Best Book Promotion Resources

Our list of articles from our site on book promotion. You can learn everything from paid ads to building an author weksite.

3 Publishing Tools That Will Transform Your Indie Author Career

There are a lot of tools that can help you in your author business. Some tools are great for beginners, whereas some won’t be needed until you’re well into your author career. It’s hard to know what you should be spending money on.

What’s certain is you shouldn’t go on an all-out spending spree when you first start writing. You can begin with the basics and build from there. In this article, we’ll look at some of my favorite tools.

Draft2Digital

One of my favorite tools, and one that I feel every self-published author can use, is an aggregator like Draft2Digital.

While Kindle is responsible for over 80% of the eBook market, there are still other retailers that author’s swear by and earn great profit from. Take Adam Croft, for instance, who’s a great proponent of going ‘wide’ or delivering your books on multiple platforms.

However, registering for every single book retailer can be a drag. Then you need to keep track of all the different passwords, usernames and accounts to check on your book sales.

A book sales aggregator does all that hard work for you, and Draft2Digital is a great option.

What You’ll Love About Draft2Digital

Draft2Digital has two key selling points.

First, you can easily do basic format conversions for your novel. All you have to do is upload a .doc or a .docx format file to the site and it’ll convert it to an epub, .mobi or PDF file. So you’ll be set no matter which book file you need.

You can also add in a range of cool extra pieces to the book before formatting — like a table of contents, copyright page and a bunch more.

Once formatted, Draft2Digital delivers your book to a range of different platforms:

Amazon
Apple Books
Barnes & Noble
Kobo (including Kobo Plus)
Tolino
OverDrive
Bibliotheca
Scribd
24Symbols
Baker & Taylor
Hoopla

You can set different price points for every platform too, which is a nice touch. Your book will also get an AISN when you publish it.

Personally, when I started out, I published directly to Kindle and then used Draft2Digital for everything else. Every book retailer you don’t sign up for is an opportunity wasted. I remember a book of mine was a random mini-hit on Scribd, after being a flop everywhere else. A book that I was putting no marketing dollars into was generating hundreds of dollars in profit every month. There’s no way that book would have paid itself off without submitting it to Draft2Digital.

How Much Does Draft2Digital Cost?

Here’s the best part. You can use Draft2Digital’s conversion service for free. So, even if you want to publish directly to Amazon, or any other retailer, you can turn your Word Document into a format that’s ready to publish in an instant.

If you want to distribute your book to any of the associated retailers, then Draft2Digital takes 10% of the retail price of the book every time you make a sale. What I particularly love about this pricing system is that you are never truly paying out of pocket; Draft2Digital only makes money when you make money.

Personally, I wouldn’t use an aggregator for selling on Amazon. However, when you’re starting out, you should use Draft2Digital to sell your books at other retailers.

Vellum

If you want a truly beautiful book, you’ll have to use a program designed for book formatting. In which case, Vellum is the pick of the bunch if you’re on Mac. If you’re a PC user, you can use the service Mac in Cloud to access an online Mac and use your purchased copy of Vellum.

What I love about a tool like Vellum is what it replaces. Before, if you wanted to get a book that looked as good as a book made in Vellum, you’d have to do one of the following:

Pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a professional book designer. You may even have to pay for two designers, one for the kindle version of your book and one for the print copy.
Spend a few months learning how to use Adobe InDesign to format your book.

What You’ll Love About Vellum

Honestly, there’s a lot to love about Vellum. Here are some of the pros that you’ll find if you use the platform:

“Book Styles” that help you change the entire book’s look in a click.
You can automatically create a table of contents for your books.
The ability to adjust the paper size, the trim, and all the other bits and pieces to suit online retailers’ requirements.
You can see a full view of the book with their preview.
You can create box-sets and anthologies instantly.
Smart-links for different book files. For example, if you link to your book when you produce MOBI files for Amazon, it’ll insert Amazon links.
No upsells or additional fees. Ever.
You can use as many pen names as you like with ease.
A multi-use license that ensures you’ll always be able to use Vellum.
You can include links to any lead magnet.

How much does Vellum cost?

Vellum is a free download, which is cool if you want to play around and see if it’s worth the investment. If you want to generate copies of your book, you’ll need a license to do so. For that, there are two options to choose from.

Vellum Ebooks — allows you to create and export unlimited ebooks.

Cost: One-Off payment of $199.99

Vellum Press — allows you to create and export unlimited ebooks and paperbacks.

Cost: One-Off payment of $249.99

I like this pricing system because you can play around with the tool as much as you like and see if it’s worth the money.

While the price point isn’t super cheap, you can use the tool on unlimited books. Plus, it’s way cheaper than hiring a professional book designer–which you’ll need to do to get a book that is Vellum quality. It’s a one-time fee too, which is great compared to a monthly subscription model.

Here’s my in-depth Vellum review in case you want to see the tool in action.

Publisher Rocket

We’ve spoken about creating beautiful books on a range of different platforms. But there’s no point in doing all that work if nobody ever finds your book. That’s where Publisher Rocket comes in.

Rocket is a piece of software my team and I created to solve a problem that I was facing with my own book marketing. Basically, the sole purpose of Rocket is to save you dozens of hours doing market research. Since our launch, the software is constantly improving and the audience is getting larger and larger.

What You’ll Love About Publisher Rocket

Before Rocket, you had to do your research manually, which meant:

You’d have to brainstorm a bunch of different keywords for your book.
Type every one into Amazon search bar and write down what variations of your keywords are auto-suggested.
Add a range of modifiers to your suggestions and repeat the process until you have a huge list of keywords.
Try to work out how competitive each keyword was by looking at the top-performing books that showed up when you searched. This involved checking every book’s ABSR and deciding if you think books are targeting that keyword

Sounds like a long process? Well, it was. It would take me countless hours to do this for every book. Even then, I still had to do a lot of guesswork. Now, with Rocket, you can do the following in a matter of seconds:

Keyword Research. Like I mentioned above, you can automate the entire keyword process.
Category Search. With Rocket, you can view thousands of Amazon categories (that are continually being updated). This will help you find less competitive categories to list your book in.
Competition Analysis. You can check out what other writers in your categories are up to, even seeing their predicted monthly book sales!
AMS Keyword Search. We all know how important it is to nail your advertising on Amazon. Finding the right keywords is a nightmare though. With Rocket, you can get huge lists of recommendations for your advertising keywords. These include book titles, author names, ASINs, and other phrases related to your keyword

The truth is, even if I had absolutely nothing to do with the software, I’d still recommend Publisher Rocket. It has helped so many authors sell more books, and I know it can do the same for you too.

How Much Does Publisher Rocket Cost?

Publisher Rocket has a one-time payment of $97. Now, as it’s my own software, I’m not going to go too much into the pricing as I’m a bit biased. However, I’ve tried to make the tool as accessible as possible for beginner authors, who are the ones that need the most help selling books.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of tools you can use to boost your indie-author success. The three we’ve spoken about here will save you time, help you get more eyes on your books, and get those readers to fall in love with your work.

Cheers!
Dave Chesson
Kindle Marketing Jedi, Kindlepreneur.com
Check out my #1 Book Marketing Tool: PublisherRocket.com

Photo by Barn Images on Unsplash

Psychological Tips For Promoting Your Next Book

Do you ever feel that promoting a book can be an uphill struggle? That everything you think of is bound to fail, and that you lack the knowledge to really stand out to readers and convince them your book is worthy of attention?

We’ve all been there. Especially when you’re just starting out, it can be difficult to know what to try and how to go about it. There is so much conflicting information out there. It’s difficult to cut through the noise and understand which book promotion methods will work for you.

One way to go deeper than most, and gain an effective understanding of the core principles of book promotion, is to understand the basic psychology of marketing. By knowing the psychological principles of why book promotion is or isn’t effective, you go beyond mere methods.

After all, methods and tactics always change. If you only know how to do something, and not why it works, you self sabotage. You’ll always be forced to learn the newest tactics.

However, when you know why something works on a deeper level, you can adapt it to new situations. Here are some effective psychological principles underpinning book promotion.

Connect Emotionally, Not Logically

One of the key mistakes in marketing is to focus on presenting logical facts.

On the surface, it might seem sensible to provide factual information about the thing you are trying to market, such as your next book, after taking the time to write it. If people know some information, aren’t they more likely to be interested?

In fact, people are a lot more emotional than they think. Everyone is subject to cognitive biases. Also, we often don’t know why we do the things we do, or have a false understanding of the reason.

When tested, it’s actually been shown that people respond better to emotional marketing than logical marketing. If you can make your audience feel something strongly, they are more likely to respond well.

So how does this impact our approach to book promotion?

If you are writing in a fiction genre, you want to ensure that aspects such as your book blurb, book description for online stores, and marketing copy in general, are all attuned to the primary mood of your genre.

If you’re writing mystery, you want to create a sense of intrigue. Romance, a sense of excitement and warmth. Horror, a sense of fear and dread.

There’s nothing worse than a dull and factual description for an exciting genre book. By instead making your potential reader feel the emotion of your story, they are more likely to check out the whole thing.

Create A Sense Of Relatability

When you are writing key characters for your book, it’s vital to ensure they are likeable and relatable to your readership. It’s a lot easier to become immersed in a story if we like the characters and care about their success. This is why writers take so much time to choose the character traits for their leads. Making a character seem unlikable or unrelatable is a quick way to make a reader uninvested in a story.

Interestingly, it’s also important for authors to seem relatable to their readers. If the reader feels a sense of connection and kinship between themselves and the author of a book they love, they are more likely to become a dedicated fan.

There are plenty of examples of this principle in action. Think about how JK Rowling’s humble background is often emphasized in media pieces. How well known Stephen King’s love of the Red Sox and rock music are.

When readers see a common thread between your lives and their own, it creates a sense of liking, which has been shown to be a core component of influence.

You can use this principle to your advantage in the photos you choose for your book promotion campaign, the author bio you put out, and the responses you give in author interviews.

Just be sure to be genuine. Show your authentic self, and people will authentically relate to you. This is a key part of the process of turning readers into fans.

Make People Feel At Home

When you look at the most prominent modern fanbases, you will notice a commonality between them – a powerful sense of community.

Thanks to the prevalence of social media, it’s easier than ever before for people to connect with fellow fans, no matter where they happen to be in the world.

If you are able to create a sense of community which people can belong to, you stand a far better chance of establishing a lasting fanbase who will be eager for your next book.

Some of the most popular books of the modern era are textbook examples of how to achieve this. Think about the rivalry between love interests, resulting in fan ‘teams’, when Twilight came out. Think about how people consider themselves to be members of the different Hogwarts houses among the Harry Potter fandom.

So what are some practical ways you as an author can foster this sense of community and belonging?

Be sure to use social media first and foremost. You can consider using hashtags related to your book, creating a controversy such as two strong main characters, running fan competitions, having some sort of tribe of allegiance aspect to your stories…the possibilities are endless.

Anything which allows readers to remain immersed in the world of your books, even when they’re not reading them, is conducive to a passionate fandom.

After all, what’s more fun than being among passionate fans of something you love? Create this unforgettable experience of community for your readers, and your books are sure to benefit.

A Little Psychology Goes A Long Way

You don’t have to be a master of psychological marketing to boost the success of your next book. Just a basic understanding is often more than enough.

So remember to move people emotionally not logically, to create a sense of relatability, and to foster an atmosphere of community.

Not only will these principles effectively promote your book, they deepen your readers’ joy at the same time. What could be better than that?

How to Choose Amazing Amazon Keywords with Publisher Rocket

When people go to Amazon and look for a new book, the words they type into the search bar are called keywords. Choosing the right keywords is one of the most pivotal parts of the whole Amazon self-publishing process.

Good keywords can lead to free traffic and more book sales, whereas the wrong keywords can bury your book in obscurity.

That’s where Publisher Rocket comes into play. This software can help you choose the smartest keywords in a quick and efficient manner.

But how do you know what the right keywords are for your book? How can you tell what’s a hit or miss? Here’s how the process works — and how Publisher Rocket can speed it up.

Choosing Keywords People Actually Search For

It’s one thing to choose a keyword, it’s another to choose one people actually search. So how can we decide which is which?

Let’s start off with the old manual way of doing things. One of the best ways to determine what people are searching for is to let Amazon tell you. And that can be accomplished via their search bar autofill feature.

However, this is where things get tedious. You need to start typing, letter by letter, topics or phrases that are relevant to your book. Then, you take the autofill suggestions and start compiling a list.

While this method can work, there are some glaring disadvantages. First, let’s talk about the time needed to perform this process. It can be a monumental undertaking. This method can take days, even weeks, to thoroughly complete. And maybe even longer if writing isn’t your full time focus.

Next, it’s hard to hit every possible keyword. There are so many different combinations of words and phrases you can use to describe your book. You’re bound to miss some. Probably some good ones too. It’s inevitable. But…Rocket can make this whole task so much easier.

In order to make Rocket work for you, simply type your keyword into the Keyword Search function and an entire list will be populated for you in seconds. Afterwords, just export the list and type in another relevant topic. You can easily build a viable keyword list in just minutes!

Choosing Keywords that Actually Pay

So now that Publisher Rocket has given you a great list of keywords… It’s time to choose the ones that will actually bring you paying customers.

You are going to have to do a little analysis by monitoring trends. You need to choose keywords that are actually producing sales for the authors currently using them.

Before we get into how Publisher Rocket can do this for you, let’s do it the old-fashioned way.

Head over to Amazon with your list of potential keywords and search for one. Once the results arrive, you need to examine the ABSR of the top three results. The ABSR (Amazon Bestseller Rank) is where a particular book stands within the rankings of all of Amazon’s books.

After you get the ABSR, you need to head over to an ABSR calculator and input the rank you received. This particular ABSR calculator gives you the estimated average daily sales for that ABSR. Jot this value down, then rinse and repeat for each keyword.

Like the previous process of locating keywords, this is another long task. But here’s how Publisher Rocket can make things easier for you.

When you do your initial keyword search, you have the option to analyze each individual keyword. And that will provide you with a slew of pertinent info including:

The number of competitors for that keyword
The average monthly earnings of that keyword
Estimated Google Searches per Month
Estimated Amazon Searches per Month
The Competitive Score (how hard it is to rank for that keyword)

With Publisher Rocket on your side, you can turn a daunting task into a relatively quick and easy process.

But what about AMS Ad Keywords?

You may not realize this, but AMS keywords are a whole different animal than standard Amazon keywords. For example, unless J.K Rowling is reading this (If so, I’m honored!), your book will never rank organically for the keyword “Harry Potter.” At least nowhere near the top. But you can run an ad targeted at that keyword and get in front of the people who search for it.

Ad keywords can include author names, book titles, and other specialized search terms. But finding the best AMS keywords can be tricky.

Thankfully, Publisher Rocket helps to streamline AMS keyword selection. Just enter your parent topic into the search function, and you will be rewarded with a list of awesome AMS keyword suggestions.

For instance, if you’re marketing a Sci Fi book, a cool keyword you could target is “Books like Ready, Player One.”

Or, to explain it from a very different angle, if you’re a food writer selling an Instant Pot cookbook, Rocket could help you identify less obvious keywords such as:

Instant Pot Cookbook for beginners
instant Pot cookbook with pictures
Instant Pot cookbook for two

As a heads-up though… The Art of AMS Keywords is one easily learned, but difficult to master. So if you’re looking for a crash course in the basics of AMS (or a nice refresher) check out this FREE AMS ADS COURSE. It’s taught by Dave Chesson, the creator of Publisher Rocket.

Choosing the Right Keywords with Publisher Rocket

The importance of choosing the right keywords for your Amazon publishing cannot be understated. That’s why it pays to have a reliable tool to help you make efficient and sound keyword decisions.

And Publisher Rocket allows you to do just that.

Honestly, Rocket is a great option for all authors using Amazon as a publishing platform–especially for those with limited time or those new to self-publishing.

(For those new to self-publishing, these courses may provide some extra guidance.)

Just remember, the ever-growing book market is a competitive one. Using tools such as Publisher Rocket can help to give you that razor sharp edge you need to compete.

Using Audiobooks To Help With KDP Page Reads

This morning I saw an interesting book come across our Awesome Audiobook book submission site. The cover caught my attention and I clicked through to see the book on Amazon.

Thats when something strange happened. I had an ah ha moment! When I clicked through the link I noticed that the book was also in Kindle Unlimited so I downloaded the book.

I then thought about it a little bit and realized that if the author didn’t have an audiobook I would have never discovered it. I wonder how many authors are getting Kindle Unlimited page reads because they have an audiobook. I was over on KBoards the other day and they were talking about a book getting page reads in big spurts. I wonder if this could be part of the reason. There are many “Free audiobook” submission sites popping up all the time and if one gets traction I am sure it could cause this.

Making An Audiobook is expensive

Yeah I know what you are thinking that making an audiobook is expensive. Think about it this way though. It is a one time investment and done right it can make you back in page reads in no time at all if you market your book correctly.

If you have a book in Kindle Unlimted have you noticed any more page reads after you put up the audio version?

Tuesday Tip – Keeping Up With Book Publishing News

I don’t know about you but it seems like the book publishing world changes every 5 minutes. Instead of subscribing to a million book publishing newsletters I get my news from trusted podcast.

I listen while I am writing or working on the websites.

Sell More Books Show

The Sell More Books Show is a weekly podcast focusing on helping new and experienced authors stay up-to-date with the latest self-publishing and indie news, tools and book selling/marketing strategies. I had the pleasure of cohosting once. You can listen here.

Jim Kukral and Bryan Cohen bring you all the latest in what is happening in the book marketing world. Be sure to subscribe to them on iTunes to get the latest episodes.

The Book Marketing Podcast

Dave’s podcast is where he shares the best tips and ideas. He also introduce you to some of the best book marketing and promotional minds in our industry as they provide a case study to each episode’s lesson. I suggest you start at the 1st book marketing podcast and binge listen.

Creative Penn Podcast

I share my own lessons from the writing journey. I have made so many mistakes, I want to try and save you time, money and heartache along the way. Audios will be posted at least every two weeks and will cover Interviews, Inspiration and Information on Writing and Publishing.

I love listening to Joanna and how she always ask the guest the questions I am thinking of.

Mark Dawson’s SelfPublishing Formula

Mark Dawson is an award-nominated, multiple USA Today bestseller, with more than 20 books and over 2 million copies downloaded worldwide in multiple languages. James Blatch isn’t – but he’s doing his best to learn how.

I prefer to watch the youtube version but if I am in the car I listen as a podcast.

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