When you self-publish on Amazon (or other publishing platforms), you’re not just the author, you’re also the publisher. Which means you get to try and do the work of any good business team of book editors, graphic designers and marketers. This post is about the marketing side, so we’ll be sticking with methods on a way to get your creation viewed, loved and downloaded by the correct ereaders.
Aside from the book editing (best to have at least one more fresh set of eyes on it), the book title (very important to selling your book) and also the book cover (people do judge a book by its cover), there’s variety of pre-marketing steps you would want to take.
This article will include the first 3 steps, find the rest by clicking the links below:
How to Market your Amazon Ebook before you Launch it (Steps 4-7)
How to Market your Amazon Ebook before you Launch it (Steps 8-10)
(Links will be active once the articles are live on BooksShelf.com)
1. Creating Your Personal Blog
Hopefully, you have already got a web site and you write blog articles associated with your subject material regularly. If you don’t, start one now.
A website gives you a ‘home’ online. These days, creating your own website is absolutely very easy. There’s many places you'll be able to get free sites from (just Google it - our personal favorites would have to be Wordpress and Wix), and most make it very easy to upload design templates and pictures, so you'll be able create a site that’s reflective of your book and resonates with your audience.
Make sure your site features a blog. A blog gives you an opportunity to showcase your writing, engage with future readers, and drive traffic to your ebook's landing page. And besides, you’re a writer, and a blog gives you a fairly cool outlet to jot down and write often.
Be sure to enable comments and include social share buttons on all of your blog posts to encourage reader engagement.
2. Start Marketing with Pre-launch Landing Pages
We know, that you’ve probably read all about the value of building up an email list - even before you start publishing. Every article or blog post about ebook publishing has this as one of the steps to success. And it’s all true.
Collecting emails is the most effective and overall best way to keep in touch with your future readers. It’s also a great way to start generating interest in your ebook with any pre-launch promotions.
The ways to achieve this would be through email-gated landing pages.
There is a large amount of pre-launch campaigns you could run on your website landing pages. For example, you can generate leads and hype about your upcoming book.
Hosting email-gated sweepstakes to give away a free copy of your ebook
Engage your audience by asking for their opinion about your book characters, if it’s fiction
Connecting with your audience by asking for subject matter advice if your book is non-fiction
Pre-launch promotions can also help you to start generating that all-important buzz, before you even publish. The more hype you generate leading up to your launch, the better chance of success your product will have.
Keep in mind, that Amazon has lists of top 100 bestselling books. If you can generate a lot of interest leading up to book's publish date just might make it onto a genre-specific list.
Aside from the dream of being on a bestselling book list, getting into a top 10 spot helps sell more books. People looking for a new read are more likely to buy a popular choice on a bestseller list and not dig through the categories.
3. Use Facebook Ads to Target Your Audience
You’re are probably already marketing your author profile on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads. You will definitely be needing the networking possibilities that those sites offer, in order to connect with your niche readership.
You might be getting quite a bit of engagement on your blog through your website’s social functions and you might be getting lots of click-throughs on your social sites too.
You want more site visitors? That’s where Facebook advertising comes in. Now, we could only recommend that you spend money on FB Ads if you’re serious about selling your ebook. If writing that book was just a pastime and you really just enjoyed the process, don’t spend a lot of money in advertising it. The average ad on Facebook costs about $0.50/click, so we can recommend to do the math before you launch your campaign - is it really worth it.
Of course, advertising on Facebook can be an effective promotion method for your pre-launch campaigns, you could get more Likes for your Page and hype your ebook's launch. It really depends on how serious you are about your writing.
This article will include the first 3 steps, find the rest by clicking the links below:
How to Market your Amazon Ebook before you Launch it (Steps 4-7)
How to Market your Amazon Ebook before you Launch it (Steps 8-10)
(Links will be active once the articles are live on BooksShelf.com)