This is where it’s about weighing the options available to you. Unless you have a large following of 1 million followers to share your book with, it’s not likely you’ll sell 10,000 books in a week. (It takes around 10,000 books sold in a week to get on a bestsellers’ list)

Some others have bought their way into the bestsellers’ list by paying $30,000-$120,000 depending on the firm they use.

Since those 2 options don’t appeal or apply to most authors, this leaves us with the last option – getting featured on trusted, credible, brand-name news websites. Because people trust these sites like Yahoo, HuffPost, New York Times, getting featured in an article that’s posted to these news websites makes people who read the article trust you.

This is why you may sometimes go to a website and see “As Seen On” [insert news websites], followed by these logos below:

This is what is called building credibility by association. Because they trust those news sites, they trust you as well.

For any product, it’s typically a mix of trust and price that may prevent a person from buying it. But for a book, which typically ranges from $0.99-$19.90, we know that price is not the problem for 90% of the population.

That’s why we know that the only reason your audience wouldn’t buy your book is that they just don’t trust you.

It’s not about book quality because potential readers can’t tell your book is good until they actually read your book. It’s about having enough trust indicators – like getting featured on various news sites – that tip potential readers toward hitting that ‘Purchase’ button.

Definitely not. You can literally give flyers around the area you stay, but that may not be the most effective. When it comes to marketing, it’s a balance of number of people you can reach, effectiveness of the method and cost.

For example, paid ads (like Facebook ads) allow you to reach people but don’t allow you to effectively build trust. They may see your ads multiple times, but that doesn’t mean they trust you more.

Paid editorial reviews build trust if your reader trusts the person or company giving the review, but you still need to promote the review to an audience or else no one sees it. Reader reviews are actually great, but unless you are paying for fake reviews, reviews are normally gained by selling copies. It’s just a natural occurrence that 3-5% of your readers will leave a review.

A news feature for your book is a perfect balance of all the factors because news sites are highly trusted by many people and news sites are also visited by many people.

Other PR agencies will probably charge you US$3,000 per month with a 3-6 month retainer. This means you are going to spend US$9,000 at minimum.

But we know how challenging it is for authors to do PR because each book could be anywhere from $0.99 to $19.90 (typically). Unlike the real estate or financial industries which have high margins, thus allowing them to spend excessively on PR, it’s going to take 3,000 book sales at $3 each to cover $9,000. And if Amazon takes a 30% fee for selling on their marketplace, technically you need to sell US$13,000 of books just to cover the PR cost.

We’ve made it possible to get similar PR at less than a fraction of what these PR firms charge and with no retainers/long-term contract.

Unfortunately the line “it takes money to make money” still holds true. Again, you could give out flyers all day long but it’d take an excruciatingly long time to reach a significant number of people.

Anyone with a large advertising budget will always have an advantage. You could start a food business from home and let word of mouth grow slowly because your cooking is great. However, if you have an advertising budget then more people are going to learn about your business at a much faster rate.

To put your mind at ease, our prices aren’t even 20% of what major PR firms charge. The only ‘catch’ is that we’ll only help authors with genuine books. But our package also comes with a guarantee.

The problem of free marketing methods are that they are either overused or ineffective. Imagine if there was a website (think Craigslist) where anyone could post for free, and imagine that 10 million people visit it everyday. What would happen is that so many people will post and then your post will quickly be pushed down. Then you need to start posting more often to be at the top, but others will do the same.

The other problem of ‘free’ is that it probably involves time/effort. Telling your friend or your neighbor is completely free. But if you needed to go door to door to tell everyone, it’s going to take a really long time just to reach 1,000 people.

Any marketing method that’s readily available to many people will simply become ineffective over the long run.

Or here’s an alternative way to think about time vs money:

The typical author would have spent $200 on a cover, perhaps $200 on formatting, and maybe $500 on editing. That’s $900, not including your time wasted writing the book.

If you spent a month writing the book, your opportunity cost is basically 1 month of your salary. Whatever that is, whether it’s $1,500 or $5,000, it’s still a cost to you in terms of time.

You can choose to spend $0 on marketing and let all of that effort go to waste, or spend an appropriate amount on marketing that gets you credibility and exposure.

Entrepreneurs will already know this. They don’t need every business idea to work. But when one business idea does work, they know it’ll pay off. Similarly, some authors are just a promotion or two away from achieving the success they want.

Perhaps a news feature will be the nudge you need.

Let us see if we can help you, and if we can we’ll let you know the cost to do it for you. If not, no worries because applying is totally free.

Some sites are already starting to mark certain news articles as “Advertising Content”, “Branded Content”, “Paid Content”, etc. As this trend picks up, the number of sites that do not have such a label will continue to drop therefore it is important for authors to act fast.

Yahoo News is one of those sites that does not have such labels yet, making it appear editorial and organic in nature.