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.

7 Ways To Build An Author Platform

Whether you are new to writing or a seasoned professional, building an author’s platform is essential to marketing yourself and selling books. At its core, the purpose of creating a platform is to effectively engage and connect with your readers.

Think of your platform as your visibility as an author. Your ability to sell your books will come down to defining your message, making connections, and marketing your brand. Combining these elements creates the foundation for building a cohesive author’s platform.

Is An Author’s Platform Actually Necessary?

You might be thinking that just putting out quality content is enough to launch you to success. It takes more than simply being good at what you do, however.

Having a strong platform gives you credibility as an author. This is what encourages readers to buy your books and potential publishers to invest in you. As you promote yourself through your platform, you’ll gain authority and influence while raising your brand equity.

How To Build Your Platform

1. Define Your Purpose

Identify the vision you want your work to be known by. This could include:

Qualities that make you unique
Topics and subjects you want to write about
Messages and themes your work incorporates
How your writing serves your readers
How your strengths, interests, and passions define your purpose

Properly articulating the vision behind your writing allows you to clearly express your purpose as an author. Determine what unique experiences set you apart and use that to define your message.

2. Create a Brand

Your name, author photo or logo, colors, and typography are all part of establishing a brand for yourself. Creating brand recognition makes your work memorable to your readership, who in turn will be more likely to promote your books to others.

In addition to selecting the proper imaging for your brand, creating a tagline or catchphrase for your work can convey a certain idea for what you write. Your catchphrase should take into account the common themes throughout your work, your tone and voice as an author, and something that makes you relatable to your audience. Keep it short and memorable, like a hook for a good story, except your brand is the story.

3. Utilize “Owned” Media

An “owned” media outlet is simply any platform that allows you to have complete control over the content you publish. Some examples of owned media include:

Author blogs, fan pages, and websites
Podcasts
Video blogs and channels
Social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter

Creating a website or blog gives you a digital home base to operate your platform from. Even if you don’t have a book deal yet(If that is your goal?), launching your social media presence allows you to build an audience first.

There are some meaningful advantages that owned media supplies to your platform. For starters, most owned media is essentially free. Owned media provides proof of your expertise, quality of work, and brand identity. Generally, these platforms are simple to use and provide a way for you to connect with your audience directly.

4. Generate Quality Content

Whether you post articles, story excerpts, or videos, strive to produce content that offers your audience something they can utilize, rather than spamming them with useless updates about your books.

Conceiving valuable content can be challenging, but if you’ve already established the central themes to your platform, you can use those as building blocks. Stay current on the latest trends that involve your core themes and turn those topics into posts. Types of posts to consider for your updates include:

Links
Images
Quotes
List posts
Q&A’s

5. Connect With Your Audience

To successfully engage your followers, post media updates daily. And instead of spreading yourself thinly across multiple platforms, limit yourself to the two that work for your content the most. There is no sense in promoting yourself on a platform that doesn’t work for you.

Encourage your followers to have a conversation with you, and use their names when replying to them. Create an open dialogue with your readers to find out what content they have enjoyed and the type of content they’d like to see from you in the future.

Building an online following takes time and perseverance. Don’t be discouraged in the beginning by how long it will take to build your audience. If you engage each new follower as they trickle in, you’ll cement an audience that will stick with you over time.

6. Stay Relevant

Preserving your identity as a writer is important, but you can stay relevant without selling-out. As writers, we can tend to get stuck in a content rut where everything we turn out starts to feel repetitive. To prevent this inevitable roadblock you must continually analyze the market.

Research the topics you write about most often to see what direction the conversation is heading. Investigate what subtopics other writers are exploring and how that relates to your work. You will find some amazing stories to share with your social media audience also.

Search for keywords connected to your themes on social media outlets you don’t utilize. This can give you valuable insights into uncharted topics pertaining to your platform.

7. Expand With “Earned” Media

Once you’ve become comfortable with creating content for your own media platforms, you’ll want to seek out opportunities to grow your brand through other outlets.

Some examples of earned media include author interviews (We offer a free one here) with online or offline publications, guest posting on other blogs or websites, and customer reviews and testimonials.

These opportunities may come about from larger publications taking notice of you, but it will most likely come from self-promotion and making the effort to reach out on your own.

Networking with like-minded blogs and websites is the first step to promoting yourself. Once you have established a reputation with other authors, you can suggest cross-promotions to that will create advertising opportunities for both of you.

Final Notes

Each step you take to building your platform works towards achieving your ultimate vision for your work. Advice is useless without action, however. Creating your platform will take time and commitment, but don’t let that discourage you from getting started.

How You Can Begin Right Now

Search yourself. Do an internet search for your name and brand and see what results. This is what your audience will see when they search for you, so make sure it presents a positive image.
Update existing social media. Go through your current social media accounts to make sure that all your contact info, branding, and images are up-to-date.
Join the conversation. Make a point to comment on other author’s articles and updates with unique insights, answers to questions, and relevant commentary. Just by dropping in on comment sections you can make your brand more visible.
Subscribe to similar content. Sign up for email lists of authors and writing blogs you admire. Utilize the advice they are circulating for your own platform.

Even if you aren’t actively working to build your brand, your reputation brands itself passively. Take control of creating your platform and define the direction your writing career will go in. What steps are you taking today to build your author’s platform?

Authors Using Social Media To Sell Books

If you want to learn about social media you have to try new things and see what works. More importantly you have to stop doing what doesn’t work.

I see a lot of authors lately using social media to sell books. When you submit an interview to our sites I ask the question at the end of the email about how did you find out about us and what your biggest struggle.

Many of the questions I get are about social media.

A lot of the authors don’t know what to tweet or put out on social media. They don’t feel like marketing books because they’d rather write one and that makes total sense to me. I think the struggle that most authors have is they think that they have to go on social media and keep putting up “Buy my book! buy my book! buy my book!!!!”

It’s the opposite that is actually true, authors can sell books on social media but should never ever go the route I just explained above.

Social media is about being social. You wouldn’t walk into a crowded room and yell at the top of your lungs buy my book buy my book buy my book! Of course not nobody would ever buy your book. If you suddenly walk up to a table and introduce yourself and say that you are a writer somebody would ask you “Hey what type of books you write?

Eventually it would lead to a conversation and then you can tell them if you want to check out the books visit my website or wherever you are selling your books. They end up telling other people about your book, if they like it of course and you end up with more people buying your book from one conversation. It’s the same in social media a little interaction 5 to 10 minutes a day.

I manage a lot of social media accounts as you can imagine with all the book sites. I have some prescheduled tweets and Facebook post to go out every day. I have one set up the morning, one for the afternoon, and one or two for the evening. It will ask general evergreen questions for example if it’s Monday I will ask something like “How was your weekend did anybody do anything exciting?”

This will end up getting two or three responses where I can then talk back and forth with the person and get to know them a little better. It can be a complete stranger or it could be somebody new who just happened to be follow my profile. Just opening up the lines of communication is important.

Since I had this question asked a lot I should set up some sort of a spreadsheet for excel or Google sheets. What things to tweet and to schedule for Facebook post.

I use HootSuite which is a program that allows you to upload both tweets and bulk Facebook messaging.

When you see me put out an author interview in the social media odds are it was either HootSuite or a program called Shareist which automates a lot of my social media also.

This leads me to another thing. What exactly to Tweet out or schedule Facebook post on social media. If you have a YouTube trailer you can put that out. If you have done an author interview on a website you can put that out. If you have done a podcast you can schedule that out.

The best thing to do is open up a spreadsheet with a Google Docs or an Excel spreadsheet and make a list of places where you have been interviewed all with links to like your Amazon book page YouTube trailer page. You can also mix in a few evergreen tweets like “I’m writing this afternoon what are you doing?”

After you have the sheet set up once you can use it over and over again. People are online at different times and odds are that they can’t remember the same tweet that you tweeted seven days ago. The only person that will know is you.

One of the main reasons why we do the author interview series on almost all of our sites is so that authors have something that they can put out on social media. Most of the smarter authors take their author interviews and end up putting it out on scheduled posts on Facebook or on Twitter.

I do it like once every 30 days on every 90 days an I will post something like “Hey I was just interviewed and featured on Awesomegang” and then provide a link to that interview. I’m sure that if you are an author and you been around for a while you have plenty of places that you’ve been interviewed that you can use for a social media blast.

When an author does an interview with us on any of our sites we put the post live and we send out the social media. After that it’ll rotate every 30 to 60 days and go out at the social media again. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten email from an author that did an interview a year ago thanking us. They had a few more book sales and the only thing they can trace those sales back to is the year old social media blast from an interview. It is a great feeling getting those emails.

After you’ve done one or two interviews you have a whole bunch of stuff to put out on social media. Let’s just say you do in author interview for instance. You could then write a series of five posts and put it into an Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet. You can drop it in your Google sheet the URL into five different boxes and write five different things, for instance the first one could say.

Let’s use Facebook is an example since those post can be longer.

1 – I had a great time being interviewed on awesomegang! Some of the questions were really revealing and then add the link to that.

2 – Awesomegang just interviewed me and the questions were tough but I got through it. If you want to learn a lot more about me and my books go here and read it and of course you add the link.

3 – Man those guys over at Awesomegang know what they are doing. They interviewed me and asked some of the best questions I’ve ever been asked. And insert the link.

4 – I spent a few minutes with awesomegang doing an interview where I told my deepest dark secrets. And add the link.

5 – Want to know more about me and the books that I write here is an interview I did with Awesomegang and insert the link.

I think you get the hang of this now. Now let’s just say you did an author interview on all of our sites Awesomegang, Pretty-hot.com Bookreadermagazine.com, and Awesomebookpromotion.com that would give you four links if you created five different paragraphs to social media and included each one of the links you would have about 20 social media post that you can make today. It would probably take you about 15 minutes.

Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and get social. If you follow any writers and you find yourself engaged with them say to yourself hey what are they doing that makes me engage with them. They might be doing the same system I just explained.

If you haven’t done author interview with us in the past I encourage you to because not only will you spread the social media links we will spread them for you every 30 to 60 days.

If you have not done an author interview with us what are you waiting for. It is free and only leads to more exposure. Go fill out our author interview form here.

7 Reason Why Authors Need To Build An Email List

Email marketing is an important form of promotion in the world of publishing. Email scales very well and allows you to resonate with one person at a time. One of the most powerful aspects of email marketing is that there’s a very direct connection between you and someone who wants to hear from you. It’s never too late to build your list, and I’m going to give you seven reasons why you want to get started today.

Get Your Email List Started Today

1. Your Email Subscription List Will Form The Backdrop For Your Future Author Outreach Campaigns.

A list forms a core asset of my author marketing plan. The greatest thing about email marketing is that pretty much everyone checks their email. It’s sort of like how a telephone was for the previous generation. We give them our email address, and even that act of doing it is a very trusting thing.

We don’t give out our email to just anyone. So if they want to hear from me specifically, that email is part of a trusting relationship that implies that I will deliver whatever they’re expecting from me. When I find a person who wants to hear from me, then email is my primary way to do that.

You don’t want to be everywhere, but you need to pick a primary channel that you work through. While I’m building a relationship, I also have their email so I can let them know about my new book coming out or what I am currently writing about. So when social networks change their algorithms to make it harder for my message to be seen, it’s nice to know that I’ve still got someone’s email address.

2. You’re Able To Reach Readers With Email Marketing Who Aren’t Actively On Social Networks.

I know some of my readers don’t like to be on social networks. Writers often choose to work with social media first because most people already use Facebook or a similar social network.

The issue with a lot of social media channels is that you don’t own them. Facebook is impressive in its size, but the problem with Facebook is that you don’t control the message. Facebook controls what they allow you to do. I just posted an update on Facebook, and it’s maddening that all my followers can’t see it. Only a percentage of my posts will be seen by any one follower, all according to Facebook’s proprietary algorithms. That’s not going to cut it. And for certain aspects of Facebook, they change the rules too often. That is why sometimes I will post the same thing two or three times during a 48 hour period.

Knowing that not everyone’s there on Facebook, email gives me a shot of reaching them where they live. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are great and should be explored by authors, but an email subscriber is always more valuable than a follower.

3. You Can Reach Out To People Who Can Give You Valuable Feedback.

There’s an illusion that writers are writing for perfect strangers. But that’s not how it really works. You have to build something by focusing first on the people you already know. Do they even want to hear what you’re writing about? I would, even before building a list, start emailing the people who I already know. I’d go straight down my contacts list and begin the dialogue.

It’s a great way to steer your adult relationships in a new direction. Soliciting what people like about your writing is how you discover who your true audience is. If you already have an email sign up form on your website direct your contacts to that page and ask them to sign up. Some will and some won’t but the people that are interested in your writing will and that is who you want on your list anyway.

4. Email Is Direct.

I can get my message to go directly to its intended audience with no middle man or gatekeeper between me and the person I’m talking to. A list of email subscribers is still the most responsive way to interact with potential clients. Email is personal. It’s a one-to-one interaction, and, done right, it can build relationships that help build devoted readers.

These people who end up on your email contacts list end up being your fans. They see you start giving value to them in the form of email blasts and newsletters. Whatever it is that you’re giving away for free (it could be a free PDF or a free newsletter), you make their life better by giving value up front. That’s when you start to build a relationship with them. You always want to give them free stuff first, so don’t try to sell them something even before any relationship has started.

Email is also private. You can interact with others in private, sharing advice, knowledge, and ideas that turn list members into devoted fans of your writing. You can then ask the devoted fans to share your email with others they think might be interested.

5. An Email List Gives You A Purpose For Your Website.

I’m proud to have an author’s website that functions like a business, which means I’m getting traffic and making some book sales. Now many authors like to blog, but what is the purpose of putting all your content on your website? Someone probably isn’t going to buy one of my books just because they found an article of mine through the search engines.

But if my post captures their interest, they’re more likely to give me their email address. That gives me an opportunity to develop a relationship and maybe win a new reader. Having an email newsletter turns any occasional visitor of my website into a returning reader.

6. An Email Newsletter Is Great For Reader Retention.

I want to continue the dialogue with my readers in a more informal venue. By allowing my readers to opt into my email broadcasts, I can continue having a conversation with them in a setting that is more casual than a book. Charles Dickens used to release his books in serial format, and a newsletter broadcast for an author’s email list functions in much the same manner to attract returning readers.

7. Focusing On Building An Email List Helps You Learn How To Do Email Marketing Correctly.

Consciously focusing on email marketing means you start learning to do it properly. You should start email marketing by getting a good email service like MailChimp or AWeber. These dedicated email newsletter subscription services are better able to ensure email deliverability across a variety of email providers (using their contractual agreements with Internet service providers). These services also make it easy for your subscribers to “unsubscribe” so that you stay CAN-SPAM compliant.

I personally use and recommend AWeber, but there are many other email companies out there. You can start by adding a hard to miss sign-up form to your website. It needs to stand out prominently, as the main goal of your website is to get potential readers to sign up to your list. You’ll also want to offer an incentive for signing up. This could be an ebook, a video, a preview of your future work or whatever your ideal readers would find valuable.

We’re all trying to get a bunch of new customers, but you have to get them interested in whatever you have to offer first. While you’re building your subscriber list, you need to give value and care about what you’re doing.

The most important thing I tell any author on the web is that the key focus of all of their marketing must be on building their list. Once you got their email, that’s the best way to continue the conversation with them.

If you enjoyed this article on building an email list for authors you should sign up for our email newsletter list and get quality content like this delivered to your inbox. Take notice how I have a landing page just for my sign ups with what they can expect from me.

7 Ways To Market Your Book Using Facebook

Social media is an excellent tool for new and seasoned authors to promote their books, and Facebook is among the best platforms–provided you know how to use it correctly.

Ebook promotion isn’t as simple as creating a page and asking your friends to like it. In an age where people are inundated with media and advertising, it’s hard to get your message through. And, like the marketing of any product, great ebook promotion is going to take some money and time. Luckily, putting in some serious work can lead to serious results.

Marketing Your Book on Facebook

Here are 7 tried-and-true ways to market your book using Facebook–follow these tips, and you just might hook a whole new market of readers.

1. Create an Author Fan Page

If you’re serious about using Facebook to market your book, using your personal profile isn’t going to cut it (plus, not all of your friends are going to appreciate the unrelenting self-promotion for your book). At the very least, you’re going to need a separate author fan page for yourself, though in some cases, it’s also a good idea to create another separate page for the book you’re releasing.

Choose Great Images

If you’ve got a high quality author headshot, you should use that for your profile picture. Your cover image should be a well-designed advertisement for your newest book. If you aren’t very savvy with Photoshop or other image manipulation programs, you might consider putting up a Craigslist ad that offers a reasonable fee for a graphic designer to create an 851×351 pixel image to use for your cover.

Find New Fans

When you create your page, it doesn’t hurt to solicit friends to invite other people to like your page. However, to find and keep new fans, you’ll need to offer value to users who follow your page. You can do this by creating quality posts, and using other methods we’ve listed below.

2. Create Targeted Ads

Next comes arguably the most important piece in ebook promotion–creating the advertisements themselves. While Facebook offers its own ad creation software, we personally prefer the Chrome plug-in “Power Editor.” There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it allows authors to create eye-catching advertisements. Or, as we’ve suggested above, you can often find a graphic designer who will create ads for you inexpensively.

Once you’ve created ads, it’s a good idea to set aside a small budget to pay for them. Facebook offers handy analytical tools to see if your advertisements have been effective.

A few other ideas for targeted promotions are:

Liken Yourself to Similar Authors–Say you’ve written a horror novel. Your ad could read something like “Love Stephen King?” (or Dean Koontz…you get the idea). Aligning yourself with a popular author who works in the same genre as you is a useful method to attract new fans.
Create a Memorable Tagline–If you can summarize your book in a few words, an ad is a great place to do it. For a romance novel, perhaps you could write “Forbidden Love, Irresistible Temptation.”

3. Offer Time-Sensitive Deals to Readers

People love to feel like they’re getting an exclusive deal. Offering a limited-time discount on your book (or making it free for a day) can drive up readership and pique people’s interest. If you’ve written previous books, consider offering a special deal on your new book if readers purchase a “bundle” that includes your other books. Again, the key here is to make these deals time-sensitive. The feeling of urgency will make people more excited to purchase your book.

4. Post Videos

Let’s face it: people these days have shorter attention spans. Because this is true, videos are one of the best forms of media to use to promote your book on multiple platforms. If you haven’t created a video teaser for your book (which can include a brief plot summary, the book’s cover, and an advanced review if you’ve got one), it’s definitely an option you should consider. It’s well worth your time to create a few of these, which you can post on your author page periodically. These teasers don’t need to be any longer than 30 seconds, and it can be an invaluable tool to promote your new book on Facebook.

5. Hold a Contest (or Two…or Three)

As much as people love a deal, they love free stuff even more. Setting up a few contests is a great way to excite people for the release of your book, and the prize needn’t be anything larger than a signed copy of your book (although a larger prize can bring in more potential readers). Start the contest a few weeks before your book launches.

Once you’ve released your book, you can hold another contest or two. These post-release contests can be a great promotional tool, because it can involve the actual content of your book, and the submissions themselves can be used as advertisements. A few fun ideas include:

-Having fans submit their favorite quotes from your book and writing about what the quote means to them
-A contest for fan artwork (perhaps an illustration of their favorite scene in the book).

6. Network with Other Authors

Try to find an author group on Facebook that produces similar work to yours.
When you start to network with other authors, you can ask them about what promotional tools have worked for them. You can also do cross-promotions, in which you both advertise each others books or even bundle them together and split the profits. Fellow authors in your genre can become an excellent support group. Some authors won’t be interested in sharing their secrets with you, but most will be happy to find a new ally.

7. Keep at It! (And Take Notes, Too)

The instructions on a shampoo bottle read: Lather, Rinse, and Repeat. Likewise, marketing your books will require you to repeat the steps listed above. A Facebook page is only as good as its content. Even after your book has been out for awhile, you should continue to post reviews, videos and other relevant content.

No two authors find success in the exact same fashion–you’ll have to pay attention to what’s working, and ditch the posts and content that aren’t having an effect. This is where Facebook’s analytical tools will come in handy. You can use them to see what types of posts are getting the most shares and views, and most important to your bottom line: which social media posts are leading to sales.

How To Sell Books Using Social Media

Social media is a multi-billion dollar industry that has taken the world by storm. Although compared to other media, it is relatively new, but social media has already become a critical component of our lives, whether for fun or business, the importance of social media can no longer be over-emphasized, and it is fast becoming indispensable in our daily lives.

A 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report revealed that a size-able 86% of marketers said that social media was important to their businesses. Also, 75% of marketers reported positive results regarding traffic increase as one of the major benefits of social media; the report also revealed that more than half of marketers who have used social media marketing for over a three year period reported an increase in sales over that period.

Facebook and Twitter alone have a combined subscriber base of over a billion, this then makes it a matter of common sense that any personal or business information that is targeted at people would be effective on platforms like these. Like every other business owner, writers can also take advantage of these ready-made market, most of which are free, to create and maintain a point of contact with customers and potential book buyers, and the following are ways authors can sell their books on social media:

First, you have to be interested and actually enjoy using the platform, anything that is forced would find it hard to sell, before you can convince people to buy your books, you must be interested in the platform of your choice, you must enjoy being on it. It is called social media for a reason, and for you to maximize its full marketing potentials, you have to respect its fundamental purpose, which is to socialize.

Focus Is The Key To Social Media

Secondly, you must be focused. You need to identify your target market or subscribers and tailor your posts and interaction in their direction, consistency is very important in this case, you must be known for a particular type of posts and you must stick to it. For an author interested in selling books, it makes sense that the bulk of your posts and interactions would be about books, maybe not necessarily your books, but books in general.

Lastly, don’t be pushy. Pick your moments well, apply the 80/20 rule, always give away more than you ask for, and you are lucky that in this case, what you are giving away does not necessarily have to involve money, it could just be helpful tips on books for your followers, or recommendations.
No matter what your opinion on the topic is, the truth is that social media is here to stay and is now one of the most important parts of our lives.

Whatever it is you have to sell, social media gives you easy access to your readers, so take advantage of this (mostly free) opportunity today.

Finding Keywords and Hashtags

When using social media you have to discover the correct words and use hashtags to discover readers and other authors in your genre to connect with. Most authors in the genre you are writing in are also reading that genre. Even if you are not focusing on them for book sales you should find them and offer to work with them. You can find 5 or 6 authors and go around retweeting each others post, share on Facebook, and put each others book links in their newsletters. Either way you have to discover the popular hashtags and use them.

One of the most popular tools I have seen is Hashtagify.me. If you click on the link you will see I already pre-populated it with books and you can see the other hashtags that are associated with that keyword.

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