10 ideas for Successful Promotion

So you’ve made your ebook, it has a great cover, it’s well edited and your friends are busy helping you out with recommendations and reviews. The first few days of sales on Amazon, the Nook and the iBookstore have been great, better than you dared hope, and you go to bed each night smiling at your good fortune, patting yourself on the back for a job well done. But then, you watch the sales reports and figures are slowly dropping away, dwindling into single figures.  So what’s next? More hard work I'm afraid. Here are some ideas:

1. Write a short story and give it away free, but promote your main book at the end, and in the short story description, and in your biography.
2. Give your book away for 1 week. Promote the pants off it on Twitter, Facebook, Google plus and Pinterest.
3. Collect your best reviews together and make a website out of them. Buy a cheap domain based on the name of your book, use the cover image as the landing page, then set up a click through to a single page with all the great reviews and a link to the Amazon, B&N and iBookstore page with your book.
4. Write thirty marketing stings of 120 character descriptions of your main characters, plots, themes and locations. Use the last 20 characters to link to the Facebook page of your book (you do have one of these don’t you?). Spend one month tweeting with these stings.
5. With your smartphone (or your children’s, or friends!) make a short video of your workplace, room, study. Pan around the room describing the books, paintings, computers and other detritus, connecting everything to the writing of your book. Post this on your Youtube channel (you do have one don’t you?) and link to it on Facebook, Twitter etc.
6. Set up a blog and write it in the style of one of your characters. Wordpress or Blogger are both free. Pretend to be your main character and commentate on news and trending events. Facebook and Tweet about this.
7. Depending on your subject matter, set up a blog or forum on the subject of your book. Make sure you think this through and give real advice or links, or help so that readers can gain something genuinely useful.
8. Find an extract from your book which is self-contained, perhaps 2000-4000 words and send it to the editor of online magazines which feature your sort of writing. When you’ve identified the magazines, makes sure you follow all the subscribers and followers of the magazine and focus on the content of the extract in your tweets.
9. Use emails. You have friends and work colleagues. Send them an apologetic but simple email asking for their support in promoting and selling your book. Include a small jpg, png or gif file of the cover as visual stimulus. Make the email creative and interesting, don't just beg!
10. Use Pinterest. Create a board which shows the places in your book. Find images on Google (with proper credits to the original website) and your own photographs. Use short snappy captions. Add a link to each image, leading either to your Facebook page or directly to your Amazon book page.

So, it's all about social media engagement: be creative and give ‘em something free. 

Coming soon: Print on Demand: a Useful Complement to eBooks?

Successful eBook Marketing: Pinterest

I love Pinterest. It allows you to express yourself in a completely different way to Facebook (FB), Twitter (TW), Google+ or any of the other social media outlets. But the best thing is it complements rather than competes all of the other forms of social engagement.

So, for writers this is a big benefit. If you self-publish, setting up a virtuous circle of links between Pinterest, FB, TW, your own blog, and the various places where you books is being sold, you can watch your audience grow and engage with your readers. 

Pinterest is almost entirely visual. Its immediate impact is completely different from FB and TW, because it focuses on images. Using the concept of boards (the sort you might have in your writing room/space/study/understairs cupboard) you pin images of your own, or clips from web pages.

At first I was slightly disenchanted with it because the various feeds and boards they highlighted showed so many shiny, perfect photographs that I wasn’t sure that any normal person could match up. However, as the weeks have gone by I’ve realised that its the interface that’s shiny and perfect! Almost everything I’ve put up has looked good. And it’s adaptable to mobile devices so still manages to look good on iPods and Android phones. You can follow and like others, and they can reciprocate.

So how can you use it to promote your writing?

1. Create a mood board with images that represent themes of your book. Obviously if the book’s about Rome, then let’s see some images of Rome, but also, if your book is romantic, you might find some beautiful places around the world that give the reader a sense of how you’re thinking.
2. Created a board for each main character in your book. Using Google searches you can find so many fabulous shots. Your main character might be a knife-toting zombie from New York. Well, find some shots of New York at night time, a spooky cemetery, and some sharp hunting blades. You might write a recipe journal, so you can find some ingredients shots, some victorian kitchen parlours.
3. If you have some cover ideas, sketches, or images you’ve created for the book, put them in here too. If you multiple books, put all the covers on a board.
4. Readers are often fascinated by a writer's inspirations. Give them a board with the places, peoples, buildings, colours or shapes that have influenced you.
5. Each image can be linked to another page, so you can link it to your Amazon  page, or the iTunes link for your book, or your blog.
6. Pin responsibly! The copyright dangers are obvious. Always give a full credit to the source of the image. Always give generous praise to the source. 

One major criticism of ebooks is that we lose the touch and feel of books. Pinterest gives us a new way of extending the look and atmosphere of what we write, so try it out and see what you think.

Some great people to try on Pinterest include Sarah Dessen, Kaitlin Ward both included on a longer list of recommended Young Adult authors on Pinterest on the YA Highway blog. Of course, I have my own which you could look at too!

Coming soon: Using a Facebook Page for your Book and Going Exclusive with Amazon.

Successful eBook Marketing: Twitter

I read an interesting article the other day about how Twitter is dealing with spammers by suing some of the software sites that generate automated spam and phishing activity and it reminded me of some basics for Twitter. I have two accounts, one as an author (a pen name) and the other as a publisher. They have very different dynamics, because one is promoting a single product (on a long, slow burn), the other has a multitude of agendas and this leads to some very different interactions. But there are some common lessons:

1. Engage. Above all engage. Join in conversations, politely, but have something interesting to say.
2. Your main purpose might be to promote your ebook but don’t do it all the time, it will put people off. And find interesting ways of promoting in 140 characters: some writers take quotes from their books, others link to their own blogs with teasing questions, some will write about their characters. Variety and mystery are essential factors in gaining and keeping an audience on Twitter.
3. Identify people who are interested in the same things as you - music, art, cupcakes, gardening. It doesn’t matter what. If you’re genuinely interested in the subject(s) then you’ll have more natural interchanges with your fellow tweeps.
4. Retweet tweets that you think are useful, or which complement the subject matter of your writing. If you can, add a comment to say why you've retweeted. Over time this will make you more helpful to others who will begin to retweet you back.
5. If someone follows you, don’t automatically follow them back. Check them out, see if they’re real, see if they have interests that chime with yours. Ask yourself if you’d be happy to see a tweet from them, even if it’s just once every ten days.
6. If someone follows you, follow them straight back. Yes I know that contradicts what I’ve said above, but this is a valid method for building followers and that’s how some people have several thousand of them. Personally I worry that of the 12K followers for some tweeps I've seen, only a few hundred must be fellow travellers, the rest being marketeers, evangelists and spammers who will never engage.
7. Be clear about your goals. Having fun and exploring is just as valid as being heavily focused on your own ebooks. Some people tweet in order to find friends from other parts of the world, or connect with new ideas. It doesn't matter what, just do it with conviction!
8. Be patient. Quality is definitely more important than quantity. It takes time to build genuine groups of like-minded people. Watch how others talk about their work, see how effective they are, read the blogs they read, join the forums they discuss.
9. Be persistent. Whenever you tweet, always look for new tweeps to follow, chase down the bloggers and online mags in your areas of interest and see who is following them.
10. Deal with spam. Personally I report any spam I find. I’ve had hundreds of follows from so many innocent sounding porn stars from a every US State. A quick look at their web-address usually gives it away, or the randomness of their three tweets. A follow can also qualify as spam if its unwelcome attention from marketing companies promoting a product which is of no interest to you. So, block it. You don’t have to clutter your news feeds with stuff you don’t want to read.

Some people like to tweet all the time and scan all the tweets that come into their feed. Others allocate a small amount of time every day or week and so restrict their activity. Whatever you do, be consistent and try to integrate the activity into your daily/weekly routine. In time you'll find you have an audience that will respond to your requests for downloading that free chapter of yours on the Kindle, enjoy it so much that they'll buy the full ebook!

So, even with the ever-present dangers of spam, there are so many ways to promote your ebook through Twitter. It's fantastic.

Coming soon: Nook vs iBookstore vs Kindle and Yes, Size Matters, Even for ePubs.

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #2

Bookshops groaning with Books.

There’s never been a better time to self-publish your own ebook. There are so many ways to promote your books through social media, publish them through major online retailers and make them available to libraries. And it cuts away at the monopoly of the big High Street retailers.

So what’s wrong with the big High Street retailers, Barnes and Noble in the US, or Indigo in Canada, or Waterstones in the UK? 

Well, not much really, except that they are limited by the size of their stores and the flexibility, or otherwise, of their central buying teams. These venerable institutions are in terminal decline because they simply cannot represent the scale of opportunity afforded online to the consumer. And, to make it worse, in an attempt to compete with the internet they are trying to reinvent themselves with non-book items —  fluffy toys, stationery — and so reducing the amount of already limited space available to books. A book store with 40,000-50,000 books used to be a reasonably typical size. This sounds like a large number, but with the publishing industry regularly pumping out over 150,000 new titles and reissues every year, you can see the problem. And Amazon has around 1.8 million books available.

Publishers, be they the powerhouses of Penguin, HarperCollins and Random or the plethora of indie outfits, all have a tough time selling their books into the limited space on the shelves of the big retailers. And they also sell to supermarkets, garden centres, chain stores etc, and these retailers have even less space for books.

So, as a self-publishing author, using Createspace, or Smashwords, or Lulu, or making and uploading yourself to Amazon, Apple, B&N’s Nook and Kobo, you will control over your own selling space. You can build on it and promote it. You can let it grow at a pace that suits you, you can publish one book every two years or five every other month. It’s your choice, not someone else’s, and, as long as you create something that’s professional and promotable, you will be the prime beneficiary.

And did I mention that you can change the price of your own book? Or alter the cover, or update the book without having to wait for the next print-run? Well, that’s for another post!

Coming Soon: Do You Need an Agent? and How do I Find a Good Proofreader?

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #1

Teenage Vampire Fiction

Just a short post to highlight a couple of good blogs/articles elsewhere. One from the Economist called 'The Death of chick lit' in the Prospero blog and a follow-on from Mercy Pilkington at Good eReader. They both focus on the often ignored phenomenon within traditional print publishing which is the attempt to follow fads, flog them to death, then abandon them when sales have slowed. New writers often don't appreciate that book publishers are businesses that have to make money to survive and one of their methods is to find something that sells, or copy something else and ride on the success. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series spawned a mini industry of teen vampire novels (and TV series) that's lasted for three or four years. Now the peak of the wave is over, the market appears to have moved on for some publishers but there is still a good following for authors in this genre. Self-publishing through Barnes and Noble's PubIt, or through Amazon, or into the Apple iBookstore is a perfectly good route for such authors.

More to come on this... In the meantime, I need to embed the number 2UFQWYKWWMPN which a my Technorati claim token and should allow this blog to be published by a wider audience.

Coming soon: Go Local and The Pinterest Challenge.

Editors for eBooks

One of the main purposes of this blog is to encourage the proper use of freelance editors and proofreaders. The problem is, there are plenty of good ones around. If you're just starting to write, and have no connections within the industry, a simple Google search will report thousands of editors, from different continents, all brilliant, all available.

So, to help with this, I've just set up a Facebook group called Editors for eBooks. It will take a while but with some heavy networking it will become a useful resource for those who need to be put in touch with a good editor or proofreader. To join the group you have to become a friend of Nick Wells and then Editors for eBooks. This allows me genuinely to recommend the services of a professional. I'll tie it up to twitter lists too (@flametreetweet), and Linkedin.

Coming soon: Good Reasons to Self-Publish 1; Marketing Lessons from the Music Industry.

Self-Publishing eBooks: Ask Yourself Some Questions.

So why not find a good freelance proof reader, and an editor, perfect your book, then release it as an ebook, straightaway? 

In the last post I looked at some of the issues relating to finding a traditional publisher. While there’s much more to say on that subject, the real purpose of this blog is give people information and inspiration about self-publishing. That’s because there’s so much on the internet about this, it can be difficult to relate it to individual needs.

So, yes, absolutely it is possible to write a text, find a good proof reader and a constructively critical editor, find some simple software and send it off to Amazon, the Apple iBookstore and Google. Self-publishing for the modern world. 

But before you take the plunge you need to ask yourself some questions:

1. Am I passionate about what I’m writing?

2. Will I be able to advocate for it, at every opportunity?

3. Am I interested primarily in the writing itself, the achievement of having done it?

4. Do I want recognition for my achievement?

5. Is the nature of the recognition more important than the sales?

6. Are sales, and a means of earning a living, more important than kudos for its own sake?

7. Am I promoting some other product (seminars, exhibitions, healthcare products)?

If the answer to 3 and 5 is yes then self-publishing may not work for you. That’s because, in the digital community the marketing of what you write is at least as important as the text itself. 

If the answer to any of the other questions is yes, then you’ll need to embrace, if not master, the power of marketing in all it all it’s forms. At the most basic level, engagement with social media is essential, using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and the rest. It’s about momentum, talking to friends and family, asking them to recommend your publication and help you advocate for it. 

Coming soon: Which software is best to make ePubs? How do I create a Facebook Page for my book?