One Reason Why Your Books are Not Selling
Book
marketing is tough. That’s something you’ll hear over and over again among
authors. Even for me, as a professional marketer, writing books is tough. Truth
be told, I’m simply not as good at it as I’d like to be – English is not my
first language, I don’t know where to begin and how my writing should be
structured. As a result, I find it tough! Don’t let this blog fool you though;
I’ve got an editor cleaning up my mess!
The very first reason why I consider writing to be so tough is due to the fact
that I simply don’t know much about it. More precisely, I don’t think I possess
skills and knowledge to get a properly structured and consistent non-fiction
flow. The result? I find it tough as hell! 
Never Skip Chapters
The same can be said for marketing. If you don’t possess the skills needed for
successful digital marketing, lack the knowledge and data about marketplaces,
or miss out on the latest research data on industry trends, it’s highly
unlikely you’ll manage to come up with a well-structured, effective, and in-depth
marketing plan. Just as your book needs chapters, your marketing plan requires
milestones. Although all authors wish this wasn’t the case, there are no single
milestones which possess the potential to be game changers. In reality, all
milestones need to work together, in order to create values that present your
work in a sellable fashion.
Above all else, there’s ONE big reason why most authors fail when building
their audience. If you have tried Facebook, Pinterest, traditional advertising
and other methods of gaining more clicks to your books, you will have been able to evaluate your returns on investments.
On the other hand, if you have failed to make a noticeable footprint as an
author on two platforms, it’s likely that you’ll pass on the same failure to
the third, fourth, and fifth platform as well. The very reason for this? The
visual presentation of your values has not been accurately matched against
platform-specific target groups. To put it simply: your graphics don’t tell a
story.
Graphics That Tell a Story
They say you should never judge a book by its cover. However, as authors and as
readers, this is exactly what we all do. As an author, you are probably already
highly familiar with the importance of book covers. After all, that’s the very
first thing your potential customer on marketplaces like Amazon will see when
browsing your page. Your cover needs to reflect your story, and you probably use
a paid designer to deliver the best possible visual message to your unknown buyers. That’s the very nature of
digital marketing and e-commerce: delivering values in split seconds, using the
most powerful visual presentation you can get.
The same goes for your marketing efforts across social media platforms
(especially Facebook), Pinterest, or on your own website. Whatever it is you
are trying to deliver through those marketing channels needs to be visually
impressive, as the visual impact is going to be the first one you’re likely to
make. You are the only one who knows what your marketing message is, and the
crucial point is to make this marketing message as clear as possible to your
target audience. This means you need to present your values using fascinating
images that act as an enticing and effective call to action.
Why do most author blogs fail?
Let’s imagine you came up with a truly brilliant blog (just like this one).
You’ve covered some important angles that successfully bring new value to your
readers. What could that be? Well, as a Fantasy writer, in your moments of
absolute brilliance, you came up with an insightful new reading of Tolkien. His
following on social media is absolutely huge – comfortably in the millions – so
your targeted readership could not be better. OK – so it might be a little bit
broad, but at the end of the day, those readers are mostly those who are
passionate about the fantasy genre, right? In this article we are not focusing
on specific targeting (although that’s a very important subject, and one worthy
of another blog), so let’s get back to my original thoughts. You have an
amazing piece on Tolkien, packed full of insightful ideas, that most Tolkien
fans would love nothing more than to read. The question is – how to get those
fantasy fans clicking on your piece, and soaking up every word?
Visual Click-baits
Why is the media rich? Quite simply, because we all click on their click bait
pieces, even if we don’t necessarily believe that they really lead to exclusive
content. We don’t have to be all that aggressive in getting the attention of
our target readers, though, but it’s undoubtedly essential to come up with a
brilliant and tempting visual presentation of the value you are offering to
your readers. What does this mean? It essentially means you should be using
click-bait too… but in altogether more subtle ways. If you have thousands of
words to share, you’ll need to consider that such a large amount of words will
not satisfy the short attention-span of most social media users users. You have
little more than a couple of seconds in which to get your message across, and this
is why your images need to tell your story, or at the very least get people
hooked in order to learn more.
The Technique I Use
Okay, this is where things start to get tough. It’s all very well talking about
hypothetical Tolkien fans… but at the end of the day, it’s all easier said than
being done, right? I’ll share some of my ideas, which should give you an
insight into the marketer’s mindset.
Let’s say we have a brilliant blog entry to promote, something that can add
real value to a certain community. While working on this blog, I was already
working on five different images for Facebook group promos, and a further ten
different images for Pinterest. As you probably know by now, Pinterest is an
absolute goldmine for marketing, being the largest source of blog traffic, and
boasting over 250m members who primarily use Pinterest as a visual search
engine.
As
much my blog should be focused on real values rather than my tangents,
thoughts, and babbling, a fair amount of time needs to be invested into nailing
down those promo images that have athesacred mission of getting the right
audience hooked into what I want to say. The beauty of this is, unlike with
book covers, I can use multiple images for my marketing channels, especially on
Pinterest. We want to aim for different images spread across different boards,
all leading to a single source article.
What you gain from this technique:
More traffic. 10 images will receive considerably more
clicks than just one image can.Your
blog will end up looking bigger and more relevant than it really is.On
Pinterest, you’ll achieve far more repins with 10 images.On
Facebook, you’ll be recognized as a fresh content contributor by its
algorithm, instead of being a spambot using the same image in multiple
places.Tailor-designed images to meet
specific requirements by social media platforms, in terms of suggested
dimensions and quality
Conclusion:
You might be the most talented new writer on the scene, with a mind swarming
with ideas, and the kinds of skills that would make Shakespeare gasp. However,
writing a good book is simply not enough. Make no mistake: making use of a book
cover which will represent it on various marketplaces is an absolute must.
Digital
marketing relies heavily on content – this is why the entire marketing era is known
as ‘content marketing’. As a content contributor on both social channels and
visual search engines, you need to design your “covers”. Even exceptional
content will ultimately fail to reach its audience if it’s not presented in a
visually impressive way… and there’s no getting around this fact. No matter how
good you are in creating valuable reads, all the bridges to your readers are
built on visual attachments which entice, intrigue, and achieve a far greater
reach.
What to take away from all this? The one reason most efforts on social media channels fail is that the story lacks the cover(s)!
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