ITT 203: Using Ads on Amazon To Boost Your Book Sales with Brian Berni

Brian Berni is a former Vatican secret archives employee and a best selling author under multiple pen names. He blogs for writers and self publishers at Authorstech and is the co-founder of BookAds, an agency that helps authors advertise their books through Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) and book club ads in 2018. Brian also hosted the first ever virtual summit for fiction writers. 

 

I brought Brian onto the podcast today to talk about book marketing, book advertising, what’s working, what’s not, and how to make a mess work for you. In today’s conversation, I wanted Brian to share his experience from hosting his first ever virtual summit, Indie Novelist Summit for fiction writers in 2018, which helped him go from practically zero to thousands of engaged readers. Due to the success of the summit, several thousand more subscribers joined his email list and generated multiple five figures just from ticket sales of his virtual summit alone. During the campaign, I worked with Brian, which was a lot of fun because he had such a commitment to quality. And so I have kind of two big takeaways. 

 

From today’s conversation, I had two big takeaways. The first is on the marketing front which is that Amazon is moving to a pay-to-play model, which seems to be the future of Amazon book sales. The second big takeaway is on the virtual summit front, which is that they work. If you want to know more about virtual summits, you can go to my blog.

 

In this broadcast, Brian and I talk about:

 

• How did Brian venture into an online space 
• Why did Brian choose to engage other authors to network
• In what ways did Brian hone his niche around self-publishing
• The importance of being acquainted with Facebook, Google and Amazon ads
• How Brian became specialized in book ads marketing
• Why you should always continue experimenting and testing with ads
• The importance of realizing that each book marketing ad will not work for all books
• What are the critical components of running a paid ad campaign
• What were Brian’s expectations for his first virtual summit
• How successful was the Indie Novelist Summit in terms of growth
• The importance of using a survey to engage the interests of your community
• Where does Brian view his business ventures going in the future

 

How to Connect with Brian:

 

• authorstech 
• bookads

 

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