Self Publishing, Google Book Search, Google PPC

I just received our Google Book Search Weekly Summary Report – and I know I’ve covered Google Book Search before – but am consistently amazed at the power of this system to drive book sales.

Google Book Search Weekly Report for Dog Ear Publishing

Google Book Search Weekly Report for Dog Ear Publishing

We’ve (at Dog Ear Publishing – my self publishing company) been focusing more effort on the Google Book Search system for our self published authors. And it’s paying off… All the information above is proprietary – but it’s so astounding that I wanted to share at least portions of it with you.

Over 17,000 visits were made to our books’ pages on Google during July – and that’s for only 365 titles (not our total title count, but the total number of titles viewed in GB). Nearly 2.5% of those visits resulted in “buy links” being clicked. For most search-engine based book marketing efforts (or any book marketing effort for that matter) a 2.5% purchase response would be amazing – interestingly many of the top titles in GBS are also participating in some form of search engine marketing / pay-per-click book marketing / Google Adwords marketing at Dog Ear Publishing. My current findings are that the Google Book Search system is delivering a much higher purchase response than our search marketing campaigns – though the traffic is much smaller… It seems that perhaps the two items may work hand-in-hand at driving traffic and sales.

In any case – if you aren’t participating in Google Book Search, you should be. I realize many authors have deeply rooted concerns about copyright – but read the previous articles about Google Book Search and content view control. Hopefully you fears can be allayed – and you may realize increased book sales.

Self Publishing Today and the long hot summer…

Sorry… the post header reads like the title of a bad beach novel, I know, but I couldn’t resist. THIS post is pretty much a nothing post other than a general ‘here’s what I’m looking to accomplish going forward’ with the blog. I’m sure many folks out there (especially parents) found the summer to be busier than the rest of the year. What happened to the ‘lazy days of summer’ that we used to know (for those of usover 40 or so…).

Anyway – I’m back in the mode of getting content back on to the site in a regular manner – matter of fact an interesting article is coming later today comparing Google Book Search results to Google PPC results… it’s very surprising to me (and I run both systems for Dog Ear Publishing).

Over the next few posts I’ll be covering a number of (hopefully) relevent topics to all of you, including self-publishing with ‘green’ in mind (not money… though it is part of the equation), social marketing for self published authors (it is turning out to be harder, less focused, and with softer results than we all thought… unless you follow some very simple rules…), expanding markets for self published books beyond US borders (UK distribution, the Espresso Book Machine, Canadian markets), and the change face of search marketing for self published books (Bing may just change the game…)

Thanks for reading – and as always I’d love to hear from you either directly or in comment

Ray Robinson

rayr@dogearpublishing.net

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