How to increase sales of your books directly on your website: Insider Strategies for Authors
Authors can use their websites as powerful tools to not only drive book sales, but also connect with readers. Today’s book market is extremely overcrowded, so simply having a website won’t be enough. You need a strategic approach that not only attracts visitors but also makes them loyal fans — and as a result, your customers.
In this article, we will go over optimizing your website’s landing page for conversions, using some content marketing and even implementing innovative pricing strategies. We’ll cover some basic — or not so basic — methods you can use to help you boost your book sales and reach a global audience.
A Conversion-Focused Website
Think of your website as a storefront for your book. Just like any other real bookstore, it needs to be carefully crafted to invite your visitors to purchase the product. So how can you make your ordinary, unoptimized website into a conversion-focused one?
1. Optimizing Landing Page
Think of your landing page as the cover of your book — but one that is even more important. The landing page is the first impression that you can make. You can either grab their attention or break a potential reader’s interest. Invest time in creating a visually attractive “hero” section of your landing page — and hopefully, not only the “hero” part of it, but also the full landing page as well. It can showcase your book’s cover art, some sort of attention-grabbing headline, and a clear call-to-action button (such as “Buy now”).
You can also add reviews from your readers or respected sources to build credibility and trust with your visitors. Positive word-of-mouth can be a truly powerful motivator for buying a book. You can also include a short “trial” version of your book (for example, the first chapter).
2. Persuasive CTAs
Your CTAs (calls to action) should be a direct call — just as the name suggests. Depending on what your goal is, such as converting visitors to your customers who are willing to buy your books — you can try purchase-oriented language like “Buy Now” or “Get Your Copy Today”. You can also try adding some sort of “flash sales” or time-oriented discounts to create a sense of urgency and excitement (“get book ‘BOOK NAME’ at 50% off — only during the next 48 hours”).
If your book falls into the category of “self-help,” or if it is a guide of any other kind, such as a how-to manual, instructional book, or practical handbook designed to provide advice, strategies, or step-by-step instructions, you might want to choose more action-oriented CTAs. For example, instead of simply saying ‘Buy now’ you might use ‘Transform your life’ or ‘Discover the secrets to success’, etc. CTAs like these not only encourage immediate action but also hint at the benefits and valuable insights readers will gain from your book — which is better than simply saying “Buy now”.
Similarly, phrases like ‘Start your journey today,’ ‘Unlock your potential,’ ‘Master the skills you need,’ ‘Take control of your future,’ ‘Achieve your dreams,’ or ‘Empower yourself now.’ Such statements appeal to the reader’s aspirations and desire for self-improvement, making the book’s promise more compelling.
In any case, no matter what you choose your CTAs to be, place these buttons strategically on your landing and product pages, and throughout your content to maximize visibility and conversions. You can also use a “floating” CTA button — meaning that it stays on the screen even when users scroll down.
3. Free Samples and Excerpts
Who doesn’t love something free? Offering some free samples or excerpts of your book can truly increase your sales. This lets your potential buyers get a hang of your writing style and see if the captivating story you’ve crafted (if it is a story) is for them. This simple strategy — if we can even call it a strategy — can significantly increase the likelihood of a sale.
4. A Seamless Checkout Process
Imagine your potential reader has finally made the difficult decision of buying your book — only to be met with a complicated, confusing checkout process. That’s a sure way to lose a sale. Not all your customers will be technical gurus, so simplify your purchase process as much as you can. You can do this by minimizing the number of fields in your signup/checkout form, offering multiple payment options, and reducing the number of steps/pages required to purchase your book.
Remember, the easier you make it for your visitors to buy, the more sales you’ll see. Ease of use is the most influential, and thus important factor in conversion rate optimization.
Marketing Tactics
Creating interesting and engaging content is the one and only way of driving traffic to your website and building a loyal following that you should use. Don’t think about what content “Google will like” or whether your articles include ‘relevant keywords’. Simply write content that people will love — SEO, Google, Bing and all other robots will follow along.
1. Blogging
A well-crafted blog can be a powerful tool for demonstrating your expertise and connecting with your readers. You can share behind-the-scenes of your writing process — BTS work really well with nearly all topics as people are usually curious about getting a look under the hood of areas they have never worked in, and therefore they do not know how the production works. You can also use your blog to write about relevant book’s themes, or personal stories that resonate with your readers.
2. Social Media
Whether you like it or not, social media is a crucial component of any successful marketing strategy. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provide an unmissable opportunity to find and engage with your fans directly. You can share excerpts from your future or past works (think of unreleased or deleted parts), behind-the-scenes content, and updates about your books. Don’t just broadcast mindlessly — try to interact with your followers by responding to comments and messages, tags and mentions. Think of your favorite author and simply imagine the thought of them replying to your comments or questions — you can also be this very “favorite author” for thousands of people. The personal touch leads to an even deeper connection with your readers — and can also drive traffic to your website.
3. Email Marketing
While social media is great for reaching a broad audience, email marketing allows you to connect with your most dedicated fans on a more personal level. Build an email list — which will be an easy thing to do once you have social media and a website — and send weekly or monthly newsletters with exclusive content. You can also use this “exclusive content” to encourage readers to sign up for your email list in the first place. This can be discounts, updates about your book, early-access offers, or once again, stories from personal life — choose what you feel might work best in your niche. Personalized emails make your readers feel valued and part of your inner circle — as well as serve as one of the most profitable tools in marketing.
Building the Interest
Building a relationship with your audience is equivalent to fostering loyalty and attracting long-term sales. Still, while a long-lasting interest is the most profitable and desirable thing that an author can wish for, it also happens to be the most difficult to achieve. So what can you do?
1. Webinars and Live Q&A Sessions
Hosting webinars and live Q&A sessions is similar to ‘ordinary’ social media — it also allows you to connect with your audience, but it does it in real-time. Once again, you can share insights into your writing process, discuss your new book’s themes, and answer questions directly from your readers — fans especially like it when they get their questions answered, so focus on this one the most. This level of engagement is one of the highest levels that you can create — which leads to an excitement around your work, potentially leading to increased sales and a dedicated fan base.
2. Reviews
Positive reviews and testimonials can also be a useful asset for promoting your book. Ask your readers to leave reviews and testimonials on your website or stores where your books are sold. Then, feature those reviews prominently on your book’s landing page — or even write a “response” to them. Seeing real praise from readers can greatly influence new potential buyers and increase their confidence in making a purchase — still, as discussed earlier, tactics like “free excerpts” might work better for your particular niche, especially if your works are related to the fiction genre. Reviews are proved to be more effective when it comes to more “technical” literature, which can be more-or-less considered objective, as opposed to fiction literary works which should resonate with the emotions of your readers instead of logic and rationality.
3. Limited-Time Promotions
Creating a sense of urgency is a powerful motivator for sales. Offer limited-time promotions, discounts, or special offers to encourage quick, immediate purchases. Flash sales, holiday discounts, exclusive deals, or some discounts for “anniversaries” of your books. You can also choose to make them public to all website visitors, or maybe only leave them out for your email subscribers or followers of your social media accounts — this can also be used as an additional lever of traffic.
Unlocking Global Reach
While the strategies mentioned above can really help you boost sales within your local market (most likely, the US or Europe), implementing a so-called Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) can take your book sales to a global scale. What is this?
PPP is a pricing strategy that allows you to adjust your book’s price based on the purchasing power of different countries, so that your books are affordable for readers in regions with lower income levels. This may sound not so obvious at first, so let’s explain this better.
1. Understanding Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)
Basically, all you have to know is that Purchasing Power Parity is an economic theory. Thanks to it, you can get an idea of what the purchasing power of various countries is, meaning how much money people in this country have to buy goods. As you understand, this is a rather complicated principle — so let’s try to think of it more simply. Say you have a book that costs $20. Now, consider the United States and Bolivia as examples — which country do you think has higher purchasing power?
Of course, it is the United States, which means that people in the US have much more money to spend on your goods — so they are most likely to be okay with your prices, and they likely can afford your books, too. Now, back to Bolivia — its average salary is about 14K USD per year, which is much less than an average salary in the US. This means that your “affordable” price for the US will most likely not work in Bolivia, as people there have lower purchasing power, so they find your prices to be too high.
By adjusting the price of your book according to the purchasing power of different countries, you can make your work accessible to readers who might otherwise find it too expensive. Going back to our example, you might want to give a 30–40% discount to all visitors from Bolivia, so that they could find your books affordable, and eventually, buy them.
In fact, if you open your analytics reports and take a look at your top-selling countries, you will most likely see the US, Canada, Australia, and some parts of Europe. That’s about 20 countries — but there are nearly 190 countries in the world — and unaffordable prices are a factor that you can change and stop missing out on this huge global market.
2. Implementing PPP to Boost Book Sales
As we saw from the previous example, PPP can significantly expand your market reach and open up entirely new revenue streams. But how do you actually use it on your website? Here are some basic steps:
- Research: You will need to conduct research to find the appropriate discounts for your book in different countries based on their purchasing power. For this, you might consider using mean/average salaries, cost of living, basket of goods, and other economic indicators.
- Write code: Next, after making a list of countries with their appropriate discounts, you will need to write code on your website to automatically detect the country of your visitor, and then apply your prepared discount based on it. Based on this data, you can then apply a discount or show a promo code with a banner message, notifying the visitor of the fact that they are eligible for a discount. To detect countries of your visitors, you could use an IP-information API or similar software — yet, this would require a payment.
- Checkout: Finally, integrate all of the steps above to integrate them with your checkout system. For this, the most simple way would be to use “promo codes” or “coupon codes”. You can show a promo code to the visitor and then ask them to apply it at checkout later on.
Those are the basic steps that you need to take to implement PPP on your website. Yet, as you might have noticed, there is an issue with this — as the whole discount mechanism is based on the country detection from IP-address, how can we be sure that one does not use a VPN or proxy to mask their IP-address? This is a major problem, as it leads to a possibility of abuse. A person can use a VPN to make it look like they are from, say, Pakistan or Bolivia, which will cause you financial losses.
Also, not all authors are developers, so writing code and using APIs may sound like a terrible nightmare to most of them. Moreover, many authors come from diverse backgrounds — where their expertise lies in crafting narratives, conducting research, and analyzing texts rather than engaging with technical aspects of software development. The thought of using programming languages, debugging code, or navigating API documentation can indeed be daunting and overwhelming.
To bridge this gap, it’s essential to provide authors with tools and platforms that abstract away the technical complexities and offer user-friendly interfaces. These tools should empower authors to focus on their creative work instead of trying to learn complex technologies.
For instance, no-code platforms can be a game-changer for authors. No-code platforms allow users to build and customize applications without requiring programming knowledge or any technical knowledge at all. And this is also true for PPP!
3. Introducing ParityVend: Your Gateway to Global Success
Instead of trying to write software yourself, as a fellow author, you might want to focus on creative works instead of technical knowledge. While the idea of integrating PPP to your website may sound exciting, the complex steps required to implement it can stop you from doing it. Don’t let this stop you! Use tools like ParityVend to automate the pricing process and benefit from PPP.
You can use ParityVend to adjust the pricing of your book based on the visitor’s location, ensuring they see a price that matches their country’s purchasing power. You don’t need to manually collect and analyze financial country data — all countries are already grouped, and their purchasing power is already calculated through sophisticated formulas — so you don’t have to worry about it.
ParityVend No-Code is also a perfect platform for authors to use, as it is as user-friendly as possible — beautiful dashboards, easy-to-read tutorials, videos to help you set up ParityVend No-Code on your website, and a friendly technical support team that is ready to help you at every step of your way — and all of this without having to write a single line of code!
Even more, ParityVend takes a step further and offers complete protection against abuse. ParityVend features powerful anti-VPN, anti-Proxy, anti-TOR, and anti-Bots systems to make sure your PPP strategy is absolutely protected against malicious use.
And the best thing is — ParityVend has a very generous free plan that you can use without any limits or boundaries. No credit card is needed.
So why wait? With ParityVend, you’ll benefit from:
- Easy Implementation: ParityVend’s No-Code solution makes it simple to integrate PPP pricing on your website — and you don’t need to have any technical skills at all!
- Enhanced Security: The platform features robust anti-abuse systems to prevent misuse, ensuring a seamless and secure experience for you and your customers.
- Utmost Personalization: Select from 99 pre-made designs or craft your own — all to make sure ParityVend No-Code complements your website perfectly.
By using ParityVend, you can expand into new markets, drive growth, and attract new customers worldwide. This innovative tool allows you to build exceptional pricing flows and expand your book’s reach effortlessly, taking your sales to new heights. And it’s free, as well.
Learn more about ParityVend and the full list of its features on its official website: https://www.ambeteco.com/ParityVend/
Get ParityVend now (fully free plan available, no credit card needed): https://www.ambeteco.com/ParityVend/pricing/
Conclusion
Boosting your book sales on your website requires a multi-sided approach that combines optimizing your site for conversions, using content marketing, engaging with your audience, and implementing innovative pricing strategies like Purchasing Power Parity. By following these strategies and utilizing tools like ParityVend, you can significantly increase your book sales, reach a global audience, and establish yourself as a successful author in the digital world.
Remember, the key to success lies not only in providing value to your readers — but also in promoting it accordingly. By crafting a compelling online presence and making your work accessible to a wider audience, you’ll not only drive sales but also build a loyal fanbase that will support your literary journey for years to come.
The journey to success as an author might not be the easiest one, but with dedication, creativity, and a willingness to adapt, you can achieve your dreams. So, keep writing, keep innovating, and keep inspiring readers with your words. The world is waiting to discover your next masterpiece!
