How to Market Your Book in Four Easy Steps (Part 1)
by Christina Kaye, @topshelfedits
So you’ve written a book. Great job. But that fact alone doesn’t guarantee you’re going to sell copies. Simply uploading your book and listing it on Amazon/Kindle or Ingram Spark will not magically generate sales, with the exception of your friends and family. You must take action and actively market your book if you ever want to sell more than a handful of copies.
Before we begin talking about
some ways you can market your novel, I think it’s crucial to share my biggest
piece of advice with you on how you can increase your potential for selling
lots and lots of books. Have your book edited by a professional and hire a
professional designer to create a compelling and unique cover for your book. Nothing
kills book sales more than poor editing and unprofessional looking covers.
Also, be sure you spend quality time writing an effective, well-written, and
compelling back cover blurb and Amazon description. These are things potential
customers will look at next once your title and book cover have snagged their attention.
Finally, you want to make sure you price your book appropriately – not too
high, not too low. Check other books in your genre and see how they are pricing
for both print and e-books and either match or beat their price.
But let’s assume for the sake of
this article that you’ve done all these first steps. What happens next?
This is not an all-encompassing
list, mind you. But it is more of a highlight of some of the biggest tactics
you must be doing at a very minimum to sell more books.
Social
Media Marketing
The most popular and effective
way to market your book is by posting about it on social media. But the key to
social media marketing is not to be too pushy, or you’ll have the opposite
effect than what you’re trying to achieve. Your posts on social media should be
about 80% nurture and 20% sales. What is nurturing? Nurturing is when you offer
your followers helpful information and nurture your relationship with them
without trying to sell them your book. This may include posting snippets from within
your book to sharing writing tips to posting quotes you love on writing or
pictures that relate to the subject matter of your book. Post four nurture type
emails for every one you post trying to sell your book or announcing sales you do
through Amazon.
And, by the way, setting your
book for sale at less than your standard price for holidays and other special
occasions is a great way to promote your book. Or make your e-book free for a
weekend period and announce that people can download your book for free for
those three days. Trust me. Giving away some free books to bring up some hype
surrounding your book is well worth the few dollars you think you’re going to
lose by giving them away.
But when posting on social media,
each platform has certain features that you must pay attention to, and you
can’t post exactly the same way on each. But whichever platform you choose,
you’ll want to post about your cover reveal about a week before you release the
book. You’ll want to post about the release for a couple of days leading up and
the day of. And you’ll want to post every time you have a sale moving forward.
Here are some tips and tricks unique to each social media platform.
On Facebook, for example, you can
post on your main feed when you have announcements to make about your book. A
lot of authors also choose to create an author “like” page, separate from their
personal page. If you do this, you can keep your book information and posts apart
from your family and friends type posts. This is definitely a good idea if you
write under a pen name. But it can work if you’re writing under your real name,
too. On Facebook, you don’t really need hashtags, though some people do choose
to use them. However, the reality is that’s not really the way Facebook
functions on the user end. People don’t typically search things using hashtags,
though it does work if you want to do it. Also, consider creating a group for
your fans and readers. Take for example, Author DL Blade, who also has a group
for her fans called Blade’s Book Dragons. It’s a place where she can safely and
effectively post about her books and answer questions her readers have and
gather feedback from them. Finally, consider posting in groups on Facebook that
allow you to promote your book. But the trick here is to look for groups with
“promotion” in the title. If you’re unsure, be sure to always read the group’s
rules on posting to make sure book promotions are allowed. And even then, do
not bombard the group daily with “please buy my book” type posts. It’s a fast
and easy way to get banned or blocked by members. My advice is to hang out in
the group for a week or two before you post your promo. Like other posts,
comment on them, and interact in the group to build credibility before you just
post “buy my book” posts.
Bonus tip: Posting on Facebook
with a picture attached on every post will increase your visibility by 60%! So
be sure to always include pictures with everything you post.
Instagram is different in that it focuses more on the image
you post than the content in the caption. However, it is still important to
write something in the caption because if viewers like the picture they see,
they’re likely to look at the caption and see what you’re posting about that
day. And as always, make sure your caption says more than just “my book is
available now.” Include snippets or quotes from your book. Talk about your
characters. Provide “bonus” materials or “behind the scenes” information about
your characters. Talk about your journey and the process of writing this book.
Also, post things that aren’t necessarily just your book cover. Post images
that relate to your book’s topic or subject matter. For example, if you’re
writing and promoting a romance novel, posting pictures of a couple embracing
with some text about love written over it will intrigue your viewers. Then, in
the caption of your post, talk about how much your protagonist and her love
interest love one another. Or how they met. Instagram used to be about cute,
funny, and even unique photographs, but increasingly, it’s becoming about voyeuristic
looks at the account holder’s life. So post pictures of you writing in your
writing spot. You can even post a pic of you holding cup of coffee and a copy
of your book. Nowadays, followers want to see “behind the scenes” type
photographs more than just pictures of cute puppies and books with flowers all
around them. And finally, with Instagram, it’s all about the hashtags. According
to Stephanie Asher of Self Love with Stephanie (an Instagram guru who has
helped me up my own Insta-game), you should ALWAYS use all 30 hashtags that Instagram
allows. How do you know the right hashtags to use? Simply type the # key then
start typing the words “write,” “author,” and “book,” and all the popular
hashtags will automatically pop up for you. You can even create a list of the
hashtags you will be using in the Notes app on your phone then copy and paste
them each time so you don’t have to type them over and over again with each
post.
Bonus: If you’d like to work with Stephanie Asher to up
YOUR Insta-game, you can find her on Instagram at @selflovewithstephanie. DM
her, tell her you need guidance, and be sure to tell her I sent you!
Twitter is yet another different medium on social media and
it’s used differently than Facebook and Instagram. With Twitter, you have only
240 characters to tell your followers what you want to communicate. You’ll want
to actively be involved in the hashtag communities on Twitter BEFORE you start
posting and using said hashtags. The most popular groups on Twitter for writers
are #writingcommunity and #amwriting. Spend some time in these groups liking,
commenting, and Re-Tweeting posts for other authors to gain some credibility
and become recognizable in these groups and then you can start posting about
your own book and tell the members of the group all about your latest project. Another
thing I’ve noticed about Twitter is that members there rely heavily on GIFs. I’ve
noticed in my own tweeting that, if I use a GIF, no matter what I’m posting, I
get more likes and RTs. Unsure which GIF to use? There’s one for almost every
topic out there. Simply start typing key words into the GIF search box, and
Twitter will recommend many different options for you. As with all groups, they
key to being successful on Twitter is engagement. You have to spend as much
time interacting with others, commenting, liking, and RT’ing other posts as you
do posting about your book. If you just go on there and post like mad “buy my
book” but you don’t engage with your followers, people will tune you out.
That’s the last thing you want to happen on Twitter or any social media
platform.
Bonus Tip: If you go to other people’s pages and RT their pinned tweet, most will go and RT your pinned tweet in return, so make sure you regularly pin tweets that tell followers about your book and include a purchase link.
2.Email Marketing
Even more important than posting
on social media is email marketing. Why? Think of it this way. When you’re
speaking to the masses on social media, even though they’re YOUR followers, the
space does not belong to you. It belongs to Mark Zuckerberg (and whoever owns
Twitter). Think about how often you have seen people posting that they’ve been
blocked, banned, or jailed on social media for one minor infraction or another.
If something happened and Mark Zuckerberg decided tomorrow to close down
Instagram and Facebook, what would you do if you had relied solely on these
mediums to promote your books? You’d be lost and in a world of hurt. Because,
again, you don’t own that space. You’re renting. So, the most important thing
you can do is to build your email list and regularly send out newsletters to
your subscribers. But again, the same rule applies as does with social media.
Do not make every single newsletter and email about buying your book. Go with
the 80/20 rule of nurture messages versus sales messages. I want you to try to
send out four emails that contain fun, helpful information to your subscribers before
you even send out one that promotes your book. This way, your subscribers will
come to trust you and know that you’re not just going to talk to them about
your book and nothing else. Think about all those emails you get in your inbox
daily that drive you nuts because they just want to sell, sell, sell to you.
What do you wind up doing? Unsubscribing. And that’s what will happen if you
email them only about your book. Try to grow your email list as big as possible
by offering freebies in exchange for them signing up for your email. For
example, maybe they get a bonus chapter from your book, or maybe you send them a
free bookmark or a “behind the scenes” look at your characters. Whatever it is,
give something away for free and you’ll be more likely to get more subscribers.
Bonus Tip: Use the website KingSumo for giveaways to quickly increase your email subscriber list. Give away something relevant to your desired audience. Recently, I increased my email list by 600 new subscribers by offering a $50 Amazon card using KingSumo. It’s free, and it works miracles.
4 Steps to Market Your Book (by @topshelfedits ):
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Christina Kaye is an award-winning author, editor, and writing coach. She’s the Founder and CEO of Top Shelf Editing and the host of the weekly podcast for authors, Write Your Best Book, which is available on iTunes, Spotify, and her website www.topshelfedits.com. She teaches creative writing courses at the university level and teaches digital courses on many topics relating to writing, publishing, and marketing books. She lives in Kentucky with her two adult daughters, two rowdy pups, and a very fat cat.
To work with Christina and Top Shelf Editing, or to ask her advice on anything related to writing your best book, reach out to her any of the following ways:
Email: info@topshelfedits.com
Instagram: @topshelfediting
Twitter: @topshelfedits
Facebook: Christina Kaye
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