Once you have your new book published and available for sale I am sure you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment! Good for you but just because your book is published it doesn’t mean your job is finished. Your next goal is to start marketing your book effectively to generate continuous sales.
This is why I stressed so much about the importance of your ecover in another post. Your ecover will either help make or break your sales. So a well designed ecover is an essential part of your marketing plan.
Easy to Follow Marketing Ideas
Create an author account on all of the main social sites:
- Google+
Use this account to talk about your book and provide small snippets from your book to entice people to want to purchase it. Publish related photos and items from other blogs and websites that relate to your book. You can automate posting to your social sites by using tools such as Hoot-suite or Buffer.
Create a main author site or have a website with the same name as your book. Here you would post the same type of information as you do on your social sites, just include more with additional photos and images and possibly a video.
Make a video trailer for your book. You can add this to your Amazon author page, post it to YouTube and place it on your blog.
Offering a preview of your book by giving away the first chapter is a great way to generate interest in your book. If you do this from your main website you can use an opt-in form to build a mailing list at the same time. People will subscribe to your list in order to receive the free chapter. This allows you to keep your list updated about any further book promotions and new books which you release.
List your book on Goodreads and join in the discussions on similar books. This helps you brand yourself as an author and generate interest in your book. You may even wish to run a competition where someone wins a free signed copy of your book.
Hold a Google+ Hangout and answer questions from your readers and talk about your book. You can include things like why you wrote the book, your background and experience. This allows your readers to get to know you more and connect with you.
Blog tours are another great promotional idea. You connect with blog owners and authors and offer to write a post on their blog for them. In the post you normally negotiate to leave a link and a short bio. This provides you with additional exposure for you and your books.
It takes time to implement a good marketing plan and to see what methods are working for you. Use Google Analytics on your site to track where your visitors are coming from. When you see that a particular place is sending you lots of traffic you can work on spending more time on that traffic source.
This only covers the tip of the iceberg when it comes to marketing your new book. In our next post we will cover this subject a little more.
