In this episode of Don’t Write That Book, Mike and AJ share just how to track if your book marketing is working. You’ll hear what they’ve used in the past and what they are doing now, and learn how to interpret the data make the most of your marketing energy, what to keep doing and what changes to make in marketing their must-reads.
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In Search of You, Kasey Compton
AJ Harper: https://ajharper.com
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Mike Michalowicz: https://mikemichalowicz.com
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Episode 28: Measuring Book Marketing ROI
Mike Michalowicz (00:00):
Welcome back to the Don't Write That Book podcast where you can learn how to write your bestseller and own your authorship. Follow along with us as we give you an insider's view of the book industry. Now, here are your hosts, myself, Mike Michalowicz and AJ Harper. So I just shared with you my daughter. I think she was--
AJ Harper (00:19):
Don't, don't.
Mike Michalowicz (00:20):
No, I mean, listen, she was a baby. Maybe she was five years old, but she went to the bathroom,
AJ Harper (00:41):
You should be a spokesperson.
Mike Michalowicz (00:43):
I should. I should. It's a good sandwich, right?
AJ Harper (00:44):
It's a good sandwich.
Mike Michalowicz (00:45):
Supposedly award-winning.
AJ Harper (00:47):
Oh.
Mike Michalowicz (00:48):
They have a sign up. They've won awards. I, I question awards because, you know, whatever. So my daughter says that, so anytime a sandwich is served with ham or ham is present, my wife and I parrot that line.
AJ Harper (01:02):
And your daughter loves it every time.
Mike Michalowicz (01:03):
And she loves it. She's like, "Oh, do it again, Dad." That's so fun.
AJ Harper (01:07):
I'm sure she also love, will love listening to this episode.
Mike Michalowicz (01:09):
Yeah, exactly. This one will be deleted. It won't make it to the air. What what's, what did Jack do?
AJ Harper (01:14):
Oh, it's so cute. There's nothing about pee.
Mike Michalowicz (01:17):
Okay. It's about poo?
AJ Harper (01:20):
Oh, God. We are so different.
Mike Michalowicz (01:37):
Isn't that so cute?
AJ Harper (01:37):
Mm-Hmm,
Mike Michalowicz (01:44):
Oh my God. It's awesome.
AJ Harper (01:45):
Piece of privacy.
Mike Michalowicz (01:47):
There's a pretty famous comedic actress from Saturday Night Live that did a a show with oh gosh, I don't know these people. It was called Rock On, Top of the Rock or something. Top of the Rock. No. Well,
AJ Harper (02:04):
That's a place.
Mike Michalowicz (02:05):
50 Rock or Rock 50.
AJ Harper (02:07):
Oh my God. Are you talking about 30 Rock?
Mike Michalowicz (02:10):
30 Rock.
AJ Harper (02:10):
30 Rock, Tina Fey,
Mike Michalowicz (02:12):
AJ Harper (02:15):
Tina Fey.
Mike Michalowicz (02:16):
Tina Fey. Thank you. That's the person I was thinking of.
AJ Harper (02:18):
I did not know where you were going with this.
Mike Michalowicz (02:20):
But we got there.
AJ Harper (02:20):
"Something About a rock."
Mike Michalowicz (02:21):
We got there. So Tina Fey's daughter said once, "I want to go to there." And so she used that on her show.
AJ Harper (02:29):
Yeah. Kids are cute.
Mike Michalowicz (02:31):
I wanna go to there.
AJ Harper (02:43):
Wait a minute, those were our intros was talking about our kids.
Mike Michalowicz (02:46):
Oh, does that count?
AJ Harper (02:47):
Yeah. I mean, well, here's Mike Mcow. It's bestselling author of 10 books to, with the goal of eradicating entrepreneurial poverty. There you go.
Mike Michalowicz (02:58):
And here, AJ, her son, likes to point at the moon and say, there's moot.
AJ Harper (03:02):
That's what you're getting. I just cited your books.
Mike Michalowicz (03:04)
No, here's what I'm gonna cite for you. You are not just a remarkable colleague and writer. You support people extraordinarily. We were down at Kasey Compton's event together, the launch of In Search of You.
AJ Harper (03:18):
In Somerset, Kentucky.
Mike Michalowicz (03:19):
Yep. Yep. So literally in the middle of nowhere because the nearest airport was Louisville, and that was two and a half hours away,
AJ Harper (03:45):
Yeah, about a hundred.
Mike Michalowicz (03:46):
About a hundred. And you spoke in front of everyone to her. It was, it was beautiful.
AJ Harper (03:52):
Thank you. (You're Welcome.) By the way, what did happen? So what, what y'all might not know is that getting to Kasey Compton's book launch was a harrowing adventure for both of us. I know. Many flights canceled rental cars that disappeared. (Yeah.) Having to stay in different cities than you planned. Yeah. Getting up at 2 45 in the morning to then drive back to the airport. But I think you won for the worst.
Mike Michalowicz (04:20):
Oh my God.
AJ Harper (04:21):
So you were, when I, you messaged me. We were messaging each other.
Mike Michalowicz (04:26):
Two in the morning.
AJ Harper (04:26):
Two in the morning at five in the morning. You said you were still outside in Asheville. And then, then you were still outside of Nashville hours later. So did you ever figure out what happened that had you at a standstill for about five, six hours?
Mike Michalowicz (04:40):
The answer is kind of, so it was a legit standstill. I, I rented a car. You rented a car, you had to. And I'm driving back to Nashville and I was only about, I think, 30 miles out. And traffic comes to a stop on the highway. I think it's 65, Interstate, 65 and stops. I'm like, oh, you know, a five minute stop. 10 20. I'm like oh, 30. Then it's an hour. I fall asleep, wake up. It's now two hours later. I, I'm in a daze. Five hours. Five hours.
AJ Harper (05:10):
You fell asleep on the highway?
Mike Michalowicz (05:11):
Yeah. I mean, we were just stopped. I turned off the engine. Everyone did. Even, even the big trucks started turning off the engines, which is a, that means we're in real trouble. Because our radio went ahead and saying...
AJ Harper (05:21):
Oh, okay.
Mike Michalowicz (05:22):
So they're like, Hmm. So when I saw the trucks turning off, I was like oh. That, that's not, that's not an hour. That's, that's a problem. Once it finally cleared, we drove by a spot and I have no idea what it was. There was nothing reported on the news. There was just dust, concrete, you know, concrete before it's, you had water and it forms? Everywhere. So I just presume something carrying lots of concrete flipped, rolled it blocked out the entire four lanes in the highway.
AJ Harper (05:50):
Okay. So we kind, you don't really know
Mike Michalowicz (05:53):
No. Two interesting things that happened. Well, one interesting thing, I I sat there and what do you do? My battery's dying and stuff. I just scrolled through the phone once and I found this journaling app on my phone.
AJ Harper (06:06):
Yes.
Mike Michalowicz (06:07):
I, so I've been journaling every day.
AJ Harper (06:09):
Okay. But actually
Mike Michalowicz (06:11):
It's an iPhone app.
AJ Harper (06:12):
I know. Yeah. They just put it on there without your permission, so.
Mike Michalowicz (06:16):
No, I hate it.
AJ Harper (06:16):
No, but you have to go in and change the settings. Laura Stone taught me this. Yeah. She actually made a TikTok about this. Okay. It has something like, I don't know, 2 million views or something already. And she did it just about a week and a half ago. It automatically shares what's in your journal. (What?) You have to go to settings and turn off. I'll show you at the break. Okay. Okay.
Mike Michalowicz (06:41):
Okay. Oh, that's great.
AJ Harper (06:42):
Yeah. It just popped up on everybody's phones.
Mike Michalowicz (06:45):
Oh my God.
AJ Harper (06:46):
It it, there's an automatic share that's happening until you turn it off.
Mike Michalowicz (06:50):
Oh,
AJ Harper (06:51):
So you're using it. Oh my God. Yeah. You're using, you've been journaling on your iPhone in the outside Nashville.
Mike Michalowicz (06:58):
To the world. Yeah, he is journaling outside Nashville.
AJ Harper (07:00):
I don't, I don't think it's quite like that, but that's so funny that you're like, I love this app.
Mike Michalowicz (07:04):
I'm taking pictures.... It's amazing. Look at these pictures and lemme tell you a dirty secret about myself. We better kick into the show.
AJ Harper (07:11):
We, we should. It's on it's metrics baby.
Mike Michalowicz (07:13):
It's metrics, baby. So I wanna start off a little story. One marketing strategy that worked well, that does not work well now. And I think that's part of the metrics, is what's working. Amplify what's working, and when it doesn't work, you have adjust was we did a pay it forward campaign. So here's how it worked. What we said is, if you reader on the list, purchase a copy of I think we did this first with Fix This Next. If you buy a copy of Fix This Next, you can give a copy to anyone of your choosing at our cost. Now, the idea behind this was, it was a list build. So say AJ, you buy a copy of Fix This Next, and you have a friend that's also an entrepreneur, and you want to grant the book to we'll gift it on your behalf from you.
Mike Michalowicz (08:03):
Now there's, there's a couple powerful benefits that we determine from this. First of all, we built our list. We don't know of this other reader. So now we got their information, their mailing information, their email. Secondly, is a gift from you, not from me, the author guy, because that actually degradants the quality of the gift. (Yeah.) I have a, I have a, a reason to promote it. You are gifting it because you think it's a value. So the likelihood of them reading it increases. Then there's potential dialogue between the two of you and further engagement in the book. So that was all the wins to raise the money for this. We did pre-event, meaning pre-launch. We did events. We hosted an event. I think you were at one specifically where we had people come in and we taught a workshop. I don't recall the subject specifically. And people paid for that workshop. We used those funds to pay for the books.
AJ Harper (08:50):
It was, it was a workshop about publishing and books,
Mike Michalowicz (08:54):
I think it was. That's right. That's right.
AJ Harper (08:56):
And it was in this building where we are right now.
Mike Michalowicz (08:58):
That's right.
Mike Michalowicz (09:01):
We're in the other side up, up here. And I, I think we raised $10,000 to $15,000. It, it was substantial. And say it was $15,000. That gets you about 800 books. I mean, it depends on what your, what your negotiation is with your publisher. But we wanted to make sure that it was Book Scanned so it wasn't like a copy sold to author, which I think BookScan does not attribute as a sale. So we bought 'em through the retail market and then distributed them, and that was great. So then we're like, well, let's repeat this and the next one not so great. And the, the third pay it forward we did maybe moved two, 200 bucks. So we're like, this is no longer good. I'll tell you without those metrics, I was so enamored by it. I'm like, let's just keep doing this. This is the new standard. We track it All In spreadsheets.
AJ Harper (09:51):
I think this is one of your greatest strengths. On the way, on the way in today, I listened to the episode that's airing today, March 21st. And it's the one where we talk about the phone call you got from Noah.
Mike Michalowicz (10:06):
The slap.
AJ Harper (10:07):
Which incidentally, I have a correction at the end
Mike Michalowicz (10:10):
For the, oh, I gotta write that this down. 'cause We, we supposed to, we are supposed to do corrections and then I forget to bring 'em up. So.
AJ Harper (10:16):
Well, it's my own
Mike Michalowicz (10:27):
Yeah.
AJ Harper (10:28):
Sessions.
Mike Michalowicz (10:29):
I, I think they're great.
AJ Harper (10:31):
I think so too, but I just get a little nervous. It's just, I'm not really an oversharer.
Mike Michalowicz (10:35):
Okay. I got the correction noted. So what happened after that call?
AJ Harper (10:39):
So...
Mike Michalowicz (10:41):
That, that podcast...
AJ Harper (10:44):
So we talked about in that podcast, the marketing challenges. You know, how you've been kind of resting on your laurels with some stuff, or you talk, you attributed to ego. I attribute it to you loving systems. Maybe a little bit ego, but, so if you listen to that episode, you'll get some context for this. I think it's a really important episode, but I, I, I find it so interesting that you are, you are so good at tracking metrics, and yet sometimes you get, still get stuck in doing something that you shouldn't be doing. But I do. I don't think most people track. Hmm. So I think it's really important this episode to see how do you, Mike Michalowicz track? If something's working, how and what is a good metric? I don't think people even know. Yeah. How do they know if this is actually working?
Mike Michalowicz (11:34):
We'll go through all that. I just wanna point out that sometimes I continue to do something, even though the metrics show it's not working, because I find a way to justify it in my own mind and say, oh, the metric isn't working because I didn't make this little tweak or adjustment, which is a confirmation bias. I want something to work, so I'm gonna see the numbers the way I wanna see them.
AJ Harper (11:54):
So is then... You just need to trust the numbers and not try and explain away the numbers?
Mike Michalowicz (12:00):
Yes. And you have to argue both sides of the the argument. So instead of saying like, when the pay a forward campaign when the numbers were declining, I would say, well, what is not happening causing the decline? Or what is happening that is causing decline? I only looked at one side and said, well, what's not happening is we don't have a strong enough plea or argument in the email notification to people. (Oh.) You know? And so I just make all the arguments and say, oh, I can get this back up. Oh,
AJ Harper (12:30):
So what you're saying is you love the idea. (Yeah. Yeah.) So you just try to think you just have to do the, be better at that.
Mike Michalowicz (12:37):
Correct. Enamored by the idea and say the metrics are pointing to, oh, clearly I have a, a kink in it. There's a kink in the hose.
AJ Harper (12:43):
Oh, I would do that too, though.
Mike Michalowicz (12:46):
Well, that's normal. It's, it's a confirmation bias. It's human nature. The best thing to do then is to say, make all the arguments against this too. Let me do the flip side. Why should I abandon this? Where are all the indicators? This is not working? And, and just to give a try to balance the perspective.
AJ Harper (13:02):
I mean, the idea sucks, or maybe it just stopped working.
Mike Michalowicz (13:05):
Yeah, yeah. And it's accepting that and, and putting as best as I can. And you can equal credibility in our mind that maybe the idea just sucks now or it no longer works. And, and to give those arguments, and hopefully they'll give a little more of a balanced perspective. I remember an accountant once said to me, he goes, what do you want the numbers to look like? I said, what do you mean? He goes, oh, I can tell any story you want through your numbers.
AJ Harper (13:32):
I know.
Mike Michalowicz (13:33):
But he's like, no, seriously. He goes, we, we were looking to sell the business. He goes, well, we'll do a recast. A recast means reproject the numbers. And he goes, we can have him say anything. I'm like, but we're not profitable. He's like, yeah, 'cause you're all, you're all for growth. Which I, I call on that. But he's like, you're all for growth and clearly you're reinvesting in doing X, Y, Z to grow the organization. It's the most prudent thing you could do. That's our argument.
AJ Harper (13:55):
Mike Michalowicz (13:57):
Yeah. Spin. But we do it in our mind. I'll tell you the most important metric that you must track, if you track nothing else, it's the one thing units sold.
AJ Harper (14:34):
Okay. But this is interesting because you're using that to determine other things, such as (Correct.) is the book working? Is the book the marketing for that book working? But you might also have a bulk sale initiative, in which case you would have a separate set of metrics,
Mike Michalowicz (14:50):
Correct? Oh, yeah. For sure. For sure.
AJ Harper (14:53):
Got it. Okay. So I understand the distinction. Yeah. So if you are gonna do bulk, bulk sales, maybe track them in a different way. Don't put them in the soup with everything else,
Mike Michalowicz (15:02):
Perhaps. And you won me over on bulk sales. (Yay.) No, you totally did. Oh, good. When we were working with Kasey through, you know, she's a Penned With Purpose author, and we're working on bulk sales.
AJ Harper (15:15):
Kasey Compton.
Mike Michalowicz (15:15):
Kasey Compton. Correct. And we were working on book sales, bulk sales of her book. And are deploying a strategy more aggressively that I wanna talk about in a little bit. But the foundational number to look at is how many units are you moving? And if you're doing bulk. And I now support that in conjunction with individual sales track that do distinguish them. But because, because if, if you have a one buyer by a thousand units and you think that's a thousand individual sales, it may persuade you
AJ Harper (15:44):
It distorts. Yeah. Yeah. What do you consider a bulk sale? Which the minimum quantity for it, because it's different than the bonus offers you do at launch.
Mike Michalowicz (15:53):
Correct. Correct. I consider a bulk sale where an entity who's buying it has the intention of distributing it to other people. So it's really the intent. So I had an association I spoke at, and they bought a hundred copies so that every guest could see me speak. That's a bulk sale. I had an individual buy a hundred copies, and the bonus was he had to spend an hour with me. That I don't consider a bulk sale.
AJ Harper (16:21):
Got it.
Mike Michalowicz (16:21):
Even though technically he's gonna do the exact same thing. So I, I wouldn't make that hard, A hard fast rule. I mean, he's not gonna read a hundred copies over, he's gonna hand 'em out to friends, or they're gonna sit on the shelf for a while.
AJ Harper (16:33):
Right. But that's different than if somebody buys, if a corporation buys 500 copies of All In and distributes it to their employees.
Mike Michalowicz (16:42):
It is, it is. Because he may be an Uber fan. Right. So even though he bought a hundred copies, and he's not, that doesn't represent a hundred different consumers. It does represent a really engaged reader, a super fan.
AJ Harper (16:57):
Wow. This is tricky. Right.
Mike Michalowicz (16:59):
Well,
AJ Harper (17:00):
So how do you, are you noting all this differently then?
Mike Michalowicz (17:03):
No. All we track is individual sales as reported through BookScan, and then bulk sales as reported, which also gets reported through BookScan through our main distributor, which is book dash pal. BOOK dash PA l.com. If you're looking for a bulk distributor or discount distributor, porch Lights, one porch
AJ Harper (17:23):
Light.
Mike Michalowicz (17:23):
Mm-Hmm.
AJ Harper (17:56):
Yeah. And they both report to book scan. So if you want basically credit for those in terms of your publisher Yeah. Or future publishers, seeing how many books you sold, you sold. Yeah. You want that.
Mike Michalowicz (18:07):
All right. So step one is have a way to track your individual sales and your bulk sales. Step two is, what we do is we set a master spreadsheet and each campaign gets its own tab. So campaign one is influencers, you know, so influencers are who are the individuals that I have enough rapport with that I can make the request. Would you be comfortable spreading the word on my book? When they say yes, they're marked in there as someone that's gonna support the book distribution. And then we track how many sales they get as best as we can. Ideally, you use a affiliate code. So I can't remember exactly how we do this. So don't quote me on this. With Amazon, I remember we were able to, in some capacity... Oh, this is how we did it. You set up a code, a link in Amazon to your book if you can get an affiliate account.
Mike Michalowicz (19:03):
So for every book you sell, you get another dollar. Every time that account's clicked on, we got banned from that or kicked off because we put in an email. And according to Amazon's regulations, you can't email out an affiliate link or something to that effect. So just, just read the rules. Apparently I didn't, we didn't read the rules adequately. We got kicked off. But regardless if you had that or not, with that link, we went to different short links like Bitly and so forth. And we put in a nonsense code after it. So it'd say like amazon.com/profitfirst would go to Profit First, hashtag Don Miller, one of my faves. Then we went to Bitly, shortened that and compressed it. So as a compressed URLI said, Don, please use this link. Specifically, Bitly has a tracking capability.
AJ Harper (19:50):
Oh!
Mike Michalowicz (19:51):
So we could see how many times that link was clicked, and then make a correlative determination on how many book sales came out of that. If you, if you can get individual link within Amazon with its affiliate, well, gosh, then you can track everyone independently. I just don't know if you can do that.
AJ Harper (20:08):
I don't think you can do that.
Mike Michalowicz (20:08):
I don't think you can. But, but that's how we do it with Bitly. Or you can use any shortener to do it, but now we know how many lick links are clicked. The other thing is make sure you subscribe to that person's list. So we get on Don's list to see the email go out and so forth. So the first thing, we'll have this influencer list and we'll track all the metrics for it. The second thing is the campaigns we have. So another campaign we do is the multi-book purchase. So we'll notify our list and what we'll say is if you buy two copies today, you'll get these bonuses. If you buy 10 15, we have determined, and we should maybe do an entire episode on multi-book purchases. (I Think so.) Okay. I was about to give away a link you could check out, so you can kind of copy what I've done, but we'll save it for that episode. Maybe. Excuse me. Gosh. We both had Taylor ham, bacon and cheese. It comes back up.
AJ Harper (21:05):
We're not allowed to do that before podcast anymore.
Mike Michalowicz (21:07):
Yeah. Don't fire down an Old Town Taylor Ham and Cheese. So the multilink page, we'd have a tab set up, then we would track what the offers were, how many people landed on that page, what the conversion rate was at the different numbers. This is really powerful because we only do one multi-book offer per launch. It's not like we do it, but it starts showing us a trend. We've optimized our numbers. We found that at least for us, having, and some authors do this, if someone buys one book, you get a bonus actually curtail people from buying more books. So we don't have a one book bonus. We have I think a three book. If you buy three books, seven 15, and I think the top number is 76. And that's, those numbers are optimized now based upon what we saw convert in the past. We sell a thousand, probably 2,000 books just through people buying the multi-book purchase. What's interesting is just earlier this week, I think maybe it was yesterday, I had a call with two guys that bought 76 copies of All In just to spend a half hour on the phone with me. And they bought 76 copies of Clockwork Revised, expanded just to spending time on the phone with me. I mean, Uber fans. Uber fans. So you, you start seeing that trend.
AJ Harper (22:27):
So you're tracking that in order to determine the best quantities (Yep.) To see which bonus offers are working well. (Yep.) Okay.
Mike Michalowicz (22:35):
We track conversion rates, so we'll track back to the influencers how well people's lists convert. So I now know, I'll ask Don and say, Hey, just can you gimme an estimate how many people you're gonna email us out to? Oh, I'm gonna email it out to 50,000 people. That's amazing. Thank you. So we write down 50,000. Then we see how many people click on the link. We're like, oh, Don has a click through rate of 0.2%. Then someone else we talked to Melissa Dugalecki comes to mind. Small list, like 600 people. Like, you know,
AJ Harper (23:38):
And you wouldn't have known that had you not done the tracking. So you might have continued to go after these big fishes that actually aren't yielding good results for you.
Mike Michalowicz (23:47):
That's right. That's right. Now I wanna do the big reveal, the coolest thing we just came upon (Oh!) Last. Yeah. So you don't even know this. Oh. So you can do this with any system that you publish through us as Penguin Random House. There's an export capability where you can export the history of the books on a weekly basis. You can do this through Amazon too, and maybe do it manually, but you can just export all sales. What we've been doing this 15 years. And so we put export all the data, 15 years. Here's the thing. You can go into chatGPT, import your data and say, tell me if there's a correlative effect between book sales. And it says, Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Yes. There is Every time you have, Profit First, we, we knew this, but now the data proves it.
Mike Michalowicz (24:32):
Profit First dictates the sales of all of our other books. There's a correlation, and I, I didn't even go in this deep, I'm going to, you can figure out the laggard time. So when someone buys Profit First, my estimate now is six weeks later, they'll buy another one of the books because they bought Profit First. It's, it's the, it's the lead book. Now. It, I asked the question, I said, well, when I sell more Clockwork, does it sell more books? It says, yes, during the launch period, you do, but other times has no correlative effect. So it just runs the correlations. It's deep data analysis. You can do it in chat GPT and it's free.
AJ Harper (25:09):
Huh. And you could do it if you just had one book, because you might be looking for different correlations.
Mike Michalowicz (25:15):
Yeah. I mean, you want, you know, there's that saying, garbage in, garbage out. You wanna make sure you put in good data. So as much as you can export from the source, just export. Try not to interpret. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff, at least for us still is it's, it's hand input. It's, it's an interpretation of something that we're putting in there.
AJ Harper (25:34):
Yeah. And if you're a self-published author, or if you're a hybrid author, you know, you, you probably have to pull data from multiple sources.
Mike Michalowicz (25:42):
That's right. I'm pulling up my spreadsheet right now. I'll show you see if there's so many other things I wanna talk about. Do you track your, your numbers for how to Write a Must-Read? Or Write a Must-Read? Not how I always say how Write a Must-Read.
AJ Harper (25:56):
It's okay. You know, I look at Author Central, like everybody, every other author. But I'm just now starting a new initiative to prove my theory about selling books. And I just met with my team this week, and we are creating a new spreadsheet. Just this is a total coincidence. We're creating a new spreadsheet to track exact, you know, 'cause we have to pull data from my publisher. But then there's also Author Central, which correlates, but then I have took my own audiobook. So I have FindAWay Voices. I have ACX. Then there's the, I also did the ebook, took that on myself. Yeah. So they created it. But I wanted to have, I wanted to load it myself and have control over the page listing. So even though I have a publisher, I have these other sources. So I have to manually pull that data. What we're trying to do is get a baseline to see if the initiatives that we're about to start, I guess you would call it a campaign, but I don't think it's a campaign. It's more like the outreach is what I would call it. So we're zeroing in on one air, one group of people. And we've developed a, an idea for getting them to help sell my books, basically, or to buy the books in bulk. So we're gonna track, we're gonna do one initiative per quarter.
Mike Michalowicz (27:21):
Nice.
AJ Harper (27:22):
And that's clean then. Yeah. To see, you know, what, how is this impacting sales? But I also wanna track getting back onto podcasts every week or every other week, because I can see a dip when I'm not regularly on. So we'll be tracking marketing campaigns, this Outreach Initiative podcast, and just looking for what's happening each week to see if we can see a correlation to any bumps that we might see.
Mike Michalowicz (27:51):
I'll give you the poor man's. It's called Poor Man's Lobster. You ever hear that saying? Poor man's lobster? Monk. It's monk fish. Okay. No. So it may just a thing in my family, I don't know
AJ Harper (28:55):
I think it's somewhere between two and four hours.
Mike Michalowicz (28:57):
Two and four. Okay. So let's say it's every four hours. And there is a laggard on it for sure, because at 11 o'clock today, I'm doing a webinar on All In, and I'm gonna be selling books. There's gonna be a couple hundred people there. I suspect I'll sell a hundred books today of All In, which will give it a bestseller number one status. Again, it'll be a top thousand book, I think today. And I'm not trying to be cocky or I just know now from my metrics.
AJ Harper (29:23):
You know, from your metrics. Yeah. You know what we need to do.
Mike Michalowicz (29:25):
I know exactly what to do, how to say it in four hours from that thing. So around three or four in the afternoon, the number will change, but it won't necessarily change to a bestseller. It may actually even go to a lower position. Meaning it may slow down because I think it reports updates every four hours, but it may be a lag of another four hours before that. So don't be dissuaded immediately, but within eight hours to 12 hours, that's, that is really showing where you landed. The reason I want you to check your BSR every single day is when you see a pop and it hits a, a really strong position, ask yourself what happened within the last 24 hours to have caused this? And that's something you track. We did this with Profit First. Profit First, I check it every day.
AJ Harper (30:12):
Do you, do you also lift the BSR and put it in a spreadsheet? Or do you just ...
Mike Michalowicz (30:16):
We, I did for a while.
AJ Harper (30:17):
You just eyeball it now?
Mike Michalowicz (30:18):
Yeah. Just eyeball it. We used to lift it and there's, there's scraping tools out there we're trying to use, but Amazon actually tries to prevent that. Like, you can automate a system to go on there, look it up, take a picture of it, basically, and input it into a spreadsheet. You can still do it. It's just complicated. And I found it's not necessarily worth it. I just log in once a day, because if you see a big bump, that bump will stay for a 24 hour period. It doesn't just disappear. Well, one day Profit First usually falls in between a, a natural ranking of 800 overall to maybe 1200. The typical range it falls in. And I know this,
Mike Michalowicz (31:06):
I'm like 100. I checked again four hours later, 27th, 27th in the world. Like, this is the top 27th book in the world. I'm like, what is the correlative effect? So I call Andrea and Kelsey and say, something's going on with Profit First. We're moving a lot of copies. Ended up being 3000 copies. We gotta figure out what's going on. And so now you start putting your sniffers out there, and we found out within an hour, it was a TikTok post. And the reason we found out is one of our readers said, oh, I saw someone mention you on TikTok and mailed our team." Normally, something that we'd say, oh, thanks for telling us, but would ignore. But now our sniffers are out because we saw this positive ranking. Looked at it, pulled it up. This TikTok had 300,000 views and, and just by the second going. And so there's a direct correlation between an individual promoting your book that's not yourself on TikTok. And if it gets a lot of views, sure enough. So now we're actively trying to facilitate that. It's not something easy to do, but we know. Doesn't mean we've, we figured out how to do that.
AJ Harper (32:09):
But you understand where it came from. (Yes.) Because you were checking every day. Otherwise, you would've heard about that by seeing a bump in your royalties when you got the report.
Mike Michalowicz (32:20):
Six months later, or a year later.
AJ Harper (32:21):
It would've been about eight to 10 months later. Yeah. So you wouldn't have been able to isolate it.
Mike Michalowicz (32:26):
That's Right. That's exactly right. We subsequently contacted that TikTok influencer. I did. I said, Hey, what you did for me is a big deal. And she's like, yeah, I had no idea. I just, she goes, most of my videos don't hit this one hit for some reason. And we're like, well, thank you. We'd like to send you a gift. We sent her every book. We bought some t-shirts from her to distribute to people. She's like, my God, you're amazing. This is so kind and built rapport with this person. Not with the intention of well now become our main promoter, because who knows what will happen just to show genuine gratitude and built rapport with her. But, but now we know TikTok is a big effing deal. Unless it gets banned next week or whatever.
AJ Harper (33:04):
Yeah. It would be sad for a lot of, well, we won't get into it here.
Mike Michalowicz (33:09):
We won't, but, but it happens. Google does. It's Google slaps, you know, things change. Things change.
AJ Harper (33:12):
I do wanna clarify for everybody listening, the BSR is the bestseller ranking on Amazon, and it's the overall number. We're not talking about the category rankings. So what Mike's tracking is just eyeballing that main number. (Yep.) And the lower, the better.
Mike Michalowicz (33:33):
I found there's some things that people typically do for marketing and there's not a good ROI, but this may become a debate because you can leverage this technique to get a good ROI, what I've discovered is most book launch parties don't, don't move a lot of books. And I, I know authors who've put such effort in getting people into a room and saying, Hey, my, my book's launching today. They actually spend so much time and, and money getting that event together. They would've done better doing other marketing techniques. Casey may be the exception, but Casey did something outside of that launch party that we went to. They actually moved the books. And this is the, the big aha now coming in marketing. It's, it's sponsorships. It's, it's definitely sponsorships. I don't know if you know this. Int TV shows more and more they're integrating products and they're doing it more subtly.
Mike Michalowicz (34:28):
It used to be like a person drinks coke and they turn the label perfectly. So you can see the Coke label and they angle themselves
AJ Harper (35:02):
So the sponsors were doing bulk, bulk buys.
Mike Michalowicz (35:04):
The sponsors were doing bulk buys. Well, yeah. Night even bulk buys fundraisings. They, they, how she positioned it, she said, "Listen, this book can serve a, a community of people that are seeking therapy and support and want some kind of adjunct benefit." you know, so she goes, "I wanna give this to therapist, particularly in economically stressed areas and so forth, where this isn't as accessible. So we're looking to use money, your money to buy books and supply for therapists in this area." So it is a form of a donation. She went to these sponsors and said, I will mention you on stage. I'll promote you to these therapists in these areas and so forth. And then she got funds that way. They gave her the cash, she facilitated the purchase of the books to delivery the books and all that stuff.
AJ Harper (35:46):
Okay. Understood. I do wanna say, just as a side note, I do think book launch parties can be wonderful things to do, but not if you're thinking that's where you're gonna sell a bunch of books. I mean, (I agree.) There's there's other reasons to do it. (I Agree.) Such as celebrating, getting a lot of buzz. A party can generate a lot of buzz. Yeah. 'cause people are taking pictures. It's exciting. There's a lot of buildup around it. It's just, it's good, really good for buzz and really good for you as an author to commemorate that. But not, it's not a not a time to sell more books. Most of the people who are there already got the book.
Mike Michalowicz (36:25):
That's correct. That's correct. Another thing that Kasey did and now Kelsey's analyzing our Kelsey is she did a silent auction, which was pretty freaking cool. We do these multi-book purchases, but silent auction is, there's only one unit available. We can bid it up. You know, here's the current bid. And so that was interesting. There was cool donations, 'cause that gives exposure to those people, but people just donated out of their heart. And then we got the bidding going. And that raised, that was the second biggest raise of funds at that day, was the silent auction. And the intention, and it was explained to everyone, is we're gonna buy books with this and give it to areas that could, could benefit from it.
AJ Harper (37:11):
All right. So what other tracking do you do?
Mike Michalowicz (37:13):
So we track, I'm just looking through my master sheet here. We track, we talk about the influencers. We even track, this is crazy, but we track like endorsers. Like who's endorser blurbed about the book? Is there a correlation between someone that blurbs and sales? And the answer is, maybe there is on a major endorsement. So what we found is, and I never had a major endorsement, so to speak. (Yes, You have!) But close. Well, I haven't had President Obama or something like that. That's what I mean by major.
AJ Harper (37:48):
I think you're, yeah. You, you had some great endorsements.
Mike Michalowicz (37:51):
Well, from... Yes. Great endorsements. Will Garra may be the best endorsement. Yeah. And some people are like, well, who's that guy? He wrote a book called Unreasonable Hospitality. That's crushing it. We tested him with a front page endorsement, meaning the front, the front, I'm sorry, front cover endorsement. And it looks like there's a correlation that that generated more interest or sales in the book as opposed to a back.
AJ Harper (38:14):
It's interesting because you used to say you didn't think it made any difference.
Mike Michalowicz (38:18):
I didn't. Now how do we correlate it? We are using click through analytics because we, it's so hard to correlate that to actual sales on Amazon. We just wanna see who clicks on it more. And it looks like using tools like Pick FU and Pull Fish, those tools, anonymous polls click more when we had his name on the front, it was interesting.
AJ Harper (38:39):
I mean, I've, I've, I've always felt a good endorsement goes a long way. I've actually seen it happen. I've actually seen people walking by books on a shelf at Book Expo, turn and make a beeline for a book. Because out of the corner of their eye, they saw an endorsement from an author they loved who didn't often give endorsements.
Mike Michalowicz (39:06):
That's so legit.
AJ Harper (39:07):
I saw it happen. It was my own eyes.
Mike Michalowicz (39:10):
Wow.
AJ Harper (39:11):
And I thought, okay, that's why. But the problem is you're not always getting that. You have to be very careful about who is, it's not gonna just work with just anyone.
Mike Michalowicz (39:22):
Yeah. That's correct.
AJ Harper (39:24):
And that author was really popular in that moment.
Mike Michalowicz (39:28):
That's key, too.
AJ Harper (39:29):
So it's not just somebody that's esteemed over time. It's someone people are talking about. And I would say a lot of people are talking about...It's Will, right? A lot of people are talking about that book.
Mike Michalowicz (39:42):
Yeah. Correct. So I think that was it. Seth Godin probably has a, in our space, probably has a bigger name. No significant impact, but...
AJ Harper (39:50):
He also endorses a lot of books.
Mike Michalowicz (39:52):
Exactly. That's what I was thinking. He, it is like, oh, you see his name regularly, which is wonderful and amazing. But Wills seem to, to do things. The other thing we track is major media, and we don't do much of it at all unless it just falls in our lap because we have yet to find a single instance of a major media outlet appearance on it to move a lot of books. Now, there is exceptions. I'm just saying, in my case, I've been on CNBC, NBC, Fox, all of them. So what you do is, when the broadcast goes live, we just record the time we look for the next 24 hours. Impact on book sales is outside the normal expectation. Never, I dare say some of these shows, if they move one or two books, it's shocking. And they say, well we have, you know, a broadcast to a million people, a million people are viewing this. Maybe it's in a million hospital waiting rooms where people are reading a newspaper. It's playing in the background. They're not, it's not moving books. There are exceptions. I know the Oprah Effect. I dunno if that still exists.
AJ Harper (40:54):
Well, okay, that's a different deal. 'cause Now you're talking about different sort of book clubs. Like, Reese Reese has one Jenna Bush Hager on the Today Show. She has a pretty popular book club. Oprah's has hers, Oprah has ventured into nonfiction, but only a specific type of nonfiction. So those are, that has a community around it. People who are listening and waiting for those recommendations. Okay. Versus say having a, somebody as an expert come on, who happens to have a book. That's a different thing than if you wanna know what Oprah or Jenna are recommending that month.
Mike Michalowicz (41:34):
Yeah. That, that helps. That makes sense. I'm just looking through notes here. Other things we track is speaking tours. I haven't put much into that, but I think the next book launch, we may,
AJ Harper (41:46):
What do you mean you haven't put much into that?
Mike Michalowicz (41:49):
Meaning speaking where we require substantial book sales, usually I'm just taking the speaking fee. But we may start changing that up to have more speaking events where it translates to substantial book sales.
AJ Harper (42:02):
So at Heroic with Michael Port and Amy Port, I know that most of the speakers there are including at least 200 books with every speaking package. It's just part of it.
Mike Michalowicz (42:19):
Oh, it's just included period. Well, that's interesting.
AJ Harper (42:22):
Yeah.
Mike Michalowicz (42:24):
Yeah. Okay. So they incur that cost. We're Yeah, we're doing it as an additive Right now, Mike's speaking fee is x plus you have to buy 200 books above and beyond the speaking fee. So just baking it in.
AJ Harper (42:34):
Well, if you wanted, you know, that would increase your sales. Yeah. If you make it mandatory. Yeah.
Mike Michalowicz (42:40):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And for some of these events, it is a separate for purchase line. So it's interesting. If you're speaking fee, I'm just gonna pick a number, $10,000 the person hiring you, that may be their max budget. So the second you say it's $12,000, and by the way, that includes a hundred books or whatever it is, they'll say, I can't afford 12,000. It's gotta be 10. But if you say it's 10,000 plus, it's a separate purchase of 200 books. And that goes now maybe to the marketing or the, the tchotchke budget and may become affordable. Which is kind of interesting. I'm just seeing if there's anything else we track here.
AJ Harper (43:14):
Do you track what podcasts you're on? So many.
Mike Michalowicz (43:17):
Yeah, we do. Again, it's hard to correlate sales. So we look for those anomaly moments, meaning when we're logging into Amazon every day, do we see pops? And then we go back and correlate. So we do track the podcast I've appeared on and when the, the airing date is.
AJ Harper (43:35):
So would you do this? So we just developed the spreadsheet just this week with my team. What are we tracking? Yeah. So we talked about having one column that said, what happened? What's going on this week? Okay. So these were the marketing emails that went out. This was a podcast that was released from wherever AJ spoke on and whatever else happened that week so that you could try and find the correlation. (Yeah.) Just a little cell on the sheet that someone on your team is filling in to say, this is what happened this week.
Mike Michalowicz (44:10):
Effectively we're doing the same thing. Okay. It's so smart. So most podcasts, we don't see any, any correlation. There's two that I've been on, and this has changed. I don't know if it's still the case. EO on Fire, that's John Lee Dumas's show. When I'd appear on there, we'd see a pop in sales and StoryBrand, Don Miller's, we'd see a pop in sales. And I can't think of many other podcasts. There's been some, I can't think of 'em by name, that we see a pop in. We look and say, oh, this happened this week. It's because of this. The vast majority of podcasts, not a, in fact, we had to make the hard decision. I get invited to be on a podcast constantly, and there's such a blessing. It's a big time cost, you know, I'm doing these podcasts we're limiting when though the ideas was like, Mike can only appear for 20 minutes max. And people were honoring that. But Thursday, say, happens to be a Thursday, today would typically be packed with about 10 to 15 podcast appearances. And so the whole day is chewed up and maybe the result in a couple book sales, it it, we couldn't see any correlation.
AJ Harper (45:15):
So that's important. And it's gonna be different for different authors.
Mike Michalowicz (45:18):
Correct. Yeah. So don't, don't say this is, oh, well, could we podcast, don't work.
AJ Harper (45:20):
Yeah. Don't say, Mike says podcasts don't work. They talk. Yeah. It's just not as effective for you.
Mike Michalowicz (45:27):
That's right.
AJ Harper (45:28):
But it might be for other people. I notice a definite dip when I'm not on a podcast.
Mike Michalowicz (45:33):
See? There you go.
AJ Harper (45:33):
So.
Mike Michalowicz (45:34):
There you go. I wonder if this is just now sur surmising, but I wonder if the awareness for the community's by my books is out there enough through the other things I'm doing, that if they hear one of these podcasts, it just substantiates, but doesn't, doesn't reveal to someone new. When, when someone hears me on someone else's podcast. It's, it's possible they're not saying, oh, I never heard of this guy before. Let me look into him. They're like, oh, I know.
AJ Harper (45:59):
What are you mostly talking about? I'm curious. Okay, I wanna ask you this. What are you talking about?
AJ Harper (46:05):
On the podcast?
Mike Michalowicz (46:06):
Well, they interview me inevitably about one of the books and the systems in the books.
AJ Harper (46:11):
So I Oh systems. Okay. I just,
Mike Michalowicz (46:15):
So, so it's the same content over and over.
AJ Harper (46:17):
This, this is what I'm wondering is, you know, I'm thinking about All In and our most recent book, and I think about the, the really amazing disruptive messages in there. And ideas and strategies. And I, I think sometimes it's more effective to talk about one aspect of a book versus the entire book.
Mike Michalowicz (46:38):
I a hundred percent agree.
AJ Harper (46:39):
So if there's a way to maybe say, yeah, I'll come on your podcast, but I actually wanna talk about this status quo and what I really believe. And I wonder if you might see a shift, if you could try and get into more detailed nitty gritty of something unexpected.
Mike Michalowicz (46:57):
I, I a hundred percent agree with that. We actually are moving toward that way on our own. We started recording these deep dives. I go into one topic and just go deep, deep, deep into it. This podcast that we're doing now we were just talking about this morning Off Air is having a hope, what we intended and hope for, but still, it's unexpected positive reception. People are like, wow, you're digging so deep into these books. So deep into these concepts, people are binging like crazy on this. Like on the show, these other shows that I appear on, they follow their perfunctory style. So our counterpoint is let's stop doing that. Where the, the question comes with their five, six questions. And then, let me start just doing deep dives on my own. We have yet to determine it's too early, but we're tracking.
AJ Harper (47:58):
Well, I think you've made a good case for metrics, man.
Mike Michalowicz (48:01):
Yeah.
AJ Harper (48:02):
You know?
Mike Michalowicz (48:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Track the metrics, check the metrics, and, and it changes. If you asked me 15 years ago, how do you get a book out there? I'd be like, blogs, you ought be on every blog. If you asked me five years ago podcast, you'll be on every podcast you asked me. Today may be, it may be something different. I think it may be these live webinars with a specific call to action that we've kind of mastered, we're doing with our authors at Penned With Purpose. It may be sponsors. This may be the future and it could be something else. Last thing is the best. This is, I gotta hand this one to you. There is one best marketing ROI in the world.
AJ Harper (48:40):
Oh, it's a must-read book.
Mike Michalowicz (48:42):
Damn straight.
AJ Harper (48:42):
Because write a must-read. Why would anybody, right. Why would anybody recommend it or gift it to others if they didn't love it?
Mike Michalowicz (48:50):
I was talking with Brian. He discovered this through this podcast. He's hired your company. He's working with you personally.
AJ Harper (48:55):
Well, not hired, he's in my workshop in the fall.
Mike Michalowicz (48:58):
Engaged. Is that the right word? Not hired,
AJ Harper (48:59):
No. He's a student.
Mike Michalowicz (49:01):
He's, he's a student.
AJ Harper (49:04):
He's, he's joining my community. He's joined your community. It's like the Hotel, California. And you can never leave.
Mike Michalowicz (49:11):
He will create, Brian will create an extraordinary book. 'cause He's working with you.
AJ Harper (49:16):
That is true.
Mike Michalowicz (49:16):
Extraordinary.
AJ Harper (49:17):
I can say that with confidence.
Mike Michalowicz (49:19):
And what I want every author to know is, you know, we just focused on marketing. Regardless of how great you market, if you have a marginal or poor book, if you've written that book, it ain't gonna sell because maybe you can convince the first person to get it, but they're not gonna be convincing anyone else. It stops with them. And so then you're in this marketing trap of always trying to convince the first person, if you do nothing else, screw all the marketing in the world. Just write the best book on the planet. Just write this book and you will sell. Because the person that reads it will feel compelled to tell others. It's that simple. All right. Hey, we wanna hear your oh, oh, oh, wait, wait, wait. I have this big note here. It says, correction. This is a corrections corner.
AJ Harper (50:10):
Oh. On a previous episode. Okay. It's the same one I referenced earlier. It's the one about the call with Penguin. It aired on 3-21-24.
Mike Michalowicz (50:51):
Thank you. Thank you for that correction. I wanna remind you, visit our website. It's DW tb. Don't write that book, dwtbpodcast.com. We have free materials up there for you. We'd love for you to join our email list so we can share some cool stuff. We'd love to hear your stories too. So forward them on our way. You can always email us directly at hello@dwtbpodcast.com. Check out AJ's program. Become a student of top three book workshop. It is transformative. I, I promise you that. And always remember this. Don't write that book. Write this one.