Some rights reserved by Casey David.
The uncommon truth is this: most of what self-published authors consider to be marketing is not actually marketing.
Before I continue, I need to explain what I mean by marketing:
Marketing is taking action to create brand awareness and sales within the target market for your product.
In this case, your target market are the people most likely to enjoy your work, and your book is the product.
The marketing plan for most authors goes like this:
- Interact with other authors on social media.
- Blog about their writing, their books and their self-publishing journey.
- Participate in writers’ forums and communities.
- Guest-post about writing and self-publishing on other author blogs.
But unless you’re writing how-to books for self-publishing authors, this list is a networking plan, not a marketing plan. While everything on the list is useful, it’s not book marketing.
In this post, I’d like to provide a guide for changing that. By the end, you should have several exciting ideas for how to find and reach the untapped target market for your books.
Continue reading »
Some rights reserved by Robb North
Anyone selling on Amazon
knows how important 5-star reviews can be for spurring sales. And yet, only a small percentage of readers ever take the time to leave a review. Without thousands of sales, each positive review you receive feels like a blessing, each negative review a major blow to your confidence.
But wherever there is hard work to be done and money to be made, there are people trying to cheat the system. This explains the booming industry of fake 5-star reviews, buying book ‘Likes’ and even paying to have negative reviews obliterated from Amazon book pages.
Continue reading »
Some rights reserved by andi.vs.zf
Strangers, especially online strangers, don’t care about you.
Let’s be clear: I mean that in the nicest possible way.
They don’t care about your feelings, but they also don’t care enough to deliberately try to hurt them. Strangers will give you some of the best feedback you’ll ever get, because all they care about is telling you what works, and what definitely doesn’t work, often in frightening levels of detail.
If your cover looks like it was designed by a painting elephant, they’ll be quick to point it out to you. If your main character’s unique first name means ‘Coffee Breath’ in Romanian, they’ll kindly inform you. If there are five POV switches in your first scene, they’ll spot them, and lecture you about it.
Most importantly, if your writing is not ready to be sold, they will make it clear.
Continue reading »
Some rights reserved by linh.ngân
When self-published authors think about ways to increase the sales of their eBooks, the first thing that often comes to mind is this: find more readers. And yet, this may not always be the best and easiest solution to the problem.
In the business world there is a classic saying:
It costs five times more to acquire a customer than it does to keep one.
Rather than trying to persuade someone to give your books a try, wouldn’t it be easier to increase the number of readers who go on to buy multiple books from you? If you master this skill, you can be successful even without a huge readership base.
Two scenarios:
- 1000 readers who only ever buy one book each = 1000 sales
- 500 readers who buy three books each = 1500 sales
In this post, I’ll teach you 5 tactics you can use to get more eBook sales from every reader.
Continue reading »
Some rights reserved by SteveD
There’s nothing quite like a www.yournamehere.com website to signal to the world that you’re a professional. It’s the first thing new readers will look for when they want to find out more about you, and when they Google your name, it’s what will show up first in the search results.
Perhaps more importantly, if you don’t own the .com for your name someone else will eventually register it. At best, they might be kind enough to sell it to you at an inflated price. At worst, they’ll keep it and turn it into a hub for their Strip-o-gram business.
The good news is that creating a .com author website is surprisingly easy. The whole process of getting a website online can be completed in less than an hour. In this post, I’ll show you how.
Continue reading »
Some rights reserved by halfrain
“Please understand that book publishing is an organized hobby, not a business.” – Seth Godin, 2005
The above quote from best-selling author Seth Godin is taken from 2005, a time when digital self-publishing had yet to hit its stride. Since then, Godin has gone on to found the Domino Project (a primarily digital publishing house) and authors like J. A. Konrath and Amanda Hocking have sold hundreds of thousands of books and made millions of dollars by self-publishing online.
As I write this in late 2011, the publishing industry as we have known it is dying. In its place, independent authors are taking fate into their own hands and launching a writing career online – a career that involves not just writing, but all the other tasks that a publishing house would usually handle. Authors are fulfilling the role of agent, editor, proofreader, distributor and publicist in addition to writing books. And why? Because we know that it’s our responsibility alone to make sure that our books sell. If they don’t succeed, we have no-one else to blame by ourselves.
Though bearing sole responsibility for our success can be scary, it can also be empowering. This blog is based on the premise that with hard work, the right attitude and by using effective strategies, you can sell enough books to earn a full-time income from writing. By focusing only on the most efficient methods to generate sales, you’ll have more time to spend on other things – like writing more books, spending time with your family, or paragliding in Costa Rica.
Continue reading »
Get Updates
Subscribe via RSS
Follow on Twitter
