How to Sell More Books formerly entitled Marketing & Promoting your E-Books
1.
Write a Good Book
Before we start talking about marketing and promo tips, I have some
preliminary words of wisdom to impart: First and foremost, no matter how you
end up publishing, you must WRITE A GOOD
BOOK. This may sound obvious. Sadly, given the vast quantity of poorly
written e-books I’ve found on the Internet, not all indie authors have embraced
the concept. And you do not want to be one of those.Naturally, you intend to write a good book. Who doesn’t? But here’s the thing. You don’t know what you don’t know. I certainly didn’t. Writing a good book requires an open mind, persistence, and a very thick skin. I discovered everything I’m telling you the hard way—by making mistakes.
Here’s my advice on writing a good book:
·
Be Willing to Make Mistakes.
I make mistakes. We all do. It’s a given. So when you do, and especially when
others point out your mistakes, don’t throw in the towel. Keep writing. It’s
the only way to learn.
·
Learn Your Craft. Don’t
assume (the way I did) that that because you wrote business reports, you have
the necessary know-how to write a novel. Take courses, attend workshops,
seminars, and conferences, and read everything you can get your hands on about
writing in your chosen genre.
·
Know Your Genre and Audience,
preferably before you start writing. This is easier for non-fiction than
fiction. Give those readers what they want. For example, my audience consists
primarily of intelligent, animal-loving women over the age of twenty-five, who
want to escape from the stress of their lives into a fun book filled with
romance, suspense, adventure, and humor.
·
Enter Contests Offering
Critique as well as Prizes: Leave your ego at the door. Contests,
particularly those targeting the all-important first chapter, can provide
amazing illumination on major issues in your book. Be warned: The critique you
receive may result in a major re-write. NOTE: I re-wrote The Jaguar
Legacy over 20 times before I finally sold it.
·
Critique Partners: Don’t
write your book in isolation, especially if you're a novice. Get yourself a
critique partner or critique group, preferably writers of the same genre.
Family and friends are generally too biased and not qualified for the job.
Also, this mistake may cost you your marriage. If you can find a critique
partner with more experience than you, so much the better.
·
Beta Readers: Once your
book has survived your critique partners, and is polished to perfection and
finally finished, guess what? IT ISN’T. Find beta readers, the more critical
the better, to read the final product. Re-write the book if necessary.
·
Hire an Editor: Once your
book has survived the beta reader torture, and is polished to perfection and
finally finished, guess what? IT ISN’T. You as the author are too close to your
work to be critical. Bite the bullet and hire a professional editor. There are
various levels of editing from full editing to detailed copy editing. Re-write
the book if necessary.
·
Titles Count: Make your
title one that stands out. Catchy and easy to remember works better than
cumbersome, vague, or too academic.
·
Covers Count: Your cover,
like your appearance, makes an initial impression on potential readers. You
want it to be a good one, so unless you know what you're doing, hire a
professional cover designer. The cover should give the reader a clear idea of
the nature of the book’s contents, but not overwhelm with too much detail. Make
sure the title and your name are clearly legible in a “Thumbprint” image,
because this is what the reader sees first in most online sites.
·
Be as Prolific as Possible
Without Sacrificing Quality: Indie publishing isn’t a sprint, but a
marathon. Your books will be available until you decide to pull them. So write
as many as you can without sacrificing quality. Sales will expand
incrementally. Short stories and novellas are a good way to spark a reader’s
interest, enticing more sales. Writing a series, especially one with recurring
characters, works best to attract readers. I’m writing a type of series called
a spin-off, where one character in Fur Ball Fever gets his own
story in Cold Feet Fever. I’m also considering two novellas, one
a prequel to Fur Ball Fever called The Fever Begins,
the other a sequel called Wedding Bell Fever.
2.
Self-Publishing: Just Do It
Being a non-techie, I’m excluding the technical aspects of self-publishing.
This information is readily available through the e-publishers. Here's my
advice:
·
Bite the Bullet: Do it
yourself. Or find a good formatter who will format the files for you in return
for a relatively small fee ($25 - $40). I was lucky. My husband handled the
technical aspect. Then again, I had to listen to the cursing and moaning coming
from his man-cave.
·
Vanity Presses: Don’t be
fooled by vanity presses (pay-to-publish, they will publish anything, no matter
what the quality). These are not the same as e-publishers
such as Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and others. If you’re new to
publishing and you come across a deal you’re not sure about, check them out at
Predators and Editors (http://pred-ed.com/). If anything about the offer
doesn’t sound right, Google it or go into the online forums and ask about it.
You could save yourself a whole bunch of pain and frustration.
·
Online Networking: Join
chat loops and online forums. They provide invaluable advice, especially if
(when) you hit a glitch. (More about those in the next section.)
3.
Promoting Your Masterpiece
There’s no place for modesty. Blow your own horn! Marketing studies suggest
that a reader must see or hear your book’s name a minimum of ten times before
it truly registers. For that reason, it is vital to make yourself—and your
books—highly visible. In this day and age, you do that by increasing our online
presence.An excellent book on this topic is We Are Not Alone: The Writer’s Guide to Social Media by Kristen Lamb. She does a great job of breaking down the tools, guiding you step-by-step as you create and grow your online presence. Another is How I Sold 1 Million E-Books in 5 Months by John Locke. It’s better to educate yourself sooner rather than later to save yourself a few missteps.
Along with directly marketing your books,
you need to market yourself as a person to gain more recognition and make
contacts that will further your career. So network with contacts of all kinds,
including librarians, booksellers, reviewers, book bloggers, media people,
other writers in your genre and readers.
There are many ways to promote yourself and your book. Paid advertisements
in writing publications are expensive and may or may not result in a jump in
sales to justify the expense. In my experience some equally effective methods
are online and often free. I will discuss some that
A) Website/Blog.
Every author needs these important
promotional tools, so create your own or hire someone to do it. Ideally, the
blogging capability would be integrated into your website. A simple tool like
WordPress is not too difficult to master, and gives you, the author, total
control of both static pages and dynamic blog pages without the need to hire a
web designer. Having said that, many authors participate in shared group blogs.
Some website/blog tips are:
·
Buy Links: Every page of your website and every blog entry should
contain buy links for your books. I am constantly surprised by the number of
websites and blogs that hide the buy links, making it difficult for someone to
buy a book.
·
Design & Appearance: Your website/blog should reflect your genre, be easy to
navigate, and free of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and system bugs.
·
Attract Visitors to Your Blog with Catchy Titles: According to
numerous studies, titles affect blog traffic. Here are some tips about the
titles you use for your blog entries:
o
Use instructional titles (begin
with How To …, Tips For …)
o
Use a numbered List (Top 10 …, Top
5 Reasons Why …)
o
Ask a question
o
A play or a twist on common
phrases (e.g. Why a Shrinking Violet Attracts the Most Attention)
o
Big Time Promise (e.g. How to
Crank up Your Romance Quotient, Success Guaranteed)
o
Oddball titles (e.g. A Tummy-Taming Teddy & a Thigh Toner)
o
Make an emotional statement
o
Use short titles (< 8 words)
o
Make an emotional statement (e.g.
The Biggest Reason Indie Authors Rock)
·
Frequency: Blog as often as you can manage (my limit is once a week,
some authors blog every day). Many authors have theme days like “Man Candy
Monday”, “Tuesday Tip”, “Wacky Wednesday”, ”Factoid Friday”, “Sample
Saturday”, “Six Sentence Sunday,” etc.
If you run out of ideas of your own, you can always invite other writers as
guest bloggers.
·
Use Bait: Some authors offer games and contests to attract visitors.
·
Social Media: Use social media to drive visitors to your
blog/website because your catchy title caught their attention or because they
want to win a prize.|
·
Keywords: Enter
keywords for each blog entry to increase the probability of your website
appearing on Search Engine pages.
B)
Social Networking (Facebook)
Facebook.com
Facebook is a powerful social networking
tool for an author. When you join, create a Facebook professional page
(separate from your personal page if you have one). Make your writing posts
interesting. Many authors promote books they have read and enjoyed, creating
goodwill and often starting a mutually beneficial cross-promotion exercise.
Others pose questions (e.g. What books are on your bedside table?”). Check out
your favorite author’s Facebook page for ideas.
C)
Social Networking (Twitter)
twitter.com
It took me over two years to get over my
mental block about using Twitter, and now I find it a powerful promotional
tool. If I can do it, you can too. Here are some tips;
·
BE SOCIABLE. Go to fellow tweepsters’
websites and see who they are. You meet some very interesting people from
around the world this way. Oh, and sometimes they buy your books, or tell their
friends about your books. Friend them on Facebook. Try to
develop online relationships with them. Interact, reply to their tweets,
re-tweet other authors, offer congratulations.
·
Where to start? Start with your
writer friends. Send them a friend request. Then look at their followers, and
follow them.
·
Meet people with common interests.
You can do this through the use of hashtags, e.g. #Writers, #WriteTip,
#Fiction, #Books, #mystery, and many, many more.
·
Try to provide added value to the
Twitterverse (a writing tip, a link to an article about writing or a topic describing
your genre).
·
Use Twitter to drive people to
your website/blog. If your blog title captures their interest or if you
announce a #Contest or are offering a #FREE #Prize or the possibility they
might #Win a #Gift, they will come. Guaranteed.
·
Promotional tweets can be an
excerpt, a good review, a new release, anything you want. When I issue a
promotional tweet, I always add my book title. It takes up real estate, but it
also fixes the title in people’s heads.
·
There are 2 schools of thoughts
about promotional tweets:
o
One is that there is no such thing
as too many promotional tweets. In Twitter, so many tweets go by so quickly,
the possibility of one person catching you issuing multiple promotional tweets
is virtually nil. These people use a tool like Pluggio to schedule tweets in
advance
o
The other school of thought is
that you should focus on relationship building and interaction, with rare
promotional tweets interspersed among the others.
o
The truth probably lies somewhere
in the middle.
D)
Social Networking (Goodreads)
goodreads.com
Join at Goodreads.com. This site lets you
post a description of your books. You can also review other authors’ books,
make recommendations, offer contests, etc. Simply start following and
interacting in the various forums there. I’ve heard several authors say that
they’ve had great success selling books via the Goodreads catalog.
E) Take Advantage of Amazon Promotional Tools
Make no mistake. Amazon is in it to make
money, and offers authors many promotional tools. Many authors aren’t aware
that some of these exist.
·
Kindle Select:
Amazon offers a program called Kindle Select where (for an annual fee) ‘Prime’
members can borrow your book free of charge, and the author receives a fee. Although
the Kindle Select Program is designed to attract both readers and authors, it
has advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
o
Your books are enrolled in the
Kindle Prime library (bigger audience)
o
you get special privileges
including a few days every few weeks where you can offer your book at no
charge. If you get the word out to the right places (there are sites that
promote free books), the surge in downloads will (hopefully) result in
gazillions of downloads. How, you might ask, can this benefit me, the author,
since I receive no royalties on free books. The answer is that if readers enjoy
the freebie, they will want to purchase your other books.
Disadvantages:
o
Exclusivity. Your book must be
exclusive to Amazon. That means no Nook, no Kobo, no iTunes, etc.
o
There are severe consequences for authors who
don’t adhere to the exclusivity agreement, e.g. withholding of royalty payments.
·
Amazon Author Page:
o
Create your Amazon Author Page and
link it to your blog and to your Twitter account. That way, your most recent tweets
and blog postings will show up on your Amazon Author page.
o
Ask people to 'Like' your Author
Page. I noticed a jump in sales when I hit 100 'Likes', have no idea if it was
coincidence or not. I got all my 'Likes' because I requested them on the promo
chat loops.
·
Reviews Count:
Scuttlebutt has it that 40 reviews is some sort of Amazon threshold, affecting
their algorithms, and bumping your book up in the rankings. I'm not there yet,
but there are thousands of bloggers and review sites who will do this if you
send them a free book. It's easier with ebooks because generally, the author
sends the reviewer a free copy in exchange for a review. You can find these
sites on Twitter or through web searches.
·
Your Product Description,
especially on Amazon, where they give you tons of space, is a great marketing
tool, so maximize this.
o
Make your Product Description so
appealing, reader salivate to buy your book. It’s surprising how many indie
authors post a 3-liner and figure that’s enough to tempt a reader to download
the book.
o
Post tantalizing snippets from
reviews (I post them at the beginning and end of the Product Description).
o
Post a short excerpt, one that's
different from the first chapter, to tantalize the reader. It also saves them
the trouble of clicking on the cover page to read the first chapter excerpt..
·
Teaser Chapters:
Append ‘teaser’ chapters of other books you have written at the end of your
book before uploading to the e-publisher. Make it easy for readers to find your
website and/or purchase your other books by posting the Amazon link. Always
post your website/blog URL(s) at both the beginning and end of your book.
·
Cross-Promotion:
I got lucky, and did some cross-promo with another author who was fairly well
established. We both appended each other’s first chapter and a buy link at the
ends of our books. I think I got the best part of that deal
F) Free Indie Promo Sites
There are many other free online
promotional sites available to authors. Two that support several genres are http://AskDavid.com and http://www.authorsden.com/. I’ve used
these and others with great success. Another is called Indie Spotlight http://www.rickiwilson.com/indie-spotlight.html
(I found her on Twitter at @HackToTheFuture).
G) Join Chat Loops for Your Genre
You can locate these through http://groups.yahoo.com). Or find out
through networking (usually the best way). Pose the question on Twitter or
Facebook. For romance writers, two excellent chat loops are:
o
Authors Network (for book
promotion): http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AuthorsNetwork/
o
Indie Romance Ink (for indie publishing
news, tips, questions, etc. (no promo): http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IndieRomanceInk
H) Read Blog Posts by Other Writers
Many authors are happy to share tips,
expertise, and encouragement. This can save you from some of the pitfalls. The
indie writer community is happily turning from rivalry to generous cooperation.
And if you don’t see a particular issue addressed, ask. There's no need to
suffer in silence or work out the bugs alone. Pioneers have already done that,
and are happy to share their experience.
I)
Guest Interviews
and Guest Blogging
Give interviews and participate in guest
blogs. If you join some author chat loops, you can find great offers for guest
blogging opportunities. Or ask the author if he/she is looking for a guest
blogger (many will accept your offer). Don’t forget to host your own guest
bloggers. Networking and reciprocity is the name of the game.
J) Blog Hops
Join a blog hop where the organizer
maintains a central list of all participating authors and their books, and
every participant blogs on the same topic (a popular romance topic might be
Alpha Heroes). Tweet the good news to the world, ask for re-tweets. Some
popular blog hops have up to 200 participating authors, all blogging, all
promoting like crazy, each piggy-backing onto the others by directing readers
to the central repository of participants. Readers then hop from one author
blog to another, attracted by the lure of prizes, and leaving a comment on each
blog in order to qualify to win. A small fee from each participant pays for
grand prizes (winner are selected at random from all commenters). To sweeten
the pie, each author also offers a prize to one lucky commenter on her site (I
offer a $5 gift certificate). Grand prizes such as e-book reader, $50 gift
certificate, swag, etc. attracts hundreds of readers, all wanting to win, and
gets them to your blog and commenting. If you can’t find a blog hop in your
genre, create it yourself. To see how it works in the romance genre, check out:
http://carrieannbloghops.blogspot.mx.
K) Business Cards
Most people are interested when they find
out I’m a writer. So I advise you to carry business cards and hand them out at
every opportunity. I’ve handed mine out to my dentist, doctor, checkout clerks,
restaurant servers, stock broker, hairdresser, banker, new acquaintances, at
the gym, standing in line at a movie. You get the drift.
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