Promoting and Selling Your Book - Part 2

In my March 12 post, I highlighted a variety of ways to sell and market your book– online and offline. Today I’ll write about more sales channels you can consider adding as you introduce your book to buyers.  

You should be prepared to spend some time every day—for at least one to two years—establishing sales channels and making contacts to sell your books. You’ll spend valuable time writing your book and will have invested money to get it properly edited and into print or digital formats. The last leg of the journey is just as important and the reason to publish in the first place: to connect with readers.

Just as a business owner creates a marketing plan and budgets for it, authorpreneurs will need to do the same. Whether or not you’ve had experience in promoting or selling before, you will shoulder the responsibility of developing a marketing program and selling books.

Your Book Website

All authors need to promote their books through their own website. It’s the best self-promotion you can have, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. By creating a blog-style website, you will be able to get your book and your profile displayed in the easiest and fastest way possible.

Whether you are selling your book or voicing your opinions, a blog using a content management system (CMS) will give you the tools you need to create, modify, organize, or remove your information from your website. According to W3Techs, Wordpress.org is the most popular online resource to create websites (or blogs). Squarespace and Wix are also popular choices.

Once you’re comfortable with the format, you can explore the other plug-ins and options available to you. You can customize your site and use names, logos, colors, and patterns to consistently brand your book. Offer free downloads with a high-perceived value or a few chapters from your book to entice readers to buy it. Setting up your website with additional pages for opt-in lists, auto-responders, and shopping carts takes time and some authors may prefer to get help to set up their systems and integrate software.

Have you made it easy for your book buyer to say “yes!” and easily buy your book? If you want to sell your books—or any other items from your website—it’s essential to have a payment option built in. PayPal is the most popular system for accepting online payments, as it allows you to accept payment from other PayPal accounts—and from credit cards.

Merchants link PayPal to product pages that display their items for sale in order for buyers to complete a transaction. To go mobile, set up with a service offered by Square, which accepts credit card payments with an iPhone, iPad, or Android phone. Although these procedures take attention to detail, they are not impossibly technical. Taken step by step, either you (or an independent contractor) will soon be able to accept payments for goods sold.

It takes time and effort—probably several years to build any significant income selling online. If your books and products are excellent and you consistently market them over time, you have a chance at success. Create good content on your site, update it regularly, offer value to your customers, and build traffic incrementally. There’s no magic bullet, although lots of marketing experts may try to sell you one!

 Email Marketing

Content marketing can be a great selling tool for nonfiction writers. The valuable information you’ve spent time researching and collecting for your book is the lure that you can use to entice readers to buy. Even if you’ve already mounted a website/blog and update it regularly, readers have to take the time and effort to search it out.

With email marketing, you can reach out directly to those who are interested in your content, your products, and your services. People who voluntarily subscribe to your email content are more interested in what you have to offer. But, as with developing a website, it takes time and effort to learn the nuances of marketing using email, including cloud blogging, building subscriber lists through website landing pages (also known as lead capture pages), viral marketing, and converting those subscribers into buyers.

Social Media

Whether or not you are a fan of social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest, they have become the center of online community buzz. Create pages on a judicious selection of these sites and link them to your website/blog to increase your visibility and spread your message exponentially. Build community through Facebook’s Pages and Groups, and you will reach the most people who are likely to share your book and your ideas with their network. Add your biography, clickable URL, and keywords to your accounts wherever possible.

Media Kits

In addition to writing customized press releases, create a complete media kit that will be invaluable in your ongoing campaign to get your book noticed and reviewed. A media kit should contain a book sample, sell sheet, past media coverage, interviews, reviews, author biography and photo, and publisher details such as ISBN, publication date, and contact information.

With publicity and marketing expanding online, it makes sense to prepare the listed materials in digital formats. That way, you can follow up inquiries very quickly by emailing PDFs, or links to your online information— and you save time and money.

If you want to create a few promotional tools in print form to hand out at personal appearances, four-color sell sheets, postcards, and bookmarks are inexpensive giveaways. Be sure to have them professionally designed for maximum impact or they’ll be poor sales ambassadors for your book and a waste of money.

Book Contests

Research book contests early. You can submit your book to any of the many established and emerging awards contests as another way to get your book in the news. Whether national, local, big, or small, finding a book contest for your title is just a click away. Search out local, regional, or state contests. Most professional book associations have their own contests, and are good resources to find names of national and specialty awards.

Bookmarket.com is a resource that lists book and author award programs. Most contests will judge only those books published within a year—or sometimes two—of the contest date, so if you’re going to submit your book, do it quickly. Be aware that entering contests costs money, so be judicious in submitting your book to contests and categories where you have a strong shot at winning. After all, the purpose of garnering an award is to create news, to increase your book’s visibility, and to let readers know that your book has been recognized for excellence in its field.  

Getting Reviews from Book Bloggers

Search online for book bloggers covering your topic and send them your pitch to request a review. Like most editors and publishers, book bloggers also have submission guidelines, so be sure to check out the genres they review and what formats they want for review. Don’t overlook other sites, specialists, and online communities formed around your topic. A tightly targeted interest group will ultimately be a better prospect to buy your book than the mass market, as they are already active and interested in your specialty.

Create a Book Trailer

Posting videos online has become de rigueur for those who want to be discovered. Book trailers are a great way to personally promote your book in a powerful and engaging way using music, images, your book cover, and title. Videos are a great addition to your media kit, and can be emailed, linked, or posted on social media sites and websites. Unless you have video production and editing skills, find a professional book trailer production company that can skillfully merge your script, your images, and music into an aesthetic whole. Including yourself in the video gives viewers the satisfaction of meeting the author—at least virtually.

 Social Profiles for Authors

Use Author Programs on book websites such as Goodreads, LibraryThing, WeRead, AuthorBuzz, Author’s Den, etc. to promote yourself and your books. Many of these sites allow authors to post free profiles with photos and bios, favorite books, upcoming events, and videos. Authors can participate in discussions on their books and even create further interest with free book giveaways in discussion groups here too. Goodreads reports a community of over four and a half million passionate readers! The value of this kind of visibility is worth the time to create a profile. Authors with Amazon.com listings can also take advantage of Amazon’s Author Central where they can share their biographies, photos, blog feeds, videos, and tour events.

YouTube

Where once people used encyclopedias and dictionaries to find information, today Google and YouTube are the two most accessed search engines in the world. YouTube allows you to create a “branded” channel by uploading videos, information, and web links. Create short videos about your field of expertise and your book topic, and display them on YouTube to get exposure. Assign tags and keywords on your topic so searchers can find them. Viewers can also share your videos by copying the embed code, to spread your video message across the web.

Reading, Speaking, and Teaching

Many opportunities exist for self-published authors to present their books outside of mainstream bookstores. Self-published authors may donate their books to local libraries, for example. Provided the library wants it, donating a number of books to a countywide library system gets your title out to local and regional readers—and may get you an invitation to do a series of talks in more than one of those libraries. These are valuable opportunities to hone your presentation skills and let local residents know about your work. Some libraries will give presenters an honorarium and allow authors to sell their books after the talk.

Pitch Your Local Libraries

The local branch of my Sonoma county library has always been supportive of the arts in our town, generously loaning its event room and walls for various classes and exhibits. Because of these relationships with our librarians, I offered to donate copies of my book, Living into Art, Journeys Through Collageto our countywide library system, including 14 libraries. When they accepted, I let it be known that I would do book talks too. I didn’t know that the library would soon host a series of local author events; I simply wanted my book to be available to local readers because my topic was on the art and artists from a Sonoma art studio.  

Six of the libraries selected me to present my book in its Sonoma Authors Series. The events were well publicized in library newsletters, on their websites, and online events calendars. That resulted in great, free, local publicity for four months. The libraries allowed me to sell copies of my book at my talks, keep 100% of the proceeds, and also awarded a small honorarium. At its peak, the library catalog showed Living into Art with all copies checked out—and five “holds.” After many years, the book is still well circulated, and many readers who discover Living into Art at local libraries buy their own copies through local bookstores and Amazon.   

Back-of-the-Room Selling

With a little imagination and a computer, self-publishers can compile lists of venues to query regarding staged book events. By now you have a handle on who your readers are and what benefits your book offers them. Smooth selling requires that you match the benefits you have to offer to the needs of your potential hosts.

Community centers, educational and adult learning centers, arts organizations, chambers of commerce, professional and business associations, even Toastmasters are all good prospects for speaking gigs. Take every opportunity to talk about your book or to do a signing, because no matter how small the group, you never know what that contact will lead to. Plus, it’s good practice!

If your book focuses on your area of expertise, petition conference organizers to add you as a presenter, and look for opportunities to teach whenever you can. You can increase your visibility and expand networking possibilities through repeat invitations. The more contacts you make, the better. Ask permission to add new contacts to your address book to send e-newsletters, announcements, and new book releases.

Making News

When you plan your book marketing, I want to encourage you to “grow where you’re planted,” and use local resources and connections to get the word out about your book. It may seem more glamorous to go after national exposure, but it’s probably better—and more effective—to send your news to local media outlets first.

I sent my book, along with a news release, to my local cultural arts tabloid and landed a short review and a reproduction of art from the book in a special issue called “Local Lit” highlighting local authors. When news about my book was ignored by another local newspaper, I took a different tack and rewrote my release as business news about my company. With that approach, I got a great placement on the top of the business section, along with my author photo.

You can spin new angles on your book’s topic, your company, or yourself to fit the needs of various editors and news outlets that are hungry for good content. Local media want to highlight hometown heroes when they can, and you can slant your releases to fill that need—and get some ink.

If you’re not sure if your book is a good idea, or you don’t have a clear plan, download my FREE GUIDE. 

If you want guidance and help creating a plan, schedule a FREE DISCOVERY CALL with me to see how I can help. 

Plan for Success!

Lindsay