5 Easy Book Marketing Tips For Self-Published Authors

Help your book sales with these 5 easy book marketing tips

Easy book marketing may sound a little trite. But the most fundamental and important book marketing issues can often be overlooked in the mad rush for book sales after you release your book.

While there are hundreds of ways to market a book, very few will work well unless you get the basics right first. For many new authors, after they write a book it is then straight into publishing – but without a marketing plan.

By failing to so so, you can waste money on Facebook Ads, miss the opportunity to send press releases and forget to investigate services that specialise in book launches.

Having a plan before you publish is always good advice. But if your book is already published, there are steps you can take.

These are my 5 easy book marketing methods that I consider essential in giving a book the best chance of selling.

1. Meticulous listing of your book

Without a doubt, the first and most vital measure to take is to make sure that your book is listed correctly, fully and completely on Amazon KDP and all your other retailers.

One mistake many authors make is not using Amazon Author Central to add even more book details and editorial reviews. I touched on this in my recent post about SEO for books and ebooks. Always make doubly sure that you have a subtitle, select narrow categories, find searchable keywords and write a keyword rich book description.

Even if you have done this, go back from time to time and see if you can improve your book details. Use your book’s keywords in Amazon search, and if your book is not appearing, try finding a couple of new keywords. Search keywords for books are very powerful, so keep looking for better keywords to replace your weaker ones. Rinse and repeat.

2. Blog more often

Write a bunch of blog posts about your book. Almost every self-published author has a book page on their website or blog. There is usually a book description, a book cover image and buy links. Then you post it on social media.

However, the effectiveness of such a page is minimal, because it is often only a repetition of what is on your retailers’ sites. So it’s boring and will gain little attention.

A better way to gain interest and attention on social media, as well as increase your Search engine indexing, and therefore book discoverability, is to write a number of blogs about your book. These can be about the setting for your book, how the idea came to you, who helped you or where you wrote the book.

If you can come up with ten ideas for ten blog posts, you then have a variety of web pages that you can share on social media, as well as ten more of your pages that will be indexed on Google, Bing and Yahoo.

3. Share better and further

Share, share share. Sure, every author shares their book posts on Facebook and Twitter. But promotion on these platforms tends to last for only a few hours, or even a few minutes. In some cases, depending on the time of day, or day of the week, it may gain zero attention.

Due to the limited duration of effectiveness, re-posting often becomes the obvious solution. But this runs the risk of annoying your friends and followers.

The far better way to share is to use platforms that have longer lasting effectiveness. Some of the best are Pinterest, Scoopit and Flipboard. These platforms can deliver a lot of traffic, so use them to share and distribute every blog post or new webpage you make.

4. Comment everywhere and often

Comment, then comment even more. Every time you comment on a blog or news article, you have the possibility to gain a link back to your own blog or website, and therefore to gain new potential visitors. Make extra sure, though, that you check that your profile details are complete for each commenting platform, such as Disqus, WordPress, Blogger or any other site.

Whenever possible, add your profile pic, your website or blog address and a brief bio. A couple of comments I posted on a recent Smashwords blog post ended up gaining over fifty new visitors to my website in only three days.

Don’t restrict your comments to only book, publishing, and writing related sites. I gain a lot of new visitors from comments I make on newspapers and even sporting sites. In fact, commenting outside of the publishing arena is extremely valuable, as that is exactly where book readers are likely to be – reading an online newspaper.

5. Stop selling your books

Stop selling books!

Don’t waste your time, because books are never ever sold.

Books are always bought after being discovered. Discovery may come from word of mouth, an Internet search, a book club, a free ebook, a book review, your Facebook page, your comment on a Facebook group, your author website, your book promotion, or by readers browsing the Amazon Kindle Store.

Potential readers are everywhere.

Discovery can come from someone reading a comment you made on a fashion website or newspaper, or from tripping over your book on Flipboard. It may come from someone taking a look at your Linkedin profile.

Um, you do have your books listed on your Linkedin profile, don’t you?

Try to think of where your target audience might visit, and give them a chance to discover your book. This is by far the most effective marketing tactic.

Conclusion

Always think book discovery and forget all about bookselling.

There are very limited ways to sell a book, but there are absolutely unlimited opportunities to make your book more discoverable. So keep looking for these new opportunities in your marketing efforts, and not at your sales dashboard. Concentrate on using these 5 easy book marketing ideas to increase your book’s discoverability, and save yourself a lot of wasted time and energy.