Three Do’s and Don’ts for October Sales

by Jay Hartman

Happy October to everyone! Here in Las Vegas it’s difficult to tell it’s fall with pumpkin season arriving, since we still have daily temperatures in the mid-90s. Other parts of the country are finally seeing cooler weather and fall colors, and that’s certainly going to put readers into a curl-up-with-a-good-book kind of mood.

October can be hit-or-miss for sales. On one hand, people may have extra time on their hands with kids back in school, and cooler temps means more inside activities. On the other hand, many people think about their holiday shopping and want to hold onto funds for presents. Add on the issues with rising inflation and potentially higher unemployment numbers and you see where things might not go as well as expected.

So, how do you overcome the fall sales blahs? I have three great do’s and three major don’ts that will help you be more successful.

Do Publish Something New

This is the perfect time to release a new title. The momentum and excitement behind a new release at this point of the year will carry you through the holiday season. Your best success will be with a short story or novella that ties to an existing series or contains characters from your other works. This will help drive sales of your backlist titles.

Do Go After the Library Market

The majority of libraries around the world are on an annual budget, and how they spend that budget often determines how much money they get for the next fiscal year. Although not every library is on a January-December time schedule, many are and need to spend their budget before the year runs out. Most of the time a certain amount of a library’s budget needs to be spent on patron requests, so make sure your grassroots campaign with your readers is active, and they request your titles from their library. Keep in mind that very little buying happens with libraries during November and December, so this is your last big push to make those sales happen. Libraries almost never purchase anything from Amazon, so make sure your ebooks are available through Overdrive, and your print is available through Ingram or Ingram Spark.

Do Bulk Up Your Mailing Lists

You’ve likely planned on all manner of sales blitzes during the holiday season to help get your books sold as the perfect item for gift giving. However, if you have great sales and nobody knows about them, anything you do from a promotional standpoint in November and December will result in less-than-desirable results. Use October to bulk up your mailing list. Offer a special freebie or giveaway for people who sign up for your mailing list during the month of October. Offer to donate to a special charity for each new mailing list subscriber you get. Give special discounts for new newsletter subscribers. Do unique giveaways on your social media channels. The idea is to capture as many contacts as possible during October to reach these folks during the more lucrative November and December months.

Don’t Run a Big Discount or Freebie

Other than as an incentive to get people signup for your mailing list, don’t run discounts or offer free titles during October. It won’t persuade people to buy the rest of your series, as you conditioned people to buy your titles only when they’re on sale. If you offer them on sale often, they really will wait until the book is on sale to buy. Discounts are heavy artillery for sales and best deployed during the gift-buying season of November and December.

Don’t Fill Your Social Media with Sales Pitches

Your readers and potential buyers get hit over the head ad nauseum throughout the holiday season with sales pitches and ads for titles. Eventually they’ll have so many options they’ll end up going with “none of the above” as choice paralysis sets in. Instead of pitching your books this month, pitch YOU. Talk about yourself, what inspires you, what inspired your books, etc. Give readers a reason to be invested in you and therefore also become invested in your titles. You’re more than the book you wrote, so let readers discover the person behind the words.

Don’t Panic Yourself into Rash Decisions

Knowing October is a slower month than most and your two biggest sales months of the year lie ahead, don’t panic if you see a slowdown in your sales, and don’t allow it to cause you to make rash decisions regarding your books. This time of year I see people do things like take their entire catalog and enroll them into Kindle Unlimited, republish books with new covers, unpublish lower-selling titles, etc. These short-term fixes not only require a lot of work, but actually set your titles back from all the work you’ve put into promoting them up until now. Unless you identified a real problem with the material itself, there’s no reason to shrink your distribution or make changes to a book that may make it less identifiable to readers already interested but not yet ready to pull the trigger. Changes to your book business should always propel your sales forward and never backward.

Looking to get The Publisher Perspective? Send your questions to jhartman@untreedreads.com with TPP in your subject line. If your question is used, we’ll send you a free ebook from Untreed Reads.

Jay A. Hartman, editor-in-chief at Untreed Reads Publishing, founded Untreed Reads to promote ebooks with an emphasis on independent authors and publishers. He’s written about the ebook industry for fifteen years and previously served as content editor for KnowBetter.com, one of the internet’s oldest sites reporting on ebooks and epublishing.