Book Marketing

Episode 9

This week’s show is about book marketing.  Yes I know I said I wouldn’t cover this, but felt that it needed some discussion.  I have not been a stellar success with marketing – I’ve had some success pushing my Timeshock book in the past, but my current Magpies and Magic book isn’t doing that well at the moment.

I talk about the idea of a book launch, and how it was a necessity to do in the old brick-and-mortar book selling world but is no longer a necessity for print-on-demand paperbacks and eBooks.   I then discuss the advantage of still doing a book launch, even for eBooks, to get your book into the ‘Hot New Releases’ chart for a category in Amazon.

I talk about services like BookBub which allow an author to pay a fee to send out an e-mail promoting your book to an enormous list of readers, but how most of these services require your book to have a set of highly rated reviews before they will even consider your book.

I then talk about other ways of getting an initial surge of sales for your book by using a pre-existing audience, whether that be friends, a following from a blog or podcast or by borrowing someone else’s audience.

I then discuss briefly social media marketing, e-mail list building and content marketing.  Content Marketing is building up a following via a blog and podcast and then using that following to sell books, usually by e-mailing an e-mail list of those followers.

I mention David Gaughran’s superb book on Amazon algorithms and marketing, Let’s Get Visible . In that book he describes why a single surge day’s sales on Amazon is not a good idea for long-term success and why you need to spread out your sales promotions over a few days at least.