What to do When Book Sales Start Slipping

Are your book sales starting to dip a bit? If so, what should you do to increase your book sales again?

In this discussion, I am going to assume that your book sales were once great and are now starting to fall. If sales were always bad, I have another episode for you to start with called What to Do When Your Book is Not Selling.

Book Sales Always Decline Over Time

Before we get started, I want to acknowledge that book sales always decline over time.

Most bestselling books see their highest sales during the pre-order period, followed by the launch month, and then experience a slow, steady decline. Even for books where this is not the case at first, it eventually becomes the reality. It’s rare that an author writes an enduring bestseller. In fact, lottery winners outnumber authors who’ve written enduring bestsellers.

One of the most appealing aspects of a book is how recently it has been published. But you can extend a book’s lifecycle. To learn how, listen to my episode on How to Extend Your Book’s Life With Effective Marketing.

First Check the Basics

The most common reason for a sales decline is that one of the basics has slipped.

Publish a New Book to Increase Book Sales

Most novelists need to publish at least one book per year to keep readers from giving up on them. Battered reader syndrome is the pain readers feel when the authors they love give up on a series without finishing it. If you don’t maintain a steady pace, readers will assume you’ve become the next George R.R. Martin, unwilling to continue writing.

If you need help publishing consistently, I have a great episode called the Tortoise Release Method, which will give you a template for a restful way to write and launch one book each year.

If it’s been a couple of years since your last book came out, you don’t need to listen to the rest of this episode; you need to write a new book to sell. That new book will give your old books a sales boost.

Conclude Your Series

Nothing juices sales like a series completion. Some battered readers won’t even start your series until they know the series has a conclusion.

Remember, after you conclude your series, you can always start writing a new series in the same story world.

Reinvest in Email List Growth

After achieving some success, it’s easy to become complacent with your existing email list instead of continuing to work on growing it. If your email list growth has been stagnant for the last year, I recommend going through my course, Author Email Academy.

Want a hint on how to get a bargain on that course? Everyone attending the 2025 Novel Marketing Conference will have a chance to get the Author Email Academy course for 80% off.

Check Your Funnel

A breakdown in sales is often related to a break in the sales funnel. A marketing funnel takes readers through three stages:

Knowing who you are (Attract)
Liking you (Engage)
Trusting you with their money (Convert)

You take readers through this process with attraction, engagement, and conversion. If you want help fixing your funnel, check out the following episodes:

Reconnect With Your Existing Readers to Increase Book Sales

Sometimes, authors get out of sync with reader expectations. Their previously happy readers get less excited about their books, and sales drop. This can be hard to notice because it happens slowly, often one reader at a time. Most happy readers keep saying so, while unhappy readers quietly walk away.

If your readers are slipping away, what should you do?

Connect With Readers in Real Life

Interacting with readers in real life is the best way to get a sense of who they are and what they want. A good reader event involves listening to your readers while they talk. If you simply lecture in a hall and then fly away to your next event without talking to people, you will not connect with them. That kind of event is not a good reader event, and it’s a missed opportunity for you.

To connect with readers in person with the purpose of listening, go to reader events.

Fan Conventions
Book Festivals
Homeschool Book Fairs
Library Events
Professional Conferences and Conventions (Nonfiction)

Learn more about connecting with readers in person by checking out the following episodes:

Poll Your Readers

Ask your readers what they think of your book series and where it is going. Sometimes, one small element of your story irritates your readers. Killing off one annoying character may be all that is needed to reinvigorate sales in your series.

One way to ask your readers what they think is through a survey. Listen to our episode on The Amazing Power of Reader Surveys to find out how to conduct one.

Read Your Reviews

I know. I know. Before you begin reading your reviews, just remember that reviews don’t describe your book; they describe your reader. Reviewers talk far more about themselves than about your book. Their review is not a judgment of your book; it is a glimpse into the reader’s heart. That realization makes reading reviews less painful and more helpful.

Listen to the following episodes for more help with learning from your audience.

Experiment With New Pricing Strategies

You can re-engage existing readers with various pricing strategies. Sometimes, you’ll want to lower the price, but other times, you’ll want to increase it. Your strategy will depend on your book and your goals. We’ve discussed pricing strategy at length in the following episodes:

Deepen Your Connection to Your Existing Readers

Once you reconnect with your readers, you may find they want a deeper financial connection to your books. This won’t help much with the drop in unit sales, but it can prevent or even reverse a drop in revenue.

Start Selling Direct

If you have 10,000 passionate readers who currently buy your annually-released ebook on Amazon for $7.99, you’ll bring in $55,590 per year.

If you could get half of those folks to buy the book from you directly, you would start making $65,000. That is a $10,000 increase just on the ebook with almost no additional work!

The ebook is where Amazon offers the most generous royalty at 70%. Selling your paperback and audiobooks directly can give you an even more dramatic increase in revenue since Amazon only offers 30% and 25% royalties on paper and audio, respectively.

When you consider all the add-ons and bonuses you could sell directly, that potential revenue increases even more.

Authors who sell directly to readers often make twice as much money per transaction.

Each year, readers are more willing to buy directly from authors, and each year, they spend less time on Amazon. If you are 100% focused on selling through Amazon, don’t be surprised if your sales keep slipping.

To learn more, listen to the following episodes about selling directly to readers:

Create Real Life Reader Experiences

Mystery Cruise with mystery author Jane Smith
Renaissance Fair fantasy meetup with fantasy author John Smith
Training seminar with business author Joe McCoach

The event would depend on your book. If you write religious books, you could host a religious event at your church or with your denomination.

Having a chance to meet with you and connect with your book in a special way creates the kind of super-fan who will spread the word and want to buy premium editions of your book.

Offer Premium Versions

Your core fans may want premium versions of your books. Stop selling $7.99 ebooks to readers who would prefer to buy a $100 limited-edition, signed and numbered hardback. Premium editions work best when paired with a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

To learn more about the benefits of printing premium editions in conjunction with crowdfunding, listen to the following episodes:

Fish in New Ponds to Increase Book Sales

Let’s say your sales have been good, your readers are happy, and you are deep into a popular series. But recently your sales have been dropping off. What should you do? Well, let me give you some advice my grandmother gave me about a decade ago.

I was single and frustrated about it, and my grandmother said, “Thomas, you need to go to a new church.” She attended a different type of church than I did, and at first, I thought she was making some sort of theological argument. But my grandmother didn’t care much about the theology or what kind of church I went to. She went on to say, “Thomas, you’ve met all the girls at your church, and they’ve all met you. You need to go to a new church.”

There’s something to be said for fishing in new ponds. In my situation, none of the girls at my church were interested in me. It turned out that the girl who would eventually become my wife attended a different church. I just had to go and find her.

In marketing, attraction tactics lose effectiveness over time as people form opinions about you. That’s why it is critical to fish in new ponds to reach new readers.

Advertise on New Websites

Top Places to Advertise Online:

X
Meta
Google
Amazon
YouTube
Podcasts

If you’ve been doing all your advertising on one website, you might see a significant boost in sales by switching to a different platform. Maybe X isn’t the top social network for you or your audience. Perhaps most of your readers are on Instagram or Facebook. However, if you’ve been advertising on Facebook for years and have never tried X, you might discover that ads on X can be surprisingly effective.

The key is to simply shift your focus from one platform to another.

Guest on New Podcasts

If you keep guesting on the same podcasts, you reach the same listeners. When you give an interview on a new podcast, you reach a whole new group of listeners.

New podcasts launch every week, and some of those new podcasts might have the perfect audience for you and your book. If you need help connecting with podcasters, consider becoming a Patron. I have a special Podcast Host Directory exclusively for Novel Marketing Patrons. It has contact information for over 10,000 podcasters and is a useful tool for helping you connect with new podcasters and their audiences.

Experiment With New Book Marketing Ideas

Authors have so many options for promotion, but sometimes, authors fall into a rut of using only one technique or reusing the same techniques over and over. Switching things up can reinvigorate sales. But how do you know what to try?

As I was creating a list of ideas for you, things got out of hand. By the time I was done, I had 101 Book Marketing Ideas, each with a corresponding podcast episode. Instead of listing them here, I created a downloadable PDF of the list instead.

Travel to New Places

People live in cultural, religious, political, and demographic bubbles. But we also live in a regional bubble. This is self-evident. Most of the people you regularly interact with live within 100 miles of you, and most of those live within 10 miles.

How many people do you know who live in Detroit? It’s the 14th largest media market in the country. Thousands of Detroiters may love to read your book if they knew about it. What about readers in Phoenix, San Antonio, Boston, and Denver?

For a long time, most of my listeners came from the Western states, even though most of the US population lives in the East. Since I was traveling and speaking along the West Coast, that’s where most of my listenership came from. I did very little speaking on the East Coast. News about a podcast or book spreads from person to person by word of mouth. And word-of-mouth marketing is often triggered by physical proximity.

If you listen from the East Coast, you may have discovered the podcast more recently than my West Coast listeners.

Check out the following episodes to learn more about word-of-mouth marketing and the importance of place and proximity.

Add Languages

The only bubble more powerful than the regional bubble is the language bubble. People can live in the same town, but if they don’t speak the same language, they live in entirely different literary and cultural worlds. Some authors find they are more popular in another country than in their home country, but this can be hard to predict. There are hundreds of countries and thousands of languages. However, most of those language bubbles might only account for sales of a dozen copies of your book, which is no good if you spent $2,000 publishing a translation.

However, if a lot of readers request a Hungarian or Portuguese translation of your book, consider giving it to them.

Add Formats

There are many readers (like me) who only listen to audiobooks. Others only read ebooks, and still others only read paper. If you are missing one of those formats, there may be a whole world of readers you haven’t connected with yet.

Many authors make the mistake of launching their book without offering all three formats: print, ebook, and audiobook. In fact, some go years without adding an audiobook. Often, all it takes to reinvigorate sales is to offer an audiobook to listeners like myself.

Producing an audiobook has never been cheaper or easier than it is today. Even readers who prefer print or ebooks will respect you more if you offer an audiobook version.

Add Retail Options

Other than Amazon, where can you sell your book? What kind of stores would want to stock your book? You might consider going wide, especially with your paper book. Try to think outside of the bookstore. Gift shops, pet stores, and nail salons can all sell books too. Maybe your book would sell well at computer stores or a Renaissance festival.

Make sure you are getting your book into libraries as well.

Target New Timothys

Before you freak out, let me explain.

My Little Pony (MLP) solidly targeted young girls. However, in 2010, MLP started becoming popular among college-aged men. These “bronies” added an entirely new audience and led to a surge of money spent on My Little Pony.

When looking for a new Timothy to target, you will get the best results targeting underserved readers. For more on writing for underserved readers, listen to How Larry Correia Became a Mega-Bestseller by Writing for Overlooked Readers.

WARNING! When you target new readers, do it with your advertising, not with your writing. It’s important to note that My Little Pony didn’t create a new product for a different audience; they just marketed to a new audience. If you want to target a different Timothy with your writing, write a different book.

Writing your book to one target reader can still make it appealing to more than one kind of person. Another example is the Twilight series. Twilight was written for teenage girls but became popular with middle-aged women. You’ll often find that if you can thrill one group, news about your book will spread to very different groups of people.

You target new readers with your advertising, not with your writing. Keep one Timothy in mind when writing your book.

One More Thing

One more thing could be causing sales to slip with your book, and it has nothing to do with your book. Culture changes over time. Commercials that made you tear up decades ago might make you cringe today. The ad didn’t change, you changed. What is true for individuals is also true for culture. The word for the cultural moment is “zeitgeist.” Your book needs to be in sync with the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist is always shifting.

Interestingly, culture shift is predictable. King Solomon saw it and talked about how nothing is new under the sun. The Romans saw it and called it the saeculum. Modern historians and anthropologists track the phenomenon, and modern academics call this cultural shift the “secular cycle.” Last year, in 2023, we shifted into a new phase of the secular cycle known as the Fourth Turning.

So, how will the Fourth Turning impact authors and writing? Stay tuned for a future episode I’m working on that will examine the answer.

Featured Patrons

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A Parable About Challenges and Improvement

We’ve had a lot of extended family around the last few weeks to see our new baby girl. An interesting side effect has been the impact on our other children.

I’ve learned to understand my two-year-old’s toddler dialect. It’s relatively easy for me to understand since most of the things he wants to talk about are events where I was present, so I already know what he is trying to say.

However, his grandparents weren’t present when he fell and skinned his knee, and neither are they familiar with his dialect. For that reason, it is harder for my toddler to tell his grandmother a story. This challenge forces him to work harder at pronouncing all the sounds in a word so that he can be understood. However, his difficulties have led to language development breakthroughs for him.

We notice that when our children are around their grandparents for extended periods of time, particularly without us there to translate, they come back to us talking with more clarity and a better grasp of the English language.

Most challenges in life are similar. They are opportunities to improve. So next time you face some suffering, instead of whining about it or trying to make it go away, ask, “What does this season of suffering have to teach me?” You may find that suffering makes you a better writer, just as struggling with pronunciation has made our toddler a better communicator.

Related Episodes

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What to do When Book Sales Start Slipping

Book Sales Always Decline Over Time

First Check the Basics