What is the best way to market your books? Any new tips? What are people talking about?
12 thoughts on “READER FRIDAY: What are your favorite marketing tips? What’s the BUZZZZ?”
To build a loyal fanbase for print, we need to leave the safety of our computer and mingle with potential readers and existing fans at book expos, signings, readings, book events, and conferences. For ebooks, video marketing is hot right now, but I haven’t had time to master it … yet. With all the vacationers flooding my area, I’ve been concentrating on the former (I do this every year from May to Oct.).
You go, girl!
I recently began promoting my first indie-novel, I’ve had a lot of success locally but not as much away from home. The one that has showed the most profit so far is Kindle Book Reviews, they promoted the book on both Facebook and Twitter for a nominal fee.
I also joined Instagram and their writer sites, so far it has gain me new blog followers, hopefully that will translate to readers.
I wondered about Kindle Reviews. Thanks for chiming in.
A fellow local author who focuses primarily on ebooks swears by Amazon ads. But she has a VERY tight rein on hers.
She spends hours combing through “hot” tags to put to each ad, and she has an exhaustive spreadsheet for keeping up with how each individual ad is trending. If one starts costing money over what she budgeted for that book’s ad, she removes the ad and starts over with a new one.
Her PP presentation on it at our last meeting was fabulous, but it looks exhausting!
I’m indie and 98% of my sales are for ebooks, so I hardly bother promoting print. Those are usually promo copies.
Two of my local author friends said the Amazon ads were effective for them but it was a full time job, plus they had to get the ‘how to’ book. Not worth it for me.
I lucked out with a BookBub featured deal this week, and it’s doing great things, but it’s not something you can count on as most applications for slots are turned down.
Setting first in series free has done very well for me. I advertise book 1, the freebie when I release a new book in the series. Free Booksy has given me excellent results. I’ve used ENT, Book Gorilla, Robin Reads, among others.
Good tips, Terry. Thanks.
Not worth it for me either, but it’s an option. I just wish there were better options where people aren’t nickle and dime-ing authors for every penny. We take months or longer to write a book, then use our own money to publish it (if we’re indy), only to have companies squeeze us for every penny to promo it – before pirates steal it and post for God and country.
This must be one of my cynical days. Sorry.
I’ve done pretty good with My Book Cave, and I’ve been circling Book Riot, but I haven’t tried them yet. Fussy Librarian underperformed for me, but I had the bad luck to run an ad on Easter, and who in the world reads books on Easter? :-p I’m going to try them again later. It really depends on your genre. Book Cave and Fussy both list how many subscribers they have for each genre, so you can see if your books would have a good shot at getting sales.
I call a sale site good when I break even or get a positive ROI within seven days. Since these ads are about 20 bucks, that’s actually a pretty easy mark to hit.
When I had a BookBub promo going, my Fussy Librarian was on a standalone day, apart from my other promos and it did well. You might try them again, but not on a holiday. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve been working with a publisher on some pretty unique book marketing: we’re doing SEO research to find the overlap between topics the book discusses and topics that people search for online. Then we analyze the articles that already rank for those topics in Google and write better, more comprehensive posts about the topic.
It usually takes months (depending on the topic, a couple years) to rank, but if you can pull it off, you earn steady traffic to a post that promotes your book. And you don’t need an established audience to start.
It’s a lot easier to do for nonfiction, but if your novel clearly revolves around a topic or has a lot of overlap with it, there are some good opportunities to do marketing that has a long-term impact.
Very smart, Ryan. Yes, I can see that this kind of discipline can be good. It’s nice to see a publisher do this. They can achieve better results for all their authors by building a database of keywords for different genres or subjects. Maybe that would get outdated fast, but when they have more than one author, I think a base of knowledge could be worth it. Thanks for sharing. Good luck with your launches.
To build a loyal fanbase for print, we need to leave the safety of our computer and mingle with potential readers and existing fans at book expos, signings, readings, book events, and conferences. For ebooks, video marketing is hot right now, but I haven’t had time to master it … yet. With all the vacationers flooding my area, I’ve been concentrating on the former (I do this every year from May to Oct.).
You go, girl!
I recently began promoting my first indie-novel, I’ve had a lot of success locally but not as much away from home. The one that has showed the most profit so far is Kindle Book Reviews, they promoted the book on both Facebook and Twitter for a nominal fee.
I also joined Instagram and their writer sites, so far it has gain me new blog followers, hopefully that will translate to readers.
I wondered about Kindle Reviews. Thanks for chiming in.
A fellow local author who focuses primarily on ebooks swears by Amazon ads. But she has a VERY tight rein on hers.
She spends hours combing through “hot” tags to put to each ad, and she has an exhaustive spreadsheet for keeping up with how each individual ad is trending. If one starts costing money over what she budgeted for that book’s ad, she removes the ad and starts over with a new one.
Her PP presentation on it at our last meeting was fabulous, but it looks exhausting!
I’m indie and 98% of my sales are for ebooks, so I hardly bother promoting print. Those are usually promo copies.
Two of my local author friends said the Amazon ads were effective for them but it was a full time job, plus they had to get the ‘how to’ book. Not worth it for me.
I lucked out with a BookBub featured deal this week, and it’s doing great things, but it’s not something you can count on as most applications for slots are turned down.
Setting first in series free has done very well for me. I advertise book 1, the freebie when I release a new book in the series. Free Booksy has given me excellent results. I’ve used ENT, Book Gorilla, Robin Reads, among others.
Good tips, Terry. Thanks.
Not worth it for me either, but it’s an option. I just wish there were better options where people aren’t nickle and dime-ing authors for every penny. We take months or longer to write a book, then use our own money to publish it (if we’re indy), only to have companies squeeze us for every penny to promo it – before pirates steal it and post for God and country.
This must be one of my cynical days. Sorry.
I’ve done pretty good with My Book Cave, and I’ve been circling Book Riot, but I haven’t tried them yet. Fussy Librarian underperformed for me, but I had the bad luck to run an ad on Easter, and who in the world reads books on Easter? :-p I’m going to try them again later. It really depends on your genre. Book Cave and Fussy both list how many subscribers they have for each genre, so you can see if your books would have a good shot at getting sales.
I call a sale site good when I break even or get a positive ROI within seven days. Since these ads are about 20 bucks, that’s actually a pretty easy mark to hit.
When I had a BookBub promo going, my Fussy Librarian was on a standalone day, apart from my other promos and it did well. You might try them again, but not on a holiday. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve been working with a publisher on some pretty unique book marketing: we’re doing SEO research to find the overlap between topics the book discusses and topics that people search for online. Then we analyze the articles that already rank for those topics in Google and write better, more comprehensive posts about the topic.
It usually takes months (depending on the topic, a couple years) to rank, but if you can pull it off, you earn steady traffic to a post that promotes your book. And you don’t need an established audience to start.
It’s a lot easier to do for nonfiction, but if your novel clearly revolves around a topic or has a lot of overlap with it, there are some good opportunities to do marketing that has a long-term impact.
Very smart, Ryan. Yes, I can see that this kind of discipline can be good. It’s nice to see a publisher do this. They can achieve better results for all their authors by building a database of keywords for different genres or subjects. Maybe that would get outdated fast, but when they have more than one author, I think a base of knowledge could be worth it. Thanks for sharing. Good luck with your launches.