5 Reasons Why Nobody is Buying Your Book

Are you wondering why nobody seems to be buying the book that you slaved over for months? You poured your heart and soul into it and tried your best to make it unique and compelling yet your sales are slowly trickling in mostly from friends and family? Is there something wrong with your book? Is this some sort of statement on the quality of the writing? Should you even bother trying to write another one? These are some of the questions that may be going through your mind if you are a first time author and especially if you are self published. The first thing we would say is, you are not alone. Before you are too hard on yourself take a look at some of the reasons why your book isn’t selling.

1. The importance of book covers. You may have an incredible story but if your book cover doesn’t resonate with your target audience, they are most likely never going to stop scrolling to even read your synopsis. If you are seeing really low sales, you might check around with other authors or work with a different graphic designer to get thoughts on whether or not you should change your book cover. It’s actually a really common problem. You can also use our book cover checking tool to analyze the quality of your book cover for factors you may not have even considered before. We check for color contrast to make sure it looks good on grayscale devices. We check for things in your cover that may be offensive to certain groups and a few other things. It’s worth a quick analysis and it is completely free.
2. Your synopsis lacks keywords. If you are selling on Amazon (and you should be), then you want to make sure that you have keywords that people search for in your synopsis/book description. This might be mentioning other works that they may have enjoyed reading or adding names they might recognize. For instance, one book of ours is about Norse Mythology and specifically focuses on Bragi, the god of poetry. That’s interesting and somewhat unique but we added in mentions of Thor and Loki because it is far more likely that readers are going to be looking for books about Thor and Loki than Bragi. There are tools out there that will help you analyze amazon keywords like Publisher Rocket. We highly recommend checking out those tools if you don't know where to start. This is also another area where an experienced author or editor can come in handy in helping you craft a better synopsis to attract more views for your book. Please don’t undervalue gloss over this, it’s important.
3. You didn’t create a launch marketing plan. Many authors (especially first-time authors), will just release their book and hope for the best. This isn’t actually a marketing plan at all and if you fall in this category it’s very likely this is the main source of your book sales problem. It takes careful planning to successfully pull off a book launch. Whether you use ARC’s (Advanced Reader Copies) or other less formal ways of building up a launch team, they can be instrumental in helping you launch your book by spreading the word about your book to their networks (friends and family). It’s also important to determine which external marketing services you are going to use (we have another article on this blog that recommends some marketing platforms our authors use). These are email newsletter services, Amazon and FaceBook Ad services, other paid ads like BookBub, etc. There are many services out there but the main point is if you aren’t using them then it will be hard to sell books in the long run.
4. You didn’t research your target market.  If you haven’t spent time researching books that are in the genre you are targeting, that could be an issue. Many genres have recurring themes for successful books (from book cover imaging to synopsis writing). It’s highly recommended that you look at the best selling books in your genre to research what they are doing and to attempt to mimic those to the extent possible. This is especially true if you don’t see names of extremely successful and well-known authors at the top of the best selling list on Amazon. We can pretty safely assume that books that have been successful have gotten their marketing plans right and rather than be jealous of that success, we should try to tap into it and follow their lead. Do Google searches on the title of the book and see what pulls up. You might be surprised at the number of places you will find that book listed that may be a great source of traffic and readers for your book.
5. You aren’t working with other authors in your genre. One of the best things you can do is to try to reach out to other authors that write books in your same genre. At first you might think they are just your competition, which they are, but move past that. It’s highly unlikely that they write so many books that their readers are fully satisfied by just the books that author writes. Which means they are likely looking for similar books to read. So if you write romance novels then it might be very beneficial for you to work with other romance novelists to co-promote your books. Book fairs are a great way to do just that because we make it super easy to both find those authors and then co-promote your books through something like a romance novel book fair (to further the romance novel example). No matter how you do it though, we highly recommend connecting with other authors in your genre to exchange ideas and to help each other be more successful. Networking with other authors offers many benefits and selling more books is certainly one of them.

Hopefully we have been able to give you some ideas on why your book isn’t currently selling (or selling as much as you hoped). It’s important to not let that self-doubt creep in too early. While it’s possible that you wrote something that nobody is interested in, it is not that likely. There is a market for almost any kind of book you have written, the challenge is finding that market and getting your book in front of those potential readers. We will have additional articles over time that could be helpful to you so we would encourage you to watch this blog and to subscribe to our newsletters. Our community of authors is here to help you be as successful as possible whether you join us or not. Happy writing and best wishes for success with your books!