Laura Howard: How to Market your Book if You're Not a Marketer

11/26/12

How to Market your Book if You're Not a Marketer



This is my first time ever as a Blog Tour Host for Heather of SupaGurl Book Tours! I'm kind of excited about being a Host, because I love having authors on here, for spreading the love, but for what I learn too! As a Tour Stop, I just pick a date and everything is arranged for me. For the future, I'm contemplating a tour of my own, so hopefully this experience will also give me some insight into that.

Anyway, I'm sure you've heard of her- today's guest is the amazing Nancy Straight. She is on tour promoting her book Blood Debt, which I hope you'll check out!


I am no expert on marketing, but these are the things that have made an impact for me.  I’ve learned tons about marketing and publishing in the last eighteen months, of the things I’ve learned these five have been the most important for me.


1. Personal connections.  Every friend I have on Goodreads or Facebook gets a personal message from me.  I’m more interested in getting to know a hundred people who read my books and loved them than I am in connecting with a thousand who may or may not be excited to hear about my latest release, a review that brought tears to my eyes, or a message from a girl in Sri Lanka who did a book report on one of my books for school (yes, that one made me feel as cool as Cat Woman!).  Writing is very personal for me and I like the idea that the people I connect with are people I want to know and who want to know me.  


2. Book Covers.  Okay, true confession here:  I am in the one tenth of one percent of the reading population who never looks at a book’s cover.  Every book I’ve read for the last two years has been based on a friend’s recommendation, a goodread’s group read, or an author I’ve met on-line who I think is fun and I’m anxious to see if their personality came through in their writing.  For the other 99.9% of the population, a cover IS critical.  Make sure it looks as good when it’s the size of a quarter, as it does when you’re looking at it stretched across your screen.  The bulk of the people who see it, will see it when it is the size of a quarter.  It’s got to be dramatic enough to catch their attention long enough to read your synopsis and peruse your reviews.


3.   Meet other authors in your genre.  They’re just like you and me.  They have families, jobs, community commitments and they write because they love it.  If you read one of their books and a character or scene moves you, tell them.  Of the books I’ve read in the last two years, every story that brought tears to my eyes, made my heart race or made me want to throw my kindle across the room resulted in a message to the author.  Most have become close friends and exceptional sounding boards for ideas.    


4. Edit.  If you’re on a tight budget and can’t afford a professional editor, find one that you can trade with.  Offer to help them market their editing business, offer to recommend your friends to them, do whatever it takes to make sure you publish a polished book.  There are thousands of readers out there who will overlook spelling and grammatical errors (yes, I think these people are angels on earth), but there are nearly as many who will be sever in their critiques / reviews.  A well edited book with a great plot and character is one readers will gladly recommend to all their friends.


5. Schedule a blog tour.  (Just like this one!)  Bloggers are the unsung heroes of the independent publishing world.  They routinely take a chance on an unknown author, devote hours of their personal time to read and review a story then publish to the world their opinions.  Word of mouth is THE BEST advertising any author could ever hope to have.  Experienced bloggers have a substantial group of followers, know how to insert tags in their posts, and if they fall in love with your story will more than recommend your story, they will advocate for you!  

What types of things have you done to market your book that you feel make the biggest impact?

17 comments:

  1. Great advice, and a little ironic because I just popped over here from a group discussion in LinkedIn that had my heart pounding. Someone, okay a guy, plead a rather passionate case for authors not doing any marketing at all, saying that if we're serious about writing we should be satisfied that it may take 100 years or more for our "genius" to be discovered. He then went on to say those who choose to actively market their work are prostituting themselves. Amazing ... I just keep telling myself it takes all kinds in this world.

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    1. Yeah, people like that are confusing Marquita! Whatever floats your boat, that's what I always say!

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    2. Hi Marquita! I agree, it takes all kinds!!

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  2. Thanks for your marketing tips, they really made me think, I've been trying to market my wife's books, she does love to write them. We went through hell with the first one as we knew nothing about editing it and got soundly whipped for it. Its okay now, we're broke so we use a couple of well educated friends to do a read through and they're very good. We learnt quickly the second book didn't get published till it was right. But I'm finding the take up very slow and they are good books. What is a blog tour? Currently we have no blogg just a website, should we have both?

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    1. I'm sorry for what has happened to you, but there is still time to change your mind on selling the domain.You can see all as a new beginning.
      travesti

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    2. Hi Sybil, I see authors with both blogs and websites. I only have a blog but plan to have a website developed in 2013. Blogs are simple to set up and they're free I like blogspot but wordpress is supposed to be similar to use. The neat thing about blogs is it's easy to bring together twitter, facebook, goodreads - most of the social media outlets with widgets. I am NOT technologically savvy but was able to set mine up in a couple days. If you want to take a peek its http://authnancystraight.blogspot.com/

      What is a blog tour? There are many bloggers who will, for a fee, help spread the word about your wife's book. Prices range from $25-$1000 - I personally have never spent more than $100. If you decide to do a blog tour, shop around, research other authors in the same genre and whose tours they are using. This book tour is with Supa Gurl tours, if you google her you'll find most of the people who sign up with her tend to be bloggers who like Young Adult fiction. An author who writes historical fiction would not want to use this tour group. If you don't know where to start researching, go to Goodreads, find a successful independent author in the same genre and send him/her a message asking them who they recommend. Indies are always quick to help one another. I hope that helps. If you have any questions feel free to send me a message on FB or GR. :)

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  3. "Schedule a blog tour" sounds like something you just check off on a calendar somewhere. For a lot of us beginners, we have NO idea what that means or what's involved. How do you even begin to go about putting together a blog tour? A blog post on that subject would be greatly appreciated.

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    1. It's funny you say that J ~ I have one in the works :D Thanks for your feedback- I love knowing what interests you.

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  4. I did a massive blog tour for my first book and sold...wait for it...25 copies on release day. I spent countless hours getting ready for it, had over 50 blogs on board...the pay off for me was less than satisfying. Maybe I did it wrong. Maybe my book sucked. Maybe it wasn't a genre anyone cared about.

    When the 2nd book in the series came out, I did virutally nothing on release day and got fewer sales than the first, but not by much.

    Call me stupid, but I'm trying another book tour for the final book in the trilogy. I've got a much bigger reader base now, so I'm crossing my fingers that I'll find more success the second time around. I am realistic enough, however, to have zero expectations for release day numbers. If I sell one book that day, it'll be one more than I expected. :-)

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    1. Hi Kendall - I just looked you up on Amazon, your second book is in the top 10,000 and your reviews are fabulous, you must be doing something right!! LOL! It's always a good idea to keep expectations low (I do the same thing). Something else to consider rather than sales is during the course of a blog tour, watch to see how many people add your book to their "to-be-read" pile on Goodreads. That's a great indicator of how much of a reach the tour has done as well. Happy Writing!

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  5. Nancy, book 2 is in the top 10K because book 1 is free. ;-) My first book has hundreds of TBRs on Goodreads. It's free and the folks who added it still haven't read it, so I don't put a lot of faith in TBRs (or Goodreads, for that matter, but that's a story for another day). TBR is nice, but I need my books in people's "READ" pile.

    Sorry, I'm a bit of a downer about the whole process. I've had more success than some, but I guess I'm just never satisfied. So, I'm ignoring everything and focusing on writing now. If I don't have something to publish, none of the marketing matters anyway.

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  6. Hi, Nancy & Laura. I'm relatively new at marketing as well, but so far one of the best things I've done was scheduling my own blog tour. I think it helps to schedule the stops at least a couple of days apart so there's time to build momentum and it's not over before people hear about it :-)

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  7. Congratulations Dariel!! Setting up your own tour can be VERY time consuming - I'm totally impressed!!

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  8. Thanks for the advice, Nancy!
    I'm loving (almost) every minute of setting up my social media and getting ready for a book launch. Just hoping I can pull everything together in time to stay with my self-imposed schedule.
    Still a little confused by random things in the soc. med. world, but learning quickly thanks to helpful posts like this.

    Keep up the great work, Laura!

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  9. Great advice! Very useful tips as always

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  10. Thanks for the great advice. It was really worth the read.

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  11. Very informative information, thank you!

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