What is Book Marketing?
If you write for the love of it, you won’t need to worry about getting famous. But if you want your book to be noticed and bought, you need to learn how to advertise your books. You need to create a Book Marketing Campaign.
Your objectives should be clear from the start since good book promotion requires forward strategy and work. Marketing for writers means revealing more about yourself and your work to your target audience. It’s as easy as communicating. But it takes effort.
Generally, a publisher arranges for editorial reviews, book launch and signing events, a space in a book fair, newspaper pieces, and bookstore placement. But, issues are left to self-publishing writers to solve for themselves, gathering inspiration from as many sources as possible, and they need to create a Book Marketing Campaign
This blog contains how a Book Marketing Campaign needs to increase your book’s exposure and sales.
Create A Professional And Effective Book Marketing Campaign For Your Next Book.
Plan your marketing mix for each sector before publishing:
Book Marketing Campaign focuses on product, distribution, pricing, and promotion.
1. Book Marketing Campaign: Product.
Your book material must be unique and superior to existing information on your subject. Your final book should be properly edited and designed. The cover has a bar code with the ISBN and price on it. Your book cannot seem self-published while competing with established publishers.
It would be best if you had a book-blur. A book blurb is a 100–150 word advertising item. It’s on the book back covers and online sales sites.
Grasp Your Reader.
Begin your blurb with a smart beginning sentence that piques the reader’s interest and keeps them reading. Then, depending on your book’s category, use powerful terms to hint at your narrative and characters (for fiction) or fundamental topic (for nonfiction). In fiction, a story’s crossroads or turning point in nonfiction is who should read the book and why.
Cover design.
Would anybody look twice at a book with a cluttered cover, weird colors, and typography, or a lack of polish and professionalism? Your Book Marketing Campaign should include a professional book cover design
2. Book Marketing Campaign: Book Marketing.
Find out where your target audience buys material and make sure your book is accessible there—airport stores, supermarkets, budget stores, and gift shops.
Direct distribution.
Consider book marketing through direct distribution to companies, organizations, schools, the military, and government agencies. These are usually huge, non-returnable purchases but help market your book with word of mouth.
Maximize your distribution.
Amazon is the largest retailer of digital and print books, and it owns Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for ebooks and CreateSpace for print books. Amazon’s KDP, Apple’s iBooks, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Kobo are included in your distribution plan, covering 97 percent of ebook sales. Note, smaller stores contribute little to sales but raise attention.
A book aggregator like Smashwords or Draft2Digital may help you avoid dealing with individual businesses. Book aggregators distribute to numerous sellers, formatting books for each. They also provide access to outlets that writers cannot directly access, such as Scribd, a global digital library with 80 million subscribers.
Book Marketing Campaign: Pricing.
Selling pricing typically means matching rivals’ prices. The book’s pricing may have a greater influence on sales, income, and profits than any other marketing choice. So, your Book Marketing Campaign should be very careful about your books’ prices.
Use bargain book sites like BookBub and Book Gorilla.
Bookbub and Book Gorilla are book suggestion services that send daily emails to subscribers proposing titles from book categories or authors they like. To be recommended, you must provide your book for free or at a 50% discount for a short time.
While some services are free, most excellent ones charge a fee based on the book’s price and genre. The listing charge for Bookbub’s top criminal fiction category is about $400 for free books and $2000 for novels sold for $2–3.
Bookbub’s expanding author popularity, as shown in online reviews and message forums, indicates that book promotions do genuinely boost sales, even after the offer ends. The advantages apply to both the promoted book and the author’s previous works. Authors have also seen an increase in book reviews after promotions.
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5. Book Marketing Campaign: Promotion.
Target segment, product differences, distribution strategy, and price all influence the direction and substance of your campaign. A competent marketer prepares how they will interact and assist one another.
A blog or website.
You may start attracting readers even before you complete your book. Update your site with content that appears in organic search results. If your book is about managing emotional well-being, write blogs related to psychological issues.
You may promote your book with competitions and book giveaways closer to the release date. Post great material that invites readers to sign up for updates on your website. A year before your book’s release date will allow you to establish a big email list for promotion and increase your site’s position.
Boost your web presence
You may boost your web visibility in various ways. For example, you may publish your articles on prominent websites, participate in forums relating to your book, or ask popular websites or blogs to interview or feature you as a guest blogger. Remember to add links to your website and books in your byline.
Social media
Your Book Marketing Campaign includes Using the data to grow your social media following and connect with them better.
Get book reviews
Your past book reviewers may be approached with a free copy and a polite request for reviews of your new book. First-time authors may seek top Amazon reviewers and shortlist those who have reviewed books in their field.
However, if you have a paperback edition of your book connected to your unpublished ebook, all reviews are written for the paperback will carry over to your ebook. So your book will have social proof from the day it is published.
Use Amazon’s book marketing tools and initiatives.
You should take advantage of Amazon’s promotional tools and initiatives. To join KDP Select, you must provide Amazon exclusive distribution rights to your ebook for 90 days. Discounting is proven to increase awareness and sales, so you might give your book for free for five days or put up a countdown deal. The maximum Amazon royalty rate of 70% is also available via this arrangement.
You’d be entered into Kindle Unlimited, a membership program that helps readers find and read books and compensates writers based on page reads.
Create an Author Central account to have your page on Amazon with your biography, images, videos, events, and book information. This page links to all of your Amazon sales pages. You may customize your page’s content and post its URL on social media and in your email signature to increase traffic.
