|
kingwand
|
Sep 7 2015, 10:48 PM
Post #1
|
|
Administrator
- Posts:
- 565
- Group:
- Admins
- Member
- #1
- Joined:
- Aug 31, 2015
|
Creating a buzz for your novel should start immediately once you've uploaded it. In order to have successful sales, others have to know about your book and where they can find it. When you're using Kindle for your novel, you are the promotion manager and the one person who will control whether your book is read or not. People can't buy your book if they don't know about it. You want to take advantage of all of the tools you can to help your book become a success. Take Advantage of the KDP Select Free Days One of those tools is Amazon's KDP (or Kindle Direct Publishing) Select. This program helps you, as a new author, get your book in front of the people who didn't know about it. But it can also help established authors get a book in front of new fans. When you place your book with KDP, you'll have to agree that your book will only be available through Kindle Direct Publishing. If anyone wants your book, they'll have to go to Amazon to get it. At first glance, selling your book using only this program might seem restrictive, but there's a reason why it's a good idea to use this program. Any author that uses this tool gains Amazon's promotional strength. Amazon flexes some pretty big muscle in the book publishing world - muscle that's big enough to put your book on the site next to very successful authors like Stephen King, for example. Amazon will promote your book in ways that you, as an independent author can't compete with - at least not without a marketing budget of several thousand dollars. You can be boosted as a free book for 5 of your 90-day term! Do you know how many people use Kindle? Millions. That means your book goes before millions of eager readers. Sometimes people browse through Kindle not really knowing what they want to read. If you're part of the program, your book is advertised and gets in front of those people who are looking for something new to read. Not only do you get Amazon's promotional power to a wide audience, but your book can also become part of the Kindle Lending Library. This can be a source of income for you because even though the book won't be purchased through the lending agreement, whenever it is borrowed, you still earn money. Another way that this promotional tool benefits independent authors is through free book give-away days. You might wonder how you can make money if you're giving your book away for free. Here's how: sometimes people want to get a book but they're just stretched so tight financially, they can't afford it. Or they don't want to take a chance on an author they don't know. By giving away the book for free for a limited time, your book gets read by more people. Then what happens is that when these people love your book, they tell a friend about it or leave a positive review. That friend, who missed the free days, goes online and purchases your book. So you gain free word of mouth exposure among an audience you might not ordinarily reach. Using Amazon's Select free days can do a lot for your book. It can create interest, spark reviews, spread the word and bring in paying customers. KDP has launched the careers of many first time authors and one of those authors could be you. Amazon also helps create a buzz for you by giving you the ability to build an Author Page on their site and they'll even help walk you through it. But what if you try KDP and discover it's not for you? Using KDP, you're not tied to the program for the long term. Each time you join the program, it runs for just 3 months. After the three months is up, you can decide whether or not you want to renew it or take your eBook and publish it elsewhere, such as SmashWords or Nook. Take Advantage of Free Promotional Sites There are other places that can help you promote your book and some of these sites are allowed even if you're using Amazon's KDP tool. Some of these places are free or low-cost and some do cost a little more. Why should you promote your book on additional sites? Because what you gain in spreading the word about your book turns into income. You can look at Addicted to eBooks at http://addictedtoebooks.com/submission to see if your book qualifies under their submission policy. At http://bargainebookhunter.com/feature-your-book/ , if your book is going to be listed on Amazon's KDP, then you can get the word out here to gain even more exposure for your novel. Digital Books Today at http://digitalbooktoday.com/join-our-team/ offers a promotional platform for your Kindle book and Good Kindles at http://www.goodkindles.net/p/why-should ... -here.html allows you to place your book on the site and you can also get your book listed in their newsletter. Your book can garner exposure at Free Book Dude - though some restrictions apply. You can check those out at http://www.freebookdude.com/p/list-your-free-book.html. Another site that can help promote your book is the site at eReader Perks. You can access that site here http://www.freebookdude.com/p/list-your-free-book.html - and don't forget to make sure your book is listed on overseas sites such as the one at http://freekindlefiction.blogspot.co.uk. Those are just a few of the many sites you'll find that will gladly list your book for you. You want to make sure that you're keeping up with all of the places where your book is listed. Keep all of your promotional sites listed in a notebook or in a folder on your computer. You'll want to access this list when you have other books to promote. Take Advantage of Social Media to Promoted Your Kindle Novel Social media has exploded - and with it, so has the promotional opportunities it offers. Everywhere you interact with people online is a potential advertising venture for you. But you need to be proactive and stay on top of your social media output. Have a day set aside just for promoting your book on all of your chosen sites. You probably already know that you should have an author fan page on Facebook. If you don't, then you need to set one up. You can do that by starting here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. You would choose the one that's labeled 'Artist, Band or Public Figure' and when you do that, hit the drop down arrow and go all the way down to where 'writer' is listed. When you set up your page, you can add the URL to your author website as well as links to your social media sites. You can list your writing, any special deals you have - and engage with your audience. This is also where you can announce your Kindle give away if you're using Amazon's KDP tool. Keep active on Twitter - even if all you do is hop on a few times a day and put a thought or two out there or talk about your book. It doesn't take much time - and you only have to use 140 characters. You want to have a presence in the blogosphere as well. Blogs don't exist on an island. Rather, they're tightly knit groups of online communities that benefit from each other. Being part of a blog group offers networking opportunities in the area of both friendship and business. You can set up a blog tour simply by asking those you know in your writing circles to host you on their blog for a specified time. When you do a blog tour, what you're doing is visiting a number of blogs usually throughout a couple of weeks or a month. Some blogs will host an author for a day event and some will host an author for a week. Think of it as a virtual book tour - but a lot easier than traveling to a strange city and setting up a table. You want to do a blog tour because it creates exposure. Exposure creates buyers. Buyers tell other people who then become buyers. There are several tips that can help you have a successful blog tour to promote your Kindle book. First, choose blogs that have an active community. These are blogs that have a steady readership. You can tell if a blog has a steady readership by the amount of comments that viewers leave. A blog with no comments doesn't have a lot of traffic. Second, give away swag. You want to give away a free copy of your book, but you can also give away a pen, some chocolate - whatever you think of that fits your budget. Third, tell everyone where you'll be. Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your social media sites, tell your Yahoo groups and ask them to stop by and show you some blog love by leaving a comment. Fourth, interact with the people who leave a comment. Even if all you say is, "Thanks for stopping by!" Finally, the content on your blog tour is important. What some blog hosts will do is create an interview and you simply send them the answered questions that they'll post. But you can also do a guest post where you talk about whatever you'd like that usually relates to writing. Whatever format gets used, make sure the content is interesting. Make it stand out to the people that stop by the blog. Not sure you can put together a blog tour on your own? There are sites such as http://www.blogtour.org that will help you get connected. Your online groups are another way that you want to promote your Kindle book. What many groups do, especially some Yahoo writing groups, is have promotion days. On those days, you're allowed to promote your book to the entire group. Some of these groups have thousands of members - so that's good exposure. But don't wait until your Kindle is out to join a group just so you can promote it. That doesn't go over so well. Instead, join a group and form relationships before your Kindle is released. Interact with your groups and join in the conversations. You can find a list of groups for self-published authors here: http://www.goodreads.com/group/show_tag ... ed-authors Take Advantage of Review Sites to Gain Exposure for Your Book Getting a good review on your Kindle book is something that you can use to promote your work. You can add a review to your author website, to your Amazon page and more. Having your book reviewed by family and friends won't carry much weight, because both sources love you and are going to be biased. There are plenty of sites that will review your book, but you want to go ahead and get your best-polished Kindle work to them now. One of the sites that does reviews is http://www.theindieview.com/indie-reviewers - and if you scroll toward the bottom of the page, you can see the reviewers listed and what they're looking to review. You can also have your book reviewed at http://www.blueinkreview.com/about. Think that some of the big book reviewers won't review independently published novels? Think again. Publisher's Weekly reviews self-published novels and here's the link where you can find more information about that: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/diy/index.html. Take Advantage of Other Promotional Tools One of the most often overlooked ways to promote your book is one that you use numerous times a day almost every day of the week. That's your personal email account. In your personal email account, you can add a signature line that gives not only a link to your book, but can include one or two- sentence blurbs as well. It's a smart, free way to advertise. Those banner ads that you see on fiction book club sites are paid advertising that can help you promote your book. Some of these ads can be expensive, but worth the cost in the exposure that you'll gain for your book. You can find one site here at http://www.blueinkreview.com/about. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the 'advertise' link for more information. They'll even help you with the ad design if you need them to. Another book site you can run banner ads on is http://freshfiction.com/banners.php. This site has over a quarter of a million subscribers and you can see examples of banner ad space that you can rent on their site.
|