You’ve been edited and proofread. You have your interior layout and cover prepared. Your designer has a PDF file ready for a printer someplace (KDP through Amazon, IngramSpark print on demand, even Draft2Digital) and you have an ebook-ready file in EPUB formats. It feels like you’re publishing.
Not yet.
Your most crucial job is to get out the word that your book is available. You want readers to discover your work. Most writers don’t like promoting themselves, but you must be the exception. You’re the CEO of your book, as they like to tell us all. No matter when the book will be available for sale, the time to start promoting is right now. Actually about 4-6 months ago, if this is your publishing date. Yes, you can get your book up for pre-sale at Amazon before you can deliver it. This gives you a running start on rankings on Amazon. But just offering the book early does little to help it sell, unless you’re bringing the readers to the product somehow.
Draft2Digital, a sales advice company and a distribution provider, held a two-hour point by point class that gives a full overview of a book marketing plan. Draft2Digital offers the chart below from the webinar below to show all four pieces of building a sales market base for your book. The only jargon on this page is CTA: Call To Action. “Buy this book now and have a better life through yoga.” That’s a CTA.
It’s easy to see a marketing webinar like that and get overwhelmed with all that you can do. But you worked hard on your book and it deserves to be seen and used in the world, so it can help others.
Getting people you never met to read your book, review it, and love life a little more, is not something that just happens. You need to make these things happen.
Make a good website for the book (it can be a very good landing page on your existing site)
You build and use a mailing list
You write a terrific book blurb for Amazon and choose the right metadata categories
You can advertise on Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook, and other places, too. If you have a great mystery, thriller, science fiction epic, young adult novel, then ads really help, since there are so many books.
Then there’s public speaking, in libraries and at book clubs and in bookstores. You can buy a space on a table in the front of some stores to sell your book for awhile. Bookstores are advertising hubs now.
I didn’t know all of this in 2011, when I was six months away from releasing Viral Times. I wrote a great book and didn’t follow through with marketing. To be fair, lots of today’s marketing tools of 2018 didn’t exist in 2011. It’s an investment of time, and pro assistance and expertise to get a book noticed, read, and most of all, reviewed. The book deserves the attention. Only by doing your marketing can you say you’re author-published in full.
