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31 Comments

Launching my book in 2 weeks - I have $4000 to spend on marketing. Tell me how to spend it?

Pretty much what the title says. I have 4k in presales for https://www.crackingthecodingcareer.com/ (it's a career advice guide for early career developers), I realized I might as well go for broke on this thing and just use the presales entirely on prelaunch marketing.

I've hired a friend to help me do some small design work, but I feel like I could go for something a little more ambitious with this budget. Got any ideas for how to spend my money?

  1. 6

    Umm, don't? Why do you feel you need to spend $4K on marketing?

    1. 1

      i dont need the money right away, figure it'd be good to learn how to pay for expertise and reach rather than my default of doing everything for free by myself.

      this isn't my full time thing, its just my first product. i expect to learn more than i make.

  2. 3

    If you have $100 to spare, my girlfriend does an amazing job at building an Instagram following from scratch. Here's her work:

    KPopKart with 20.1K followers

    Much of her customers find her via Instagram. They go on to make purchases on the marketplace

    Quick Ideas:
    • Share quotes from your book that's potentially viral
    • Get people to share them on Instagram in exchange for a discount / chance to win a free copy (easy dozens of shares possibly = thousands of eyeballs)
    • Get people to tag their dev friends on Instagram

    Instagram is a great way to attract a millennial audience, many of whom are graduating in one of the toughest times. Reading your book could help them so much!

    1. 2

      Hey, I'm interested as well! That's pretty impressive to grow to 20k followers. I'm just starting to grow the audience for AvoToast. My email is [email protected]. Thanks in advance!

      1. 0

        Thanks Josh! My girlfriend is already asleep. Will get her to email you in a few hours when the sun's up 😊

        1. 1

          Thank you! No rush though, any time this week! :)

          1. 1

            Hey Josh, thanks for your interest! I've dropped an email.

    2. 2

      Can you get in touch with me about this offer? daniel at getonedesk.com

      1. 1

        Hey Daniel, thanks for your interest! I've dropped an email 😊

      2. 1

        On it! You'll get an email in a few hours – it's a bit late here, 3AM 🙈

    3. 1

      hey great thoughts!! I don't use instagram at all personally so i'm pretty clueless about this whole thing. i am VERY tempted but i think im gonna stay off insta for now. got a focused 2wk launch period and want to stay close to home. happy to explore later though!

    4. 2

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

      1. 1

        We'll look into this! Thanks Jimmy!! 🙏

  3. 2

    Come over to careermove.io and promote the book to 10k+ professionals. As the domain states, careermove.io is home to tech professionals who are looking for ways to grow their career

    No kidding. Your book will be beneficial to our audience

    1. 1

      hey i saw your msg on twitter, will chat there!

  4. 2

    You could try paid ads, but at that price point I’m not sure it’s going to be very profitable unless you plan to upsell other products.
    Reddit Ads could work, Twitter Ads maybe, FB&IG probably not (except for retargeting).

    I’d copy what @dvassallo does to sell his courses: basically he turns his behind the scenes stuff (results, lessons learned, etc.) into content marketing. Check out his tweets.
    The best part? It’s free.

    1. 1

      yeah. doing that :) just hit 500 followers on the book's dedicated account today https://twitter.com/coding_career

  5. 2

    Do you have an email list? If so, then come over to SparkLoop.app and set up a quick referral program. It'll cost you $39/month and will boost your growth by ~20% probably*.

    That means you'd be spending $39/month to make your $4k spend ~20% more effective. Sounds like a great deal to me :)

    *At least, that's how much faster other book authors are growing after using SparkLoop.

    1. 1

      i only have a personal email list so far. thanks but will pass on this one!

      1. 1

        Ha no worries.

        You're launching a book without an email list?

        Mind me asking why?

        1. 0

          i mean i have an email list, 1k subs, just that its a personal list. i also have 17k on twitter. idk.. i didnt want to spend a long time building an email list for the book.

  6. 1

    Curious, how did you end up spending it? Anything work well for you?

    1. 2

      honestly, i wasted quite a lot of it. professional editors dont care about content, just correct capitalization and shit. I was much better off paying early readers to read the book and give real feedback. i should also have spent money upfront working on a professional landing page.

  7. 1

    I think with "infoproducts" the rule of thumb is to build audience (email list, twitter following, etc) first and then launch your product to them.

    If you have a book, but don't have an audience to sell it to, you have only two options:

    1. Run ads (create a high-converting sales page & all that)
    2. Partner with people who have an audience.

    The second option could be either done on the affiliate commission basis, or you could try paying people with relevant audience to promote your product.

    The only challenge is that most of the time you should have an existing network of "influencers" who will be open to support/promote your work. If you email people out of the blue asking to endorse your work, most will ignore you, even if you offer to pay them.

    There's a third option though. What you could do is research which parts/chapters of your book answer people's search queries on Google and publish them on your blog for free, so that they would rank in Google and bring those people to you. And given that it is a chapter from a book - those visitors will be quite likely to buy the full book.

    But this takes time and not very easy to do, as there's probably someone already ranking in Google for these search queries, and it won't be easy to outrank them.

    All in all... no silver bullet, sorry :)

  8. 1

    Not exactly a "prelaunch" strategy, but you should consider taking some of the content in your book and turning it into an online course that can be shared on a platform like Udemy or LinkedIn Learning. I know authors who use this strategy to leverage the audience of a big platform to drive traffic to their own website and other products.

    There's also LinkedIn ads. Being able to target recent CS grads who just started their first job or are still looking should be a good use of a portion of your budget.

  9. 1

    @dvassallo has been having some success selling ebooks with Reddit ads. This thread might be useful for you: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1251180131986497536

  10. 1

    Ask some industry leaders to read and review it.

    1. 1

      already planning to! i have a list. just got to actually man up and ask them.. 😬

  11. 1

    Audiobooks are a great way to reach more readers. You can sell your book in audio format side by side to give the users a better and faster option to read the whole book.
    Contact me if you want some help.

    1. 1

      thanks how do i contact you? what are some example self published audiobooks you can think of?

    1. 1

      i did see that! i think thats something you do post launch, will think about it cheers

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