Dismantling Bad Advice on How to Market an eBook

When it comes to how to market an ebook, there is a lot of bad advice out there. However, the advice can sound completely rational and logical. So how do you best separate out the good information from the bad? There are three main ways to do this:

Method 1: Ignore success, look for failures

There is an old saying that failures teach more than success. This is exceedingly true when you are looking for marketing advice. Many people will take a look at the success of a project and try to duplicate it. However, they may not see that the success of the project was an iterative approach, achieved just a bit at a time. That means that when you try to duplicate success, you could be missing steps or may not have the full picture. Instead, if you can see the road they took to get to success, you will be setup better. Things to look for include:

• How many failures did they have
• How much did each or all the failures cost
• What was the method that they experimented

That final thing can be more important than any other piece of information. However, this is often ignored in marketing advice. Giving an example of an A/B test is simply not enough. What led a particular marketer towards certain words? What websites did they visit for ideas? How did they generate each round of test keywords? This complete method of experimentation is the map towards success, or at very least, the same location.

Method 2: Are they talking about the 80% or the 20%?

Knowing the impact of each change can determine how much effort should be put in. When you put your time into an effort, you don’t want to waste that precious commodity. In addition, advice can also focus on a “shot gun” approach where the marketer tried a bunch of stuff and something stuck. However, when you dissect their advice, it is easy to tell that they don’t know what exactly stuck. Knowing the exact lever to pull is important to determine the validity of the advice.

Method 3: Does the advice fit the box you are trying to put it in?

Another common approach to any marketing advice is to keep it really broad. The idea behind this is that many more people can use the advice. The only problem is that many more people can use the advice in the wrong way. Instead of determining what fits their goals, they may focus on a broad aspect and hope it fits. One example could be the “just write” approach. However, if the writer is trying to determine the value of time to writing, this advice isn’t going to be helpful. If the writer is trying to build better books and needs to learn through trial and error, this advice will work. When it comes to marketing, the same is true. Pouring more money into keyword research isn’t going to matter if the problem is that the author doesn’t know their genre. That would just put the wrong product in the wrong hands. The result of that will be either negative reviews or no sales.