Marketing your Books

'

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



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