Life Altering Reads: The right and wrong way to promote your books online.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

The right and wrong way to promote your books online. – James Shipman @jshipman_author

The right and wrong way to promote your books online.

Marketing a book is almost more work than writing and editing the book itself. Not only is it critical to consistently market your book, particularly online, but it is also critical to do so in an appropriate manner, otherwise you are wasting your time.

Appropriate marketing online involves reasonable direct marketing with a full measure of relationship and audience building in between. I recommend building Twitter, Facebook and Goodread audiences (there are others but these are the ones I use). This can be done overtime if you are consistent and within a year or two you will have a very good group of people you are interacting with. You are probably not going to just publish a book and have a ton of fans (if you do sell one of those books that goes crazy, congratulations, and you don’t need my advice). Probably your list of contacts will include personal family and friends and then many other authors and some readers. As you are building this audience start communicating with them. Certainly post about your book or upcoming book (or sale, event, etc.), but also post about things going on in your life. Let people get to know you. Also ask questions, make requests, tell people what you are working on next. Evidence shows the more you engage your readers the more they will be invested in you as a writer. Additionally, build relationships with other authors. Like their pages, accept their friend requests, follow them and tweet about them. People like reciprocity.

The don’ts are all about selfishness. You will get nowhere incessantly spamming about your book and then refusing all interaction with other people. If people follow you and you don’t follow them, they will notice. They will drop you, they will not support you. If all you do on Facebook is advertise your book over and over, or if you post your book on other people’s pages or personally message them for the very first time with an ad about your book, you are going to anger people and you will get nowhere.

Again, if you get an agent, a major publishing deal, and you sell five million books, you won’t have to do all of this. You can follow 12 people and have millions of followers. For most people it is going to take more time and more effort. Online marketing is about relationships, and about caring about other people’s work as much as you care about your own. Best of luck to all of you.