Social Media

Part of a successful digital author platform is a consistent brand image and active participation in several relevant social media networks such as Facebook or Goodreads.

Your personal brand should be consistent across every platform. This means you use the same name, colors, images, and biography for each account. For example, you don’t want to use your name on Facebook and the title of your book as your Instagram account.

If you plan to write more than one book, it is especially a good idea to go with your personal brand and get your name out there instead of just your book’s title. This personal brand will carry you through different book titles, speaking engagements, book tours, and other projects that will happen during your entire writing career.

For your author website, choose a domain name that has your name in it., and not one that is your book title. Then make sure […]

What’s stopping you from selling more books?

In most cases, it’s not money.

Authors tend to think that only if they had more advertising dollars they could turn their book into a bestseller. The truth is it’s more often an author’s mindset than an author’s checkbook that gets those books rolling out the door.

Spend your money on making your book the best it can possibly be. This includes a great cover, powerful editing and revising, tweaking, rewriting, editing, and revising again and then, when your book is perfect from the opening page to the end, you can use the following simple ways to get your book into the hands of avid readers.

1. Create an email signature and use it for every email you send out. Simple emails are often overlooked when it comes to book marketing, but personal notes actually have more influence than you think. When you include a simple link […]

Google Hangouts on Air is a type of video call that operates like your own private television broadcast talk show. You can have up to ten people participating on the call with as many as 5,000 live viewers submitting questions via text chat. Once the show is completed an automatic YouTube video is published.

For authors, this can be a great way to build up weekly or monthly content as well as deepen connections with your target audience. A recent article on Forbes reported that the reach of video “over white papers, case studies, even live demos with reps” was significantly higher in how audiences choose to absorb new content.

Getting Started

To get started doing your own Google hangout on air, you will need to pick a topic that offers valuable content to your target audience. Offer a tutorial on a subject such as photography, business, cooking or create […]

An important part of building brand awareness is image awareness. Like the golden arches of McDonald’s you want your face to be recognized as an expert. When people see your face, you want them to instantly say, “Yes! I know that person.”

Recognition builds association, which builds greater credibility.

The more your target audience sees you in different places and doing different things, the greater the image of “Oh my, that person is everywhere. They must be much more important than I realized!”

A photo tip is to use a unique personal image for different social applications. This way when your name is searched on Google, the page of images for your name will have more instances of “you” than images of other people with the same name.

When getting professional images taken, come prepared with different outfits and ask the photographer to use different background images. This way you get more mileage out […]

If you are looking for a magic bullet to speed your book to greater selling success, creating a 100 gold contact list might be just the ammunition you need.

A gold contact list is simply a list of 100 people that would help you to sell more books. This concept comes from John Kremer of Bookmarket.com. Kremer explains that building a list of 100 key media and book marketing contacts will help you to focus your relationship building efforts where they will have the most punch.

The first thing you have to realize when you build your list is that you don’t have to already know and have a relationship with these people. Come up with a list of people in the field that you want to know and then try to build a relationship with each one.

This will take some time. It will mean finding out where this […]