Table of Contents
Book Marketing For Authors
Book Marketing Recipe – Based on second hand knowledge and first-hand experience, a successful online marketing cocktail looks like this: Equal parts hard work, talent and persistence, shaken for a long, long, long, long time, and some luck skewered onto a toothpick and thrown in for good measure.” – Kristin Weber
My purpose here is to assist you to understand that marketing is communicating about your book and making it available on as many platforms as possible where the readers flock. As you begin on the book marketing tips offered here, you’ll come upon more ways to push your book to reach more readers.
For the first timer questions arise Why do you need to market your book? Aren’t the publishers the one to do it? If you upload it on Kindle direct publishing–would not it sell automatically? Loads and loads of questions from the newbie writer who is a creative genius but needs a book fairy to market it. That book fairy is a sound marketing strategy. A few tips from my marketing and selling experience.
“Most of us wouldn’t cook an entree for the first time without following a recipe, and having a marketing plan for your book can make the difference between success and falling flat.” – Paula Krapf
The First step on Book Marketing
Your primary task is to do relevant research about your audience before you write. This is necessary for two purposes–one to find the right niche to look for to rank on book websites and search engines, and secondly to find out in which Niche does your book (if is ready) fits to present it to the right audience. Knowing what people buy is a direct hit for getting sales.
With book buying and reading becoming universal–it not only opens a vast market but also offers a complex challenge to brand and sell your book. Wait, do books need branding? Yes, they very much do. You may have heard about book launches in book shops. Digital Marketing is a better idea than grand opening functions or author meets.
Use of Online Publicity for Book Marketing
Why? A real function is a onetime thing, compared to it an online event is even available later to view. Besides, you can sustain the online promotional activities for a longer time without spending big money. For instance, Facebook and YouTube ads are cheaper than say an ad put in a magazine hard copy. A simple meme can become a very interesting and viral marketing tool, which an offline ad can never achieve.
“Without an effective marketing plan, you might end up wasting a lot of time, money and effort in a frenzied, unorganized attempt to sell books.” – WordClay.com
1.Your Book Cover
Book marketing bgins with your book cover.Your book cover can become one of the most attractive assets to lure the audience and brand your book. A few important aspects–get it done from a professional. A book cover is like a recipe–if you get the best taste you will recommend it to others, provided of course the content is read-worthy. Also, the look attracts the audience, just like a well-made recipe with an attractive look will make your mouth water.
Have one that stands out in the background where your book will be displayed– for instance on Kindle Publishing Page your book will stand out with contrasting colors. Keep the cover text effective, to the point, and easy to read and remember. The graphics, the overall look and the ultimate effect should represent your book, not just impress the prospective buyer. Engage a professional to design it. Search Fiver or online websites to get a great one done.
for DIY Book Covers read Here : https://authorshine.com/2022/10/09/tips-to-diy-book-covers-easy-and-quick/
More on Book Covers Read Article Here : https://medium.com/@sudhirbhatt/creating-attractive-book-covers-d96db0ccf212
2.Impressing the Prospective Buyer
I suggest you do a thorough research for the niche of your books. How? By reading the index, introductions, blurbs of the best sellers and make notes to make an effective strategy. Read the free chapters to get the proper feel for it. You need to impress and also write right to make them recommend to others.
3. Join Readers and Writer’s Groups
You will need to join communities where you could talk about your writing skills. Do this without being intrusive and aggressive. Read and follow the rules of the forum. The universal principle is to pass your message to be helpful to others. Do not overwhelm them with your skills and knowledge. Gently show the tips and use your experience to gain their confidence.
4. Social Media & Book Marketing
LinkedIn and LinkedIn articles could give your book excellent exposure. But you need to be fairly regular and consistent as regards quality and the right tone, expression and reach.
Quora is a good place to look for various topics and answers which could become a link to your book topic in your blog post. Search for queries which relate not just relate to your book but also to your skills. Use your skills to answer to these queries.
Facebook: You need to be in touch with your friends to propagate your message, since Facebook and Instagram are interlinked you may get a substantial exposure here to your book blog.
Twitter: Your connecctions on twitter could also give you good exposure. Regularly tweet about your book’s interesting parts, serve small portions that could reveal less but make the reader curious.
5.Do Effective Email Marketing for Marketing Your Book
This area is fairly underrated by new authors; lead generation has to become a regular feature. Many do not understand how one can generate leads to sell books. But an email list of faithful readers is a significant source of sales for books. Your bond with your readers will become stronger as you grow, you can get valuable tips from them.
Email marketing is a very reliable source for developing market leads. Though it is complex as compared to advertisements or Instagram posts, it keeps you in touch with your audience privately, you can have individual feedbacks though your faithful audience. Whatever efforts you do–it is essential to check everything with the basic applicable metrics. Different areas of publishing need different parameters for checking. A large email list can give you regular sales of your book and personal reviews about various aspects of your book. You can do a survey to know opinions on characterizations, plot, storytelling, etc.
To Generate Leads read here https://medium.com/@sudhirbhatt/lead-generation-for-authors-and-blogging-71b6827ff0e
6.Online Book Publishing Platforms could make Book Marketing Easy and Simple
There are book discounting sites like Bookbub (quite expensive, though) and Book Gorilla to showcase your product. A few useful names – Reedsy.com, lulu.com, goodreads.com, and others. They have different schemes to promote your book, you decide based on your need. Here is a link to an exhaustive list of these types of sites and a detailed article on how they work by Dave Chesson.
https://kindlepreneur.com/list-sites-promote-free-amazon-books/
He has lined up some useful tools to promote your eBook – https://kindlepreneur.com/tools/
7.The Book Blurb
Genrate A Book Blurb description on this Link:
https://publishwide.com/amazon-description-blurb-preview-tool/
A book blurb can make the presentation of the book interesting. Go through the blurbs of books in the genre which you are into, you will get a neat idea of how to go about it. If you have some advance reviews from some famous people, it will work wonders here. The blurb has a lot of key points of the book displayed prominently and forcefully, without sounding aggressive.
8. Free eBook the Evergreen Lead Magnet
If the book is fiction or otherwise, you can make a small eBook of the summary of your Book and 2 or 3 exciting chapters that could interest the reader. You can distribute this freely on the book promotion websites. This free eBook must have the details at the prominent places in the book to show where can buy it. A prominent display of the link is essential. While selecting the chapters, make sure the matter would interest them and entice them to buy the full version.
Joining Goodreads could be a great idea. Goodreads has a network of over 65 million members. This makes it a useful promotional platform. You’ll create your profile page. Display your book offers, seek reviews, organize book giveaways, host discussions regarding your books, add your books to the suitable lists and bond with other authors here.
9.Start a Website or a Blog
Here you will need to put up a landing page which offers the free eBook I discussed above. This will not just promote your book, but also establish you as an authority on writing about your book topic. The content displayed must be to the point, relevant, useful and interesting to read. It should be such that the reader gets motivated to share it. Research well on each article with photos, Gifs and interesting presentations. Uniqueness of your material is a must. Impress the reader to revisit, share and remember the content. Take special care to write correct grammar and a unique style, tone, etc. Answer every comment appropriately.
10. Tie up with Social Influencers
Just being on the social media platforms is not enough. Visit the popular authors’ websites to find the right personalities by taking their help to reach the audience. You can publish their interviews and podcasts on your website for a fruitful association. Assure that your guests are on the popularity chart. Write an email to them showing how your website will be of help to them. Shower genuine praise after reading their work. Avoid getting personal but be exhaustive in asking the questions of your topic and audience interests. How do you know what interests an audience? The best way to find out is to visit author’s websites and look at the comments on blog posts.
11.Guest Blogging for Other Authors
You can start an association with them by guest blogging and writing articles that could make you and their website shine. You not only need to take the same amount of care as you write for your website. Also be extra careful of the decorum and rules that you must observe to make it pleasant for both. Study the Guest Post page carefully, all Guest posts offer pages give clear idea about how you go about it.
12. Medium, Ezinearticles, Hubpages.
Contribute through a regular column on each of the above websites for your niche. This could place you as a significant contributor, and drive traffic to your blog. It could also help you to establish yourself as an authority on your Niche. Bonding with other authors and writers could expand your writing horizon. Even regular reading and commenting on other contributors could give your book an enormous boost to your blog. Medium is a powerful and effective publishing platform with a huge variety of topics to write and get prominence in your niche.
13.KDP and Author Central
Kindle direct Publishing can give you good exposure to your book. But you will need to research about the sales rank, popularity, reviews, sales, etc. You can get various researching apps to do it. To find out about a better ranking, two applications KD Spy and Publisher Rocket would be useful. You can download from here – https://www.kdspy.com/ and KDP rocket https://publisherrocket.com/.
These apps can give you a fairly good idea of how to do the assessment and what will click. Popularity in book ranking can be a good metric to assess. Usually reviews and star ratings can give a fairly good idea of the assessment. To decide on a niche, you can see the autocomplete option in Amazon search. Find keywords that have high search volume and low competition.
14.Book Description
Optimize the metadata of your book–Your Book Description matters, So make sure your book description is excellent and up to the standard. Your Author Bio affects your sales, reader reviews and buying decisions. Responding to them is significant, Your Book Title also is important because it shows the search output and recommendations. Your Subtitle also Matters, regular readers read a lot about all these things. To generate descriptions with an automatic tool hail to https://kindlepreneur.com/tools/amazon-book-description-generator/
15. Get Reviews for your Book
You must reach out to Book Reviewers. You need to share small parts of your book content across various social media. You must also submit reviews of other books on Amazon regularly. Add the Amazon reviews on Goodreads too. Also, sharing a book review on the author’s YouTube channel could be a good way to connect with the authors. Get testimonials for your book and share them on various media. Buy extra copies to give to your reviewers and their friends.
How to get Free Amazon Book Reviews: https://medium.com/@sudhirbhatt/how-to-get-free-amazon-book-reviews-part-1-d9ce71efb2fd
16.Social Media Ads.
Social media ads could work out well if properly placed and presented to get book sales. Research meticulously to write the most effective headlines. There quite a few headline analysers online which could give you useful suggestions: CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, Sharethrough Headline Analyzer. All may not suit your purpose though because they may be for writing headlines for blogs.
17. Participate in Contests:
Publish a participation contest of your readers with some prizes thrown in. You must share details of these contests to enable easy participation of readers. This complements your other efforts for book marketing.
18. Joining Goodreads Could Be a Great Idea.
Goodreads has a network of over 65 million members. This makes it a useful promotional platform. You’ll need to create your profile page. Display your book offers, seek reviews, organize book giveaways, host discussions regarding your books, add your books to the suitable lists and bond with other authors here.