Enjoy a quick snapshot into Book Marketing with this webinar I ran for April Cox’s author workgroup. Marketing your book can feel incredibly overwhelming. So overwhelming that in fact many authors throw their hands up in despair and don’t do anything. But the truth is that everyone can market their book. It just requires a little bit of planning, research and strategy. There’s no overnight success without a bunch of behind the scenes work.
Book Marketing Basics Video
The video runs for about 33 minutes. I’ll run through the basic concepts below, but I go into more detail in the video.
Why Did You Write Your Book?
Let’s go back to the beginning. What is it that made you want to write your book? Write down some of the reasons, just roughly. This is core information for your book marketing. I think often as we move through the publishing process it’s easy to step away from that core reason and lose focus on what drove you to create your book in the first place.
Who Is Your Reader?
This question often paralyses people, but it’s an essential one to think about in your book marketing. I know it paralysed me and I talk more in the video about how I was able to move past that fear. Your book is not for everyone, but it is perfect for some people. When you think about your why, you will be able to think about you're who.
If you are struggling to think of your reader, then start from the other end and think about the people that haven’t liked your book. They will give you some characteristics that you don’t want in your reader.
Once you have some characteristics, the best thing to do is to create an imaginary person that you are directing your marketing towards. This can be quite fun. The process to do this could take up a whole article, so I’ll cover that another day. If you’d like to be notified when I do, just sign up to our author newsletter (and you’ll get some awesome goodies).
Can Your Reader Find You?
The world is online now and if you are not online, it’s going to make book marketing much more difficult. A reader who searches should be able to find you online. The easiest ways for them to do this are for you to have:
- An Amazon Author page (if you sell on Amazon)
- A Goodreads Profile
- A LinkedIn Profile (that mentions your books)
- One social media channel
- A website or Author page
Again, setting up each of these can take up a whole guide, so I will cover them all another day. Remember just sign up for our author newsletter to get them sent straight to your inbox.
Focus Your Book Marketing Efforts
Every author I know pairs their writing and book selling with other work or family commitments. This means that the most important part of your book marketing is to focus. Choose one or two tactics to work on at any one time. Start by setting some goals and then think about what tactic will be most effective to achieve those goals.
Otherwise you’ll do a little bit of everything and get nowhere far on anything. This is best summarised by the image below.
Make a Book Marketing Plan
Once you have these foundations in place, you can create yourself a plan for the next three months. Try to break down your overall tasks into weekly jobs and measure and track your progress.
If you need help with this, please get in touch and we can organise to have a chat. We can chat through your current situation and then I can take that information and turn it into a plan for you. I’ll do the set-up work, so you can step beyond the overwhelm.
Where to Next
This is just one of our ever growing list of indie author guides and book publishing and marketing templates. They are all available for free for the indie author community. Do let me know what you're going to do to market your books. And of course you can find us on all the usual social channels, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.