Market a book: get organized

When it comes to the point at which we market a book, the story is all too familiar in the freelance author/self-publisher world. The book is written after being painstakingly revised for months, probably years. The e-book or paper version doesn’t matter, the direction and outcome, sadly, are often a well-trodden road to marketing failure. Do not go there. There is another way and the key is organization. To market a book you need to be organized and disciplined. Of course, there are no guarantees of success, but you should give yourself the best chance you can to get as far as you can but, and here’s the key part for me, at the same time you need to maintain a balance between your writing and your marketing. Can be done. Marketing your book doesn’t mean you can’t keep writing. Just get organized, write a plan, stay on track, stick to the plan and make sure you have a clear vision of the future. Above all, be patient. Most books don’t sell in large numbers right away and the marketing strategy for each book improves as other books are added to its author’s portfolio, perhaps sequels or perhaps a novel or issue is written entirely. new. One method that I have come to use, not only in my writing, is to create a structure with a clear center point, or an axis, as I like to call it. This method can be applied to absolutely any situation in life, whether on a large scale, if you are perhaps moving house, or on a smaller scale, if you are planning a birthday party, for example. For the purposes of this article, I will refer only to the use of this method when marketing a book. I hope, however, that it is obvious how it can be applied elsewhere.

First, create a stable hub, a static website (in the case of a book marketing), which will house the core of your marketing strategy and become a place where you can refer other people who express interest. at your job or whom you reach through an advertising campaign. Let this hub have clear and concise links to your:

  • Points of sale
  • social networking sites
  • Twitter feeds
  • Other ‘hubs’ for other projects
  • Videos
  • online reviews
  • online news articles
  • and so

It also shows some reviews on the center page.

Make this place, the hub, yours, whether it’s a self-hosted blog or website or one you’ve commissioned. Choose a domain name that is easy to remember, relevant to your book or to you, and one that you think will be easy to recommend to interested parties. I hope you can now see that in its simplest form, bringing all the threads of your authoring life together in one place is hugely beneficial for keeping clutter out of your mind and showcasing your work, and it’s an incredibly simple concept really.

The situation actually gets even better, as once this center is achieved, you can let it mature and gain status on the internet knowing that it will still be there tomorrow, next week, next year, or ten years from now. Since the hub is literally a storefront, it doesn’t suffer from the same flaws as social media pages like Facebook or even your blog. What I mean is that no one expects the content of the ‘hub’ to change, so it doesn’t need your constant attention, unlike your Facebook Page, Twitter or Blog which, if not updated regularly, your visitor’s perception is that perhaps you have lost interest and quickly move on. As book seekers and buyers, we are a very fickle bunch, I assure you.

Of course, a hub can be modified, but I find that once it’s established, it just sits there quietly doing its job and actually needs a minimal amount of attention from you. Imagine, as it has happened to me, bumping into a friend you haven’t seen in a long time in the supermarket. He wants to tell you about his book and wants to tell you where you can find it online. In an instant you know there’s a simple and relevant web address you can recite that will cover all your bases. It will lead to outlets on Amazon or Smashwords, for example, or to your Facebook, Pinterest or Google + page and contain some reviews on the site. Easy. You could even sell your book directly from this hub using their easily configurable PayPal buttons.

I sincerely hope this makes sense to you and is something you might consider when marketing a book. It works for me and I can assure you that before I did this my marketing strategy was chaotic and I couldn’t find time to write or follow my other interests due to my ‘brain clutter’. Give it a try. Works.