Marketing self-published books on the Web

There's a saying that book advertising doesn't work. Another way of saying it is that money spent on advertising books is wasted money. Why? The theory is that a consumer's decision to buy a book is such a personal one, that advertising can't influence this behavior. Word-of-mouth (free advertising) is the only kind of advertising that moves books, or so the theory goes.

What about Internet advertising? If you have a Web site with traffic, through a blog audience or valuable content, you have a built-in free advertising machine for showcasing your book.

If you don't have the Web traffic already, pay-per-click advertising programs such as Google Adwords could provide a way to build awareness for your book. But generally, even this advertising doesn't work well for selling books.

The problem is that clicks for the keywords to drive traffic to your book's Web page may cost around $1 apiece. Let's assume your profit margin on the book is $5, and you're willing to give up that whole margin to kick-start your sales. You'll need one of every five clickers -- a conversion rate of 20 percent -- to buy your book to break even. Not very likely.

I tried marketing my book initially through Adwords keywords. I used every word and phrase in my book's index, but didn't notice any sales from that, despite spending a couple thousand dollars (ouch!). I tried limiting my ads to Google's search network (no content network ads) and that didn't help either.

However, recently Google allowed you to specify which sites on its content network your ad will run. So I've had much better results by limiting my ads to the very few sites dedicated to my book's topic that show Google content ads. They call it a "site targeted" campaign. It probably hasn't been cost-effective for me in itself, but I believe it has sparked some word-of-mouth to get sales going.

Also, a couple weeks after the book was available, I sent review copies of the book to some of the "top reviewers" on Amazon, about the top 75 who review nonfiction books. I've gotten about 25 positive reviews from that effort, and I noticed that sales picked up noticeably after the positive reviews began appearing.