Marketing

Finding the best market for a book is a challenge for every author. Below is a list of ten ways to find markets for your book.

1. Identify three categories of book genre for your book. For instance, fiction books can be broken down into age group, type, such as romance, mystery, thriller, audience, location, etc. Nonfiction books can be categorized as business, finance, science, history, etc. Each of these categories will have subcategories that will narrow your audience and offer best marketing positioning.

2. Go to Amazon.com and look up each of these categories and note the most popular books. Go to the website of each author and look for leads that will show you where they are promoting their books. For instance, websites they have featured guest posts on, articles from magazines, newspapers they are reviewed in, etc.

3. Look on their website for places they make public appearances, such as […]

Publicity does not have to be big to make an impact on book sales. Something as simple as leaving a comment on a blog post with a link back to your book can be the start of a publicity campaign.

Here are 5 simple ways that you can publicize your book in less than five minutes.

1. Create an email signature that promotes your book. It can be as easy as writing the title of your book with a link to Amazon or your website. You can add a simple statement such as, “Read my new book.”

2. Write a quick comment to a blog post with a link back to a page on your website about your book. If your comment is interesting enough for people to want to know who you are, they will click through and find out about your book(s).

3. Send a fun note about your book to family […]

The super, simple secret to getting more exposure for your book…

Ready?

Here it is in a nutshell:

Comment on blogs in your niche.

You see, the way to build a new audience for your book is to go where that audience is already congregating and enter into the conversation.

Ask yourself these two simple questions.

1. Who do you want to know you?
2. Who do you want to follow you?

Now look around for blogs with those types of avid followers. Start commenting on their blog posts. When possible, try to comment as soon as the post goes live so that your comments are at the top of the list to get greater exposure.

Make sure your comment adds some spark and sparkle to the conversation. Don’t steal the light of the blogger with your own amazing story but rather highlight what they have said and offer positive feedback with sincerity.

Here are 3 powerful reasons to leave […]

Pinterest is an amazing tool for authors but only if used regularly. Unfortunately, pinning can be a major time waster and may gobble up the precious minutes you should be … writing!

One way to get around this is to schedule your pins a week at a time.

There are programs available that will allow you to schedule your pins. The bad news is that the ones I could find are all subscription based, starting at $10.00 a month and going up to $100 for noncommercial users. While that might be affordable for some, it may not be for authors on a limited budget.

The bottom line behind scheduling is planning. Remember the old adage: for every hour you spend in planning you save three in work time. If you take an hour a week to plan your pins, you can then pop in the pins every evening in just three minutes.

The best […]

Behind every successful author is a dedicated group of fans. Let’s call it your author fan club.

This club may not include card-carrying membership with dues, name tags, or annual parties, but it does exist in some form or other. As an author, you need a faithful group of followers to ignite your book sales, show up at your events, and promote by word of mouth everything that comes off the press.

I do realize that when you start out, this fan club consists of your closest family members. They do come to your events, don’t they? No matter how small a fan club you have, the truth is, you do have one, and your task is to make it grow.

The easiest way to get started is to start collecting email addresses from your author website.

Of course, all that is much easier said than done.

Collecting email addresses from casual website visitors with […]

Building your author platform is a daily exercise every author must commit to for a book’s success.

If Twitter is part of your social media routine, coming up with interesting and relevant tweets can be a chore. One way to make this task easy is to create a tweet subject list.

To get started, decide how many tweets a day you will do. Three to five is usually a good number to start with. Leaving it up to whatever happens happens usually means that nothing will happen. So get yourself a piece of paper and let’s get started building your author tweeting program.

For this example, I am going to help you plan for five tweets a day. You can shorten it if you like to three or four.

When tweeting, a good practice is to offer tips, links, and interesting news items that will be of interest to your followers. Obviously, you want […]