Online Book Marketing

Book marketing is one of the least fun parts of being an author, but these days, even traditionally published authors need to think about marketing their own books, and most of the time that involves online marketing.

If you think the hard part is writing the book—think again. Selling it is far more difficult.

New books—especially those by unknown or new authors—start their shelf life under a mystical cloak of invisibility. So to attract readers, your job as an author is to make your book visible. You may not want that job, but it needs to be done if you want to sell any books. However, that doesn't mean you need to start spamming your book on Twitter 24/7. No one ever sells books by spamming about them on Twitter.

Selling Books Online

On book sales and popularity online, it all comes down to ranking and maintaining that ranking because if you're not ranking high in search engines or book stores like Google or Amazon and you're a new/unknown author, your book is invisible! No one can see it. No one knows it exists. Invisible books don't sell.

There are a lot of ways to boost your ranking, so readers can find your book: A good use of keywords, a good use of categories in places like Amazon, having a professionally made website and a newsletter, for example. You can also use paid advertising somewhere like Facebook or Bookbub. These are all tried and tested methods that can work, but they have no guarantees.

There isn't a one-method-suits-all solution to marketing because book marketing is reader-centric. If you aren't visible to the kind of people who are looking for your kind of book, then all your marketing will fall on deaf ears—or blind eyes. So the first thing you need to do is work out who your readers are, what they read and where they hang out. You need to laser-focus all your marketing on the people who will be looking for a book like yours if you want to make any sales.

Amazon

For example purposes, let's focus on Amazon ebooks. Amazon is the biggest bookseller in the world after all. Without ranking in Amazon, your cover, book and pitch don't mean much. No one will see them if your book's on page 1 million in Amazon's paid kindle category. Only an author trying to find out how they're ranking will look on that many pages! So yep try and get on page one of a category. Then people will see your book exists.

Amazon uses the A9 algorithm, which means that the algorithm is driven by what makes Amazon money. So if your book sells a lot of copies, the algorithm will reward you by putting your book into lots of reader's faces and selling more copies for you. But if you make no sales, then welcome to invisibility—population 300,000 other authors.

But lets assume you find something that gives you a ranking boost—an advert you're running perhaps, but your book stops selling after the advert, so you don't make much money from it. After you reach a high rank—less than 30,000 rank—you need to keep it so you can afford more adverts and maybe some food. Only regular sales keep that kind of ranking. If your sales drop off after your promotion, and the book tanks down the ranks, then something about it wasn't working. Something about it wasn't keeping the customer's interested. So you need to either run constant adverts, or you need to find out why Amazon readers aren't buying the book. Often in cases like this, the problem will be in the presentation.

The Branding

Branding covers a wide range of elements from your cover to your keywords, and it's important to get your brand right because if you attract splatterpunk horror readers to your YA romance novel, none of them are going to buy it.

Meta Data

Meta data is basically the information in the back of your ebook file, often the description, title, category and keywords. These are also things that you will submit into your KDP dashboard. These are tools for you to laser-target your ideal reader, and if you use them well, your book will be shown to the right readers, which will give you sales. Most authors ignore their meta data, but it's the foundation for all your future marketing, so spending some time finding out where your readers look for books—the right keyword, categories and kind of description—will pay off a lot in the long run.

The Cover

A good book cover is also part of the branding, and you need to think about how it will be viewed by readers. The thumbnail needs to look good, so does the main cover. If the thumb looks bad, no one will click it and see the bigger picture. Take time to get a good cover. Readers DO judge books by their covers.

The cover also needs to match your genre. Readers decide in a split-second if they're going to click on a book, and it's the thumbnail that makes them decide. If your cover doesn't match your genre—regardless of how pretty it is—the wrong readers will click on it, and you won't make any sales.

The Pitch

If the cover is getting the job done, your next presentation to the reader is the pitch and tagline: Too many writers put years into their book and only 30 minutes into their sales pitch. If the pitch is a hatchet job, no one's going to want to read the book. You don't need to describe your whole book in the description. You need to intrigue the reader, so they want to read more.

One of the common pitch mistakes is being too vague. Here's an example of what I mean: It's not a spoiler to say Harry Potter is about wizards even though he doesn't find out he's a wizard on the first page. If the wizards had never been mentioned in the pitch, the pitch would have said: A book about a boy who is mistreated by his family. Not really describing HP is it? So yep, vague pitch = no one knows what the book is about.

It's only a spoiler if you give away the ending. The rest you can shout out about in your pitch and pull in readers with.

Another one is: 'The Pitch That Never Ends!' Anything over 4 paragraphs—and those are short paragraphs—is probably too much information. Readers don't want to read the pitch forever. They want to read it fast, see if it's their kind of book and then read a book. A long pitch will just make them give up half way through and go find another book to read instead. So trim it down, get to the point, and make your readers salivate over what happens next.

The Formatting

Next in the presentation line up is Look Inside the Book. Did you look at yours? Is it aligned well, does it look like a book, or does it look like kindle threw up wordsoup on a page? Formatting a kindle takes time, making it work and look good takes time too. Make it look good.

The Content

Next is the book content. Structural edits—you should always have one! Not only does it make the first few chapters addictive reading, it fixes an endless list of errors that first novel drafts have in them. We all need eyes on the book, but the first ones should be from an editor!

A line editor is also a good idea to catch the issues that MS Word misses.

Conclusion

So the three rules of selling books online are:

• Be visible
• Be presentable
• Be a good read.

Tick all those boxes, and you should be doing well on book sales.

Author: Claire Chilton