Eps 1: How to Sell More Books And Reach More Readers
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Ruby Ferguson
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Overall, the best thing you can do for yourself and your sagging book sales is be consistent in your methods of marketing. In short, many professionals in the bookselling business have said marketing your book can be a much more difficult task than writing the book in the first place. It is an undisputed fact that if you want to be an author nowadays, you have to know how to market your book.
Below are tons of free articles, video interviews, and audio, as well as book marketing inspiration. When you are just starting to market your books, having a website where bloggers, journalists, and readers can go for more information is invaluable. Your own author website will serve as the hub of everything about you, making it easy for you to point people to all of your books, your social media accounts, your email list, etc.
The Nonfiction Book also covers social media, pricing and selling books, touring books and media interviews, and the authors website. Any way an author can position themselves as an asset to readers looking for this type of information and/or expertise will be helpful as the book prepares for marketing. That said, many authors are unsure who their book is aimed at or how to reach a market, so this is the first advantage that a good PR person can provide to an author.
Start looking at authors that are already selling books in the market you are targeting, and seeing what they are doing to reach this audience. One of the best ways to sell instantly is to have an audience who knows you, who is ready and willing to buy your book right now. Because podcasts are typically highly targeted, you get access to exactly the audience who is your books primary market - people who most want and need what you are offering.
In fact, being featured on someone elses podcast can help get you and your book in front of more audiences. Because you are tapping into another persons audience, you may increase book sales with people that might not otherwise find you or your book through other means. This will get your book noticed again, and when you have multiple versions available--paperback, hardback, and kindle--you are seen as a bigger authority, which can increase your sales dramatically.
One reason why I love having a large list is not only because it makes marketing my books easier, but also because I get a substantial bump over other authors in my genre. I heard someone recently on Facebook say that your list is not only for the sake of marketing yourself and your books; it is also for providing value for the other authors in your community. Now that I am focusing on making money from my books, I am willing to promote other authors in my genre on my list, in return for them promoting my books on their lists.
After all, if I did not believe author websites were important, I would not have written my WordPress for Authors book, or my free Author Website Blueprint.
As you help to promote other authors in your genre, sharing their blog posts, reviewing their books, and similar activities, you will develop goodwill and a solid network of support from peers for your current and future projects. It is also important to develop relationships with people who read or react to posts on social media--authors need to take care to not sell their books, but rather be a person who a potential reader feels connected with. Building and maintaining an email list is one of the best things you can do for your book sales, both in the present and in the future.
Obviously, you can use that resource to promote your books, but even more powerful is getting your target audience to sign up for your email list, offering them additional content in return for signing up . Promoting is not rocket science -- it mostly involves properly identifying who your target audience is and how best to reach that audience, then doing the legwork of getting the word out about the book where this target audience is likely to see it or hear it. Then selling your story means networking and connecting with audiences to get the book promoted.
Try these steps, and you will be on the road to getting your book in front of more eyes, building a fanbase, and making more sales. With a good plan, you will soon hit the breaking point when your fans start marketing to you in numbers large enough to truly affect the sales of your books. What that means is if you want to truly leverage your marketing power, you are going to want to look at growing your single-title to a series, or even a sprawling universe, in earnest.
All you really need to do marketing through word-of-mouth is have a book worth sharing, and a way of getting it in the hands of the people who are going to be spreading the word. The Goodreads Author Page encourages readers to share your book amongst themselves to generate some free word-of-mouth publicity, but also includes paid promotional opportunities and freebies. It is not a must-have for every published author, but having a Goodreads Author page gives you access to some other awesome tools, including a widget for embedding Goodreads reviews for your books right onto your site.