Often when a retail store or a business wants to generate interest in a product, it offers coupons. You can do the same with your books.
While you have limited control over your book’s price at online sites such as Amazon.com, you still can offer a variety of promo codes and coupons that drop its cost. CreateSpace has a promo code option for the paperbacks its prints while Smashwords actually offers a coupon generator that can be applied to ebooks for Kindle, iBook, Nook and Kobo sold through its site (KindleDP allows for your book to given away free, though no promo code or coupon is necessary for potential buyers.).
When offering promo codes and coupons, follow some basic guidelines:
• Set an expiration date – A limited time offer creates a sense of urgency in potential buyers. Move your book by relying on their impulse to not let a good deal to slip away.
• Keep it focused on a lone book – Think in advance about what you most hope to achieve by offering a discount. Move a book that isn’t selling? Generate interest in a series? To land new customers? Determine in advance which lone book in your cache of titles best serves your goal and focus on selling that one. Sales of your other books naturally will follow.
• Promote the heck out of your special offer – Provide readers your promo code or coupon at all of your social media networks, your website/blog, and via your mailing list. The promo code and coupon does no good if no one knows about it. Encourage your readers to share the code or coupon.
______________
My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.