How to increase your book pre-orders with brand collaborations and partnerships
There are 3 main reasons why brand collaboration and partnerships can help you generate more preorders for your book, especially if you are going the traditional publishing route with a publisher.
So let’s start from the beginning - securing preorders for your book shows your publisher and retailers that your community is excited about your book. At some publishers, pre-orders can even help determine when reprints are ordered and the size of the print runs. Book pre-orders also are VERY helpful in getting on bestseller lists, such as the New York Times Best Seller List. Best Seller Lists are based on one week of sales. For books that are not yet published, any pre-orders you get for your book count towards your first week of sales.
Before I get into the reasons why brand collaborations and partnerships help you get more pre-orders, I want to explain what collaborations and partnerships actually are and how you can use them.
Collaborations and partnerships are when two creators team up together to create content and cross-promote to each other's audiences. The reason they are so great is that each brand brings its own audience and community to the table. Each collaborator gets exposure to a completely new and complementary audience.
There are so many creative ways that two creators can collaborate. The sky is the limit! I’ve worked with brands to help support gifting and giveaway opportunities, brands can sponsor an event series, and content can be created and shared across all channels. Think about what you love doing and what your audience loves from you! Then think about how you can incorporate someone else into this.
Finding like-minded brands and creators to collaborate and partner with in your niche means that you are getting in front of potentially thousands of new customers who could pre-order your book!
3 reasons collaborations and partnerships help you get more preorders:
Let’s jump into the reasons.
1. You are borrowing their audience
Working with another brand or individual means that you are literally borrowing their audience. This helps both brands get more visibility and awareness. The content you create together gets you exposure in front of their audience and vice versa. This means that you can potentially get in front of a huge group of people who are not already following you and don’t know who you are… yet.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re a cookbook author and you partner with a healthy food vlogger that makes a dish from your cookbook. When they create a video (or series of videos) on YouTube showing your dish and how easy it was to make your cookbook is now being exposed to their audience. But you have your audience as well and you are sharing their video with your own audience generating even more exposure for the video. You’re now exposed to their whole audience and they are exposed to yours.
Borrowing someone else's audience is one of the most effective ways to grow your own list and generate that buzz for preorders.
2. Collaborations give you an opportunity to grow your email list
Let's continue with the cookbook example and say that you are doing a live event together with this healthy food vlogger. Maybe you do a giveaway at the event and offer a free recipe. In order to enter, the audience needs to sign up for your email list or they need to follow you both. And voila, by creating something that both your audience and their audience want you have the opportunity to have new people join your email list.
And… I’m here to tell you email lists for authors are important. Emails are your “owned” audience. Once they have joined your list, you can email them whenever you want versus social media where your visibility is dictated by an algorithm.
3. It’s basically a personal referral
Did you know that 50% of all purchases are influenced by a personal referral? Whether you’re buying a car or deciding on the next book to read, personal referrals play a big part in this decision. Sometimes it will be really obvious, your partner wants to buy a specific SUV for your next car or it might be more subtle, where you have been seeing so many of your friends reading books by a specific author and you want to be able to talk to them about the book.
The personal referral can come from your sister, colleague or the influencer you follow on Instagram.
I’m going to call an influencer on social media talking about a product as a pseudo-personal referral. You don’t necessarily know the person in real life, but you follow them and frankly feel like you know them because they share their lie and journey. The pseudo-personal referral is Amazon because it cuts down on the number of times that person needs to see you and then recognize you in order to engage with you.
It also gives you credibility. If this other creator trusts you enough to give you a mention on their channels, there must be something there. They must really like you + your book. You've now built up a lot of trust with their audience so they might be more willing to follow you on social media, give you their email address, or even preorder your book because you already have that vote of confidence.
How does this all add up to more preorders for your book?
By partnering with another brand you are getting exposure to their audience.
The new audience is a great way to grow your own social following and more importantly email list.
You’re getting a pseudo-personal referral from this other content creator.
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