Saturday, October 29, 2011

The Top 4 Book Marketing Tactics in Today's World

John Kremer speaking in Singapore

Here are the top four book promotion activities you can engage in to sell more books in today's world . . .

1. Speak. Speaking builds a word-of-mouth army better than anything else. Speak locally - at garden clubs, libraries, bookstores, Rotary clubs, JCs, poetry nights, story swaps, book club meetings, etc. Then expand out to a wider area, to nearby cities, to nearby states. Eventually, expand out to an even wider audience.

When someone hears you speak, they become a bigger fan than if they had just read your book. If they like you when they hear you speak, they will tell ten times more people than by just reading your book.

2. Book yourself on national TV. TV is still the largest mass market media. It still reaches more people than any other media - and with more impact. It's worth spending the time contacting the ten or twenty news and talk shows that reach your audience. For most national TV shows, you can get the contact information in one of two ways: 1. from their websites, and 2. via your network of friends and fellow authors.

Your appearance on one major TV show will not only expose you to millions of viewers, but it also opens the door to dozens and sometimes hundreds of other media: newspapers, magazines, radio, more TV shows, etc.

3. Create relationships with high-traffic websites. How many major high-traffic websites that attract your target reader have you created relationships with? Are these real relationships where you contribute content to them on a regular basis? In today’s world, Internet relationships are the key to marketing success.

Uncover five to ten top websites that already reach the audience you want to reach. Look over their sites until you find a way to contact someone behind the site - a webmaster, an editor, the founder. Then email them with an offer of free content for their readers: an interview with you, a review copy of your book, a free article (that is really good), some tips for their readers, a Q&A column on your specialty, etc. Their obligation, in return, is to link to your website or sales page.

4. Do a Superstar Blog Tour. Or a Mega Blog Tour. Or a Blogpalooza. I’m not talking about the old-style humdrum virtual book tour of 15 or 20 blogs. I’m talking about an event blog tour that creates Internet buzz on a major scale. Event blog tours can build brands, create incredible website traffic, and sell tons of books.

The neat thing is that effective event blog tours take less time to carry out than the traditional Amazon Bestseller Campaign - and are almost always more effective in selling books, building a brand, and driving traffic.

If you want to know more about event blog tours, check out this recording of me speaking about the value and method of carrying out an effective impact blog tour: http://www.bookmarket.com/blog-tour-palooza.htm.

Conclusion

These four book marketing techniques work for almost any kind of book: fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, children's books, how-to, spiritual, business, even cookbooks. You don't have to do all four. Start with one and work it hard – you'll get better results than doing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, EzineArticles, or other Internet marketing flavors of the week.

John Kremer

John Kremer is the author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books. If you want to launch a SuperStar Blog Tour™, Mega Blog Tour™, or Blogpalooza™, check out http://www.bookmarket.com/blog-tour-palooza.htm.

Blog Tour Palooza

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Book Promotion Via Giving Away Books

Bill Barol, author of the crime caper novel Thanks for Killing Me, is conducting an experiment in book promotion. He self-published his novel via CreateSpace and, after discussing his book promotion with a publishing friend, decided to give his book away (or, at least, sell it for as low a price as he could, given his relationship with CreateSpace.
Thanks for Killing Me novel
As his publishing friend advised him, “First, forget everything you know about traditional media; all your experience is worthless. Take all that time you spend screwing around on Twitter and put it into marketing your book. And, at least in the beginning, sell it as cheap as you can. In fact, you know what? Give it away.”

As Bill noted in a blog post about his adventures in self-publishing:

His reasoning was hard to argue with, and not just because I suddenly had a loud buzzing in my ears and the room was all swimmy. The logic went like this: Given two facts -- the odds of any self-published novel ever making any real dough were astronomically low, and the job of my novel was now to be its own loss leader -- why not set its retail valuation at zero and get it into as many hands as possible?

It sounded screwy, it sounded counter-intuitive -- hell, it was counter-intuitive, as my intuition was to make money by my work, and as much of it as possible. But the more I thought about it the less nuts it sounded. If I was really serious about exposing my work to a broad audience and generating the kind of critical mass that would make publishers reconsider, I had to make the book almost impossible for anyone with even a passing interest not to acquire.

The Get It/Don’t Get It decision had to be friction-free, and cost was the point of friction I could most easily lubricate.


To read more about his decision and how he priced his books to sell cheap, see his blog post at BoingBoing: Adventures in self-publishing: Why I took a year's work and tried my hardest to give it away.

Book Marketing Success Story: Sneaky Uses

I just received an email from a reader of my email newsletter. He describes how he has had success for his book series.

Sneaky Uses Series

Just wanted you to know I ordered another copy of "1001 Ways to Market Your Books" @ B&N last night.

I have passed 325,000 in total sales, will definitely reach 500,000 (at this rate since my 8th "Sneaky Uses" title will be published 11/1/2011) but I want to get to a million, or more.

So, I am going to do a 'system refresh' and start over with your latest edition to work on the next 5 to 10 years!

(I meet or get introduced to writers and the first thing I tell them is to order your book - and they love it.)

Regards,

Cy Tymony of http://www.sneakyuses.com
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