With all of the work that you’ve done writing, editing, and researching for your book, it would be a shame to slouch on marketing your work and lose out on potential sales. You owe it to yourself to take all of the necessary steps to make it easy for people to find you and learn about your book.
Here are a few things you can do to positively promote your book on the internet and boost overall awareness:
Create a Personal Website
All digital marketing efforts are futile unless you have a website showcasing yourself and your book. This is very important, and absolutely crucial in today’s marketing environment. If you want people to find you and learn about your book, you NEED to have a legitimate website. You can easily do this for cheap with several do-it-yourself website building platforms.
Optimize Your Website for Search
Make sure your website is heavy in text as search engines can fully interpret text, but cannot read any video, image or flash object. I would advise making a list of 20 keywords that you think your readers might use to find your book and input those words in your website’s language. Try to use the words as much as you can without going overboard. It’s important for that text to be there, but it’s even more important for your website’s language to be clean, smooth and not repetitive. After all, you still want your writing skills to show!
Blogger Outreach
Make a list of influential blogs that will help drive traffic to your website. Any blog where you think potential readers of your book will be. These can be blogs within the field of the book’s topic, blogs of other authors, blogs that reviews books, etc. Once the list is made, develop a strategy to approach each blog with a warm message and a value proposition offer that will generate interest and help them. The key to blogger outreach is to be open to helping them as much as you can. Many will be happy to help if you supply them with unique content such as interviews, book excerpts or a copy of the book before it goes on sale so that they may review it. Top quality blogs can drive a ton of traffic to your website, so be sure to do whatever you can to create and maintain a mutually beneficial working relationship.
Create a Facebook Fan Page and Put a Facebook Icon Linking to the Fan Page on the Website
Readers love to interact with the author and talk to fellow fans. If you’re attentive to any questions or comments and open to your readers, they will help spread the word about you and your book. Show love to your readers, and love you shall receive back.
Develop a Mailing list – Create a contact list of as many people as you possibly can. Sounds kind of ridiculous, but it can pay off with some huge dividends. The contacts can be family, friends, co-workers, professional contacts, etc… anyone you can reach out to that will support your book and your marketing efforts. When your mailing list is made, send out a mass email to all of them with an appropriate message. I would usually advise using a email-management platform like iContact or ConstantContact, but for this situation I think it’s best to send an old fashioned email to make it more personable and less business-like and marketing speak. These emails will help spread the word, increase your Facebook fan numbers, keep important people aware of news regarding your book, and may even lead to new opportunities!
List Out All Book Promotion Events on Your Website
This helps keep your fans in the loop and aware of your upcoming activites. This is especially important if you have radio, tv or newspaper interviews in the future. On your website, this can be in the form of a calendar or list.
Make it as Easy as Possible for People to Buy Your Book from Your Website: BIG ICONS! – This is certainly getting nitpicky, but this small detail can make an impactful difference. When setting up icons and links to websites where readers can buy your book (Amazon, Itunes, Barnes & Noble, etc.) make sure that the links are both large enough to be easily seen and located above the initial fold of the website (the part of the website that can be seen without scrolling down). It’s important to make it as easy as possible for people to buy your book and these steps greatly help in that regard.
