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110: International Book Marketing Strategies with Marc Reklau

About this Episode

Marc Reklau is a Coach, Speaker and author of the #1 Amazon Bestseller 30 Days— Change your habits, change your life which since April 2015 has been downloaded over 100,000 times on Amazon and has been translated into Spanish, German and Korean.

Before he wrote his breakout bestseller Marc worked as a printer for a publishing company in Spain. When the German market for books dried up in 2013 Marc was fired from his job. He decided to use his savings and the unemployment he got from the government to pursue his dream of making a difference in the world.

He was inspired to write his book for all of the young people in Spain who saw no hope during the global financial crisis. Marc knew from his own experience and training in self-improvement that if you form proper success habits it’s possible to change your life in a very short period of time.

He began work on 30 Days— Change your habits, change your life in April of 2014 and it was live on Amazon by September of 2014.

In our conversation we talked about why it’s important to have your book translated into English and Spanish. We talked about the pros and cons of selling foreign-language rights, and Marc revealed a solid international marketing strategy that everyone will want to hear.

Bookbub is amazing.
When Marc’s promotion went live on bookbub he got 40K free downloads in one day.
Bookbub download momentum peters out from the second into the third day. Take that into account when planning your promotion.
It’s important to realize that you can’t manually turn off a bookbub promotion. If you do you will never get another one.
One surefire way of marketing your books is to write more books.
One benefit of publishing a book is that it gives you authority status so that you can teach your subject is that something you’re interested in.
Spain is a much smaller market than the US. So it’s much easier to get noticed by Amazon executives there.
When you sell foreign rights to a publisher in another country you’re giving up the ability to market yourself.
Often when you sell foreign rights you’re only paid once by the publisher regardless of what the contract says.
Translators are more expensive than native speaking editors. So if you can translate your self that may be the way to go.
80% of traditionally published books are never sold. They are sent back to the publisher and recycled.
Only 2% of authors so more than 500 copies of the books they write.
While paperback books may make up a fraction of your sales they lead to different business opportunities such as coaching clients and speaking engagements.
Everyone should write a book.
Publish your book no matter what your inner critic says.
you will get approximately 1 yes for every 10 rejections.

Marc’s International Marketing Strategy

1. Have your book translated into American English and Spanish. America is the largest market for e-books in the world. And there are 500 million Spanish-speaking people in the world.

2. Use free promotions (including bookbub if you can get it) to get massive downloads of your e-books from Amazon.com when you’re book is free on Amazon, make sure it is free on the other Amazon websites you are selling the book.

3. After the free promotion period, set the price to $.99 so that you can get some screen shots of your book being a number one bestseller on Amazon. Use those screenshots as part of your promotional packet.

4. Amazon in Spain (Amazon.es) is a relatively small market. Selling five books a day there is likely to get you in the top 100 of the general store on Amazon.es as of October 2016 .

5. The whole point of all this is to have Amazon Spain actually promote your book for you. This is the exact strategy Marc used to beat out Tim Ferris and David Allen in the time management category on Amazon.es.

Links and Resources Mentioned in the Interview

30 Days – Change your habits, Change your life: A couple of simple steps every day to create the life you want — — Marc’s international bestseller

Bookbub — the big name in ebook promotion

http://www.babelcube.com/ — an online marketplace where you can find translators to translate your book into different languages. The translators split the royalties from the translated version of your book.

http://www.marcreklau.com/ — Marc’s personal website

http://goodhabitsacademy.com/ — Marc’s course on changing your habits.

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