’t have time to promote it, or you did promote it and you did all the wrong things. Whatever your reason, or even if you aren’t sure if re-releasing is right for you, let’s have a look at the benefits, some of which you may surprise you.
Benefits of a Re-Release
The first and foremost benefit is the new publication date.
Having a new book opens up access to bloggers and media who might not have been available to you with an older book.
How old is too old to pitch to bloggers and media?
Honestly, unless you’ve already been getting some interest in the book, meaning it’s been featured in the media and on blogs, books six months or older are often harder to work with.
A staggering number of books are released every single day in the US (latest number is something like 4,500), so the competition is fierce. You need to have a new book, or newer book, in order to capture more blogger and media attention.
And what about reviewers? Well, same thing there. Although you can keep pushing your own email list for reviews, it’s harder to get reviews from folks like Amazon top reviewers and the like if your book is older. And by older I mean older than six months. Generally, the rule is the higher up the reviewer food chain your reviewers are, the sooner you should send them your book. Meaning if you’re trying to get an Amazon top reviewer to review your book, don’t wait till your book is six months old to pitch them.
Second, if you didn’t submit your book to contests the first time around, maybe you should have. And if you want to submit your book to national reviewers, the clock is ticking on that as well. There’s a joke in the industry that books have the shelf life of milk. While this is a bit of an exaggeration, books do age rapidly.
Covers are another reason I love a relaunch.
It’s not always easy to get covers exactly right the first time. A cover redo, even without a content redo, is a great reason to re-launch a book. In some cases, you may want to redo only the e-book cover.
In situations where an author is writing fiction and the majority of sales are coming from e-books, redoing only the e-cover makes a lot of sense. We’ll talk more about the mechanics of this later. Also of note: Updating your cover, even just your e-book cover, is another great way to spike your Amazon algorithm.
I mentioned earlier that adding to your virtual bookshelf is a great way to boost your Amazon algorithm. By having more books on your bookshelf, you can grow your Amazon real estate.
Let’s say that, like the science fiction author example I used, you have a book you’d like to re-release. Or maybe you just want to chop up a longer book and put it up on Amazon in shorter installments, maybe issuing them as a serial. That’s fine, too. This helps to build your library and add books to your platform.
An author backlist is another fun way to work with a re-release. I know some authors who have enormous backlists, with fifty or more titles. There are a lot of different ways you can go if you want to rebrand and re-release them.
Doing a re-release, as was the case of the author who needed to rebrand her series, can help to revitalize a series as a whole, making it possible for you to re-market the books and introduce them to a whole new audience.
But you don’t have to do all the books. One route is to only re-release the first one to remind existing readers of your books and to entice new readers to your virtual doorstep. Of course you’ll have chapters or blurbs and/or review snippets at the back of that first book tempting them to buy the next, and the next…
In the case of nonfiction, often authors find that their books need to be updated, sometimes annually. But the updates aren’t always a complete redo of the book. Sometimes it’s just a chapter enhancement, or the update of a chapter or two.
The bottom-line decision will be whether you publish over the existing book, or publish an entirely new book. We’ll talk about both options later.
How to Revise and Re-Release Your Book: Simple and Smart Strategies to Sell More Books is available on Amazon in print and Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07C6V6NRF
Here’s the full description if you’re interested in learning more:
Is Your Book Not Selling?
Do you feel like you’ve tried everything to promote your title but nothing is working?
Do you have a backlist that isn’t selling anymore?
Has your brand evolved and you’re worried the disconnect is hurting book sales?
If you’re struggling to sell more books it’s time to stop stressing about it, because it happens to the best of us. The next step is to do something about it.
Let me present one of the smartest book marketing strategies out there – the re-release.
And I can show you how to do a re-release the right way – with smart and simple planning to revive lackluster sales numbers with minimal effort!
In this short and dynamic book I can teach you:
- Why re-releasing a book has become such a lucrative marketing strategy
- How to read the telltale signs of a title that’s a perfect re-release candidate
- How to tell if your cover needs some market-driven updates
- How to determine if you need to make content updates
- Special considerations for updating fiction and non-fiction
- How to make the new version stand out on Amazon
- How to upload everything to Amazon the second time around
- How to work with Amazon to keep all the reviews from your original version
- How to properly price your re-release for maximum exposure
- Marketing tips for your re-release….and a special bonus offer!
If the idea of re-releasing your book seems like too much work, I assure you it’s not.
It’s a lot less daunting than wasting time and money continuing down a dead end road, right?
Whether you’re ready to consider a re-release in the very near future or not, I encourage you to read this title now so you feel confident in your options when problems do arise.
Be prepared to save yourself the heartache and frustration so many authors have suffered wondering what to do next!
Penny Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. (AME) and Adjunct Professor at NYU, is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. To learn more about her company and services, visit www.AMarketingExpert.com.
You can also find her on social:
- Twitter: @bookgal
- Facebook: /therealbookgal
