How Effective Is Your Book Marketing?

The 80/20 Rule says 20 percent of your efforts will yield 80 percent of your results/sales and 80% of your time/effort tends to chase 20%. When you are marketing your book, consider how the 80/20 Rule might play out for you.

Let’s say you sell 500 books this year. You will probably look back and see that certain things yielded the majority of your sales, while a handful cane from many scattered places.

For instance, you may see that speaking at bookstores or events helped you sell 200 books. Maybe the news media, such as interviews, feature stories, and book reviews sold 150 copies. The rest came from a lot of buckets — maybe 35 from amazon ads, 20 from social media, 30 from libraries, etc. In this hypothetical model, for this particular author and book, it becomes easy to identify which efforts had the bigger payoffs — and which did not.

Now, are these numbers the result of more time or money being used to get sales? Possibly. The key is to compare total sales from each area, such as speaking at events, and divide it by the time spent or the cost spent in that part of your marketing.

When looking at advertising you can easily say you spent $100 and sold six books, so the cost per sake is $16.66. Match that up to the cost of something else that you undertook to generate sales.

Look at your time spent, as time is money. Maybe you lined up three interviews with the news media, at say, three local weekly community newspapers. Perhaps it took 12 hours to write pitch letters, research media lists, send out emails to the media, respond to their queries, and spend time preparing for and doing the interviews. So that was one interview per four hours. Let’s say you sold 36 books from these interviews. That is 12 books per interview or 3 books sold per hour.

Compare that to spending 10 hours to set up and conduct three speaking appearances that sold 85 books. That is 8.5 books sold per hour of effort.

When it comes to marketing your book, you will need to experiment and diversify your efforts and test-case what is effective for you. Overtime, you will figure out your best practices and zone in on what consistently works for you.

Until then, stay grounded on what to do but every so often you should swing for the fences.

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D4o You Need Book Marketing Help?

Brian Feinblum can be reached at brianfeinblum@gmail.com  He is available to help authors like you to promote your story, sell your book, and grow your brand. He has over 30 years of experience in successfully helping thousands of authors in all genres. Let him be your advocate, teacher, and motivator!

 

About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 5,000,000 page views. With 5,400+ posts over the past 14 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs  by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2025.

 

For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/