Marketing for books and authors takes time
Marketing for books and authors take time.
Marketing for books and authors takes a significant amount of time to market books. Once you write and print the book, self-publishers can be successful by devoting a few hours a day to marketing their book and themselves, if they wish.
Self-publishers can do their own marketing for books, hire a book marketer, or depend on marketing services that they may purchase in a “package deal”. Small publishers expect authors to do much of their own social media. Publishers limit the marketing budget for any book. The budget will not increase unless the book is highly successful.
It is always the amount of traffic that counts the most
There are hundreds of free and paid providers who will promote books through their sites, tweets, etc. Check their website or social media traffic numbers. Some have less traffic than our site, but they charge to Tweet, or charge to let you on to their website. This probably does not help you.
The majority of our followers are book-related, and we tweet several times a day. Is it worth it to pay for tweeting your book title? I am not convinced unless they have a much larger list of followers; more than our nearly 50,000 Twitter followers. Also, we do not offer a social media service as there are tons available. We print and design books, and we strive to do both exceedingly well.
Know your niche
Self-publishers most often write about what they know, as they should. They may write several books and these are easier to market if they all fall into the same category. For instance, marketing two or three cookbooks is easier than a novel, a photography book, and a children’s book. That is simply because the target audience remains much the same, instead of having to expend three times the effort to market to three different groups.
Build a brand with multiple titles. Building the audience for your first book makes marketing easier for your second book in the same niche.
Laying the foundation
Once your book is written, have the rest of the marketing tools in place to market the book effectively. Know who your audience is. It can be helpful to write a paragraph or two about your target market. What are their demographics? Do they live or recreate locally, regionally or nationally, or globally? What are their interests and hobbies? Are you writing books about fly fishing, gardening, or children’s books?
If the last, what age are the children? You can see how defining this information will lead you into planning the target audience to reach on Facebook or other sites, where to send press releases, and the businesses to friend on social media.
Book, author, publisher. Who are you?
Consider your target market and future plans for marketing for books and your business. Are you selling yourself as an author? Then, you would have a website promoting yourself, as well as the book or books that you are writing. Your domain name might be your name or pen name for marketing as an author.
Do you have your own publishing company or business name? The domain name for your website could be the name under which you are publishing.
Here is what you need to have in place:
- Website with a sign-up form for email subscribers.
- Sign up with MailChimp or a provider of your choice to collect sign-ups for your email list. Set up the email or newsletter with your logo.
- An Amazon page to sell the books.
- Authentic book reviews on your Amazon page are helpful selling tools.
- Write a press release and send it out to a list of potential media outlets, bookstores, publications, websites, or qualified email addresses.
- Send an email to your list about your new book launch. Be sure to add a link to Amazon, or where you are selling it.
- Talk to bookstores about carrying your book. This is great for local events, history, etc.
- When something is successful, keep doing it! In anything that you try whether it be advertising or your marketing efforts, never give up after the first try. Of course, you do not want to waste money on ads that do not work but sometimes other things interfere, like the headlines of the day.
Thousands of dollars can be spent on marketing for books. We find that most self-publishers are on a tight budget and are not interested in spending large amounts of money to launch their book. But, if you are a celebrity or well-known in your field, a top publicity agent may be just what you may be looking for!
