Why You Should Start a Blog Today

One of the essential ingredients to a successful book marketing plan is a blog.

A blog will allow you to post “journal” entries about your process during the book writing stage, to post entries about your publishing timeline, to write about your published book, and to write about everything else you are interested in in between.

On the Wheatmark web site we have a blog post that includes step-by-step instructions on how to start a blog using Blogger – one of the free blogging sites available.

How does blogging for book marketing work?

It works by establishing a home base for your marketing efforts. As you read other people’s blogs, you can comment from your blog identity allowing them to follow back to your blog. When you use Twitter, you can put up tweets about new blog posts and also put the link to your blog in your profile so Twitter users can read more about you. This will drive traffic to your blog site.

On your blog site, make sure to add a link to where prospective readers can buy your book.

Why does blogging for book marketing work?

It works because it creates a virtual world where you can be the expert on your book’s topic and allows people with similar interests to interact with you. The more you gain readers to your blog, the more readers you are likely to gain for your book! By allowing readers to be a part of your journey as an author, from first inspiration to the exciting book launch, you can form a community of people invested in your project and your success!

It can be difficult getting going. So here is a list of topic types to get you started

List of 5 ideas or thoughts – numbered lists are always winners. It helps the blog reader understand what they are going to be reading and helps them get to the end. This works in a blog about business very easily. You can write about one of your chapters, offer tips, etc. But it could also work for fiction! Say you are writing a young adult fiction book about a battling a demon. Your numbered list could be “Things You Need to Battle a Demon.” It’s entertaining and it brings people into your book.

Publish a list of links – Can’t think of anything to write? Someone else has written it already and better? Post a link to the articles on your blog. They’ll appreciate the favor and also your blog readers won’t feel like you’ve abandoned your blog for the day!

Take a recent experience and share it – Maybe it is obvious, but writing about something that made you have an emotion is always good fodder for a blog. It lets other people into your world and also allows them to share their own experiences in the comments forum. It may even inspire you!

Marketing for Fun: 1:1

Personally, I get a little run down with the same old online marketing techniques. You check your Facebook account, scan your Twitter feed, read your Amazon reviews (can you hear the droning in my head?) which are all excellent and, I'd say, necessary ways to market your book.

The Internet channel is the most open one for self-published authors. However, taking full advantage of it can be work though, sometimes, not fun work.

So why not liven it up a bit?

Today I was toying with alternate ideas, silly ones, that would help engage readers and potential readers into your book world.

Let's just consider this the first installment of:
Kat's Krazy Kool Stuff She Found for You to Market Your Book with Online

Quiblo.com
Register at quiblo.com and you can create quizzes, surveys, polls, and their ilk. While it may seem like a time waster (and believe me, it is) it is also a brilliant, fun way to engage your audience in a truly active way. Create surveys about your book, quizzes about your characters, polls about your title, even personality quizzes based on how people felt about your work.

It's silly, it's fun, it's interactive, and it can include your book cover image. You can make as many as you want after registering.

They are easy to create, fun to play with, and, best of all, still a marketing tool.

Check it out!

Because books can be fun!

Thoughts on Social Networking

"Think of it like a giant cocktail party."

Over at the BookSquare Blog, the brilliant Kassia Krozer has written a wonderful post about social media and social networking that not only does an excellent job of explaining what socia media and social networking are, but why they are so important for book marketing.

As Kassia so eloquently puts it,

Social networking means that the book club is online — and the participants range from people who’ve read the books, people who want to read the books, people just passing through the conversation, people who sell books, people who sell books to people to sell books, and, yes, people who acquire, edit, market, and distribute books.

I urge you to read her post, and also to sign up for information about her upcoming BookSquare University - designed to help authors build relationships on Facebook, and which Kassia describes as "a gentle introduction to social media for non-technical authors."

Happy Book Marketing!

Sell Yourself, Not Your Book!

Here's a book marketing advice I hope you'll take the right way:

Forget about trying to sell your book. Nobody is interested in buying your book.

What people are interested in is you, your services, your cause—and not a book.

There are many, many great books. But hardly any book out there can sell itself on its own. The bestselling books out there became bestsellers not because their authors were trying to sell books.

You will sell the most copies when people you have sold yourself to will want to get you and your ideas packaged between two book covers. It is not a book they are looking for, therefore, it's not a book you should be selling to them. Sell them yourself—in the form of a book. Most authors get it backwards: They are trying to sell a book instead of selling themselves. They are using their profession to sell their book, when in fact they should be using the book to sell their professional services.

What you want to do is to market not your book, but what your book is about. Use your book to promote your business, your practice, your cause. If you are a professional speaker, sell your speaking service using your book, rather than try to sell your book using your speaking business. If you are a counselor, use the fact that you've written a book about relationships as a way to solidify your credentials. If you are exposing human rights abuses in your book, all the more you should be thinking about advancing (marketing!) your cause, not your book.

"I don't know how to market a book!" is the most common excuse I hear from authors. Forget marketing books. How good are you at marketing YOU? Are you or your service marketable? Can you sell yourself? If the answer is yes, you don't need to know that much about book marketing. When you "market your book," do not market it, market yourself. Market your practice, your services, your advice, your concept, your cause! If you do a good job marketing YOU, your book sales will follow.