You’ve written your masterpiece and now you have to sell it! It’s a really competitive world out there and thousands of books get published every year. Most writers will need to spend time on marketing as well as on writing, otherwise they’re invisible and sales are low.
Here are my top tips for getting the most out of marketing.
Decide on your “brand”
Romance writer? You probably don’t want to use a lot of black in your marketing. Horror writer? I’m suspecting that pink roses and cupcakes won’t be a natural bedfellow with your genre. Work out what your personal brand looks like – color themes, images, fonts etc. – and use it with all your marketing – your website, your social media sites and all marketing products. You’re aiming for a cohesive whole so that it doesn’t matter if people are looking at your business card, your website or your Twitter feed – they know it’s you.
Social Media
Too many Tweets and Facebook posts that are “buy my book, buy my book!” are a real turn off. You wouldn’t walk up to strangers in a party and start demanding that they buy your book, so don’t do it on social media. Interact with people. Post other things, other than just demands to buy your book. You are selling your brand and, to some extent, you as well as your book. WriteHacked had a great article about social media for writers. Well worth a read, as is Twitter Tips for Authors on Indie Author News.
Beyond social media
Social media can raise awareness of you and your books, but what else is there out there?
Where else are your readers? Bookshops. Reading groups. Libraries. If you have a local bookstore, go in, talk to the staff. See if you can do an event there – a reading and a Q and A session perhaps? Likewise at your local library. Produce some discussion questions or notes for a book club and offer to do a Q and A with them. Most readers love to meet the authors of books they’ve read and most readers are on the look-out for someone new to read. Since many books get bought as a result of personal recommendations from friends, having all those people tell their friends about “the great new author” they’ve discovered is gold!
Other marketing materials
You’ve got your business cards (you do, don’t you??). What about producing postcards or bookmarks? Having made all those personal contacts with the local bookstores and libraries, can you leave your bookmarks or postcards on their counter as freebies? A lot of readers will pick up a free bookmark if it’s on offer. Having your book cover in front of them every time they open a book may well inspire them to go and buy it.
What else?
You’ve got an entertaining blog, a decent number of Twitter followers and Facebook likes; you’ve whipped up interest at your bookshop and library and everyone you see is carrying one of your bookmarks. What else can you do?
Can you and a few other indie authors work together to produce a box-set of your works? There’s a great post about it on The Creative Penn about creating a box-set. It takes a bit of organizing, but it brings other writers’ audiences to you and yours to them. Set up some author interviews with each other across your blogs for good publicity, and make sure you have links to your other works in the back of your book as well as to your social media and website.
Book marketing can be hard work, there’s no denying, but hopefully these tips will have given you some ideas.
Amanda Fleet lives in Scotland with her husband where she can be found writing, walking and running. Her debut thriller – The Wrong Kind of Clouds – was published in Spring, 2016. You can learn more about her and catch up with all her news at http://www.amandafleet.co.uk/ where you can also sign up for her newsletter and be the first to hear about special offers and bonuses.