Marketing your Books

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You've just written your book and are now dreaming about relaxing on a beach in some exotic location with a good book.  Forget about that dream.  Writing was the easy part.  You now have to market your book and that is the unfun part.  Marketing is a serious amount of work and time.  If you don't market your book nobody will know it exists.  If they don't know it exists then they will not know to buy it.  So get yourself off that beach chair and fire up that old laptop and get started.
Author Platform
In a nutshell, this is your footprint on the worldwide web.  You develop this by having a website, a blog, using social media, writing articles, guest blogging and commenting on others' blogs.  The more active you are on the internet, the larger the footprint you will leave.  The easier it will be for readers to find you and your books.
Marketing 101
Freebies
There is a lot of discussion about giving your books away for free.  Some authors don't believe in it and say they didn't put all the hard work and effort into writing the book just to give it away.  Others say it gets your name known and out there.  If you want to give away books you need to sign up with Goodreads.com and list your book as a giveaway.  Alternatively put your book on Smashwords.com and give away a discount coupon.  KDP Select gives you 5 free giveaway days every 90 days.  How much longer this will last for, nobody knows.  I haven't found KDP Select particularly successful in the longterm.  You get a lot of people downloading your book onto their Kindle because it is free.  They don't always read it and aren't necessarily your target audience either, which can result in a sucky review.  Also, you have to give them exclusivity which is never a good thing as you miss out on a lot of other ebook retailers.
Blogs, Blogging, Guest Posts, Commenting and Virtual Book Tours
It's so easy to set up a blog it's frightening.  There are scores of places where you can get a free blog.  You have to post regularly, deliver good content and don't spam or only try and push your books on people.  If you have friends with blogs, offer to do a guest post and reciprocate.  You can also organise your own Virtual Book Tour, or pay someone else to organise it for you.  Once again there are countless people advertising on the net who arrange your blog tour for about $30.  You will get some exposure and reviews.  Find blogs similar to yours that you can sign up for and be sure to comment on them regularly.

Book Reviews
I'm a great believer in what you put out to the universe you get back.  If you review other books people will review yours.  Get into the habit of reviewing everything you read.  Post the reviews on Amazon, Shelfari, Barnesandnoble and Goodreads.  Don't pay people to review your books.  There are many people out there who are prepared to exchange reviews.  If you want to go that route you find review exchanges on Goodreads Forums, Createspace and Amazon Forums.
Social Networking
Twitter, Facebook, Pininterest, Google+, Linkedin are the more common ones.  For writers there is also She Writes, Goodreads, Kindleboards and Shelfari.  Join the groups, comment frequently and get yourself known as an oracle of useful information.  Don't spam as that will make you unpopular.

Try and work out a schedule for yourself so you can do a little every day.  Take on too much and it becomes overwhelming.  Good luck with your marketing efforts and have an awesome Festive Season!
Cindy



Bookbuzzr offers great technology for authors

If you are an author and looking for ways to market your books, you have to go to Bookbuzzr.com.  In a few minutes you can set up a QuickQuiz which will market your book to potential readers.

Or you can get a book widget which you can embed on your blog or website, which will enable potential readers to read excerpts from your book.

You can also put your cover in their Book Cover Match Game, or advertise your book through their Hangman Game.  Bookbuzzr is definitely something to include in your marketing plan.
http://www.amazon.com/C-U-8-ebook/dp/B007N60QAI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1332831982&sr=1-1

Why I can't write

This seems to be the year of distractions.
I don't know what it is that some years you can achieve so much and other years it's just one distraction after another that blocks your vision, hampers your creativity and manages to force one's writing onto the back burner. 
I love writing.  Stories, relationship advice, I love it.  But this year it is a struggle and just isn't happening for me.
My youngest daughter will tell you, I'm addicted to research.  Mention something I don't know and I have an obsessive compulsion to find out all I can about it.  This means that my time on my laptop is ill-spent researching trivial bits and pieces that mean nothing to anybody just to satisfy some weird urge I have to acquire useless knowledge about random subjects.  It's a huge time-waster that I can't get control of.  An addiction I don't seem quite ready to give up.
During my recovery time after another bout with breast cancer, I should have been able to use that time to write.  Instead, I became completely obsessed with researching my roots.  I did find out some scandalous stuff but seriously, what can I actually do with that information?  How useful is it?  If I am honest with myself then it is just another waste of my time and time is very precious to me.

Being an armchair sports fanatic, a year of world cups is the worst possible thing for me.  First the cricket world cup consumed my weekends and killed my writing.  Now it's the rugby world cup and as a die-hard Springbok supporter I find it of the utmost importance to my sanity and psyche to compulsively read every bit of news about the Springboks and their world cup bid written in every blog and newspaper around the world.  Weekends are taken up with rugby-watching and it's very hard to focus on anything else.  Even planning an October getaway and December holiday has been pushed aside.  I have a one-track mind and it's not about sex.  Rugby, that's all I can think about at present.  I try and avoid conversations with people as I instinctively try and turn the conversations around to rugby and the Springboks chances in this world cup.  This is sad.

I have two books I should be working on.  Redesigning yourself for the multi-tasking generation which I'm co-writing with Jeremy Sherr, and C U @ 8, a novel I'm quite excited about.  I've promised myself that after the world cup, these books will get my full attention.  But there's always something else, isn't there?

Marketing.  The bain of my life.  Indie authors have to spend a lot of time marketing, especially if you want to enjoy the successes which come with increased sales.  Marketing is time-consuming, and at the moment is compartmentalised with watching E!  I can do both at the same time.  However, I do not spend nearly enough time on marketing.

Parenting takes time if you are a single-parent.  Your children expect you to talk and interact with them, fetch and carry them, all of which makes inroads on your time.  And if you just agree with them or pretend to listen, they have this nasty habit of taking your inattention personally, and throwing it back at you when you need their support.

And last of all is my job.  A huge distraction as I have to go to work during the week.  Because you receive a salary, the expectation is that you'll put in the hours and do the work.  Unfortunately, I do love my job so feel this compulsion to do the extra yards and go the extra mile.  If only I had a horrible job and didn't have to work.  Now if I could just make the time for marketing, to get the sales to supplement my income, then maybe...?  With one more child to go to university and finish school, retiring to write is not an option for a good few years.

My goal for this week is to manage my time and make the time to write.  It's what I'm passionate about (besides the rugby) so it stands to reason that I should make the time to follow my passion.

Have a good week.

Cindy

Book marketing tips

As an author there are different ways to market your books for free. Living in the wop-wops as I do, book signings are difficult, word of mouth works to a certain extent but won't have truckloads of your book rolling out the door. A virtual book tour is another great marketing tool and is more about generating a web presence rather than selling books.
There are so many books out there, you have to do what it takes to get yours noticed. Giveaways on Goodreads are an option and usually gets you a few reviews as well. Reviews are also a great way to get your book known. Have a friend with a blog interview you on their blog. Tweeting on Twitter and posting on Facebook helps make people aware of your book, but doesn't necessary make them leap up to buy it. Posting on blogs, writing articles online, and answering questions on sites like Quora.com all help put you and your book out there.
However, it's still not enough.
Joining groups on Linkedin, Kindleboards all help to build your author platform but by themselves do not generate major sales.
Bookmarks, business cards, posters in bookstores and setting up a table in your local shopping mall are all well and good if you live in a place geared for that kind of marketing. Some of us don't.
You can also make book trailers and post them on Youtube.
Freado.com is an awesome book marketing site that incorporated Bookbuzzr where people can play games where they have to memorise your book cover. They also have lots of other useful tools and widgets. I'm particularly fond of the book excerpt widget where the pages turn like a real book. They give you the code to embed on your webpage or blog.
Amazon have a nifty tool called an astore. You can join Amazon.com as an affiliate and set up an astore which contains your books. The instructions on how to do it are very simple to follow on the Amazon Affiliate's site. You then get code that you can embed on your blog or webpage and sales of your books on the astore will net you an affiliate fee and your normal royalty.
From all these marketing tips you can gather that it's best not to put all your eggs in one basket and use only one strategy like tweeting on Twitter. You have to spread yourself thin and do as many as possible to reach heaps of people.
Writing your book was the easy part. Marketing is where the real work comes in, and boy is it time-consuming! You'll find that with all the marketing you have to do you won't have much time left to work on your next masterpiece. If you are running a household and holding down a full-time job it gets even trickier. Time management is the key here. At the start of your week set yourself a small marketing task for each day. Don't try and do all the marketing strategies every day, you'll reach burn-out before you get a chance to sing God save the Queen. Small manageable chunks that are realistic. Don't bite off more than you can chew otherwise you'll get stressed, frustrated and be inclined to give up. You don't want to dry up those creative juices of yours, so factor in some quality writing time each week.
If you have any good marketing tips to share, please add them in the comments.
Have a good one!
Cindy