Marketing starts with you. What is your unique contribution? What value do you bring to your audience?
Who is your audience? What do they want and need? What do they value? Where do they spend their time?
Figure out how much time and money you have to spend. However you prioritize your time, you want your efforts to be of high quality if not of high quantity. The two most-used ways to do that are through a website and social media, which we discuss below.
Author Website
A key aspect of your marketing will be online. First, you’ll want to build your author website. When people search for your name or book, your website will be one of the first results to appear. Your website is your personal space on the Web. Having your own professional author website legitimizes you in the eyes of your readers. When they see your well-designed website, they’ll gain a strong first impression of you.
Your author website is your central hub on the Internet. From there you can link up to your social media, your sales pages, and your blog. You can upload media, start a mailing list, write about you and your book, and share your contact information. You create a space for fans and admirers to find you.
Social Media
Amazon, the self-described “Earth’s biggest bookstore,” lives up to its name. You want to increase your visibility and credibility by having an Amazon Author account. With Inword Publishers, your fully developed Amazon Author Page comes with an author photo, your author bio, up to two videos, a link to your website, and a blog RSS feed, as well as additional reviews.
Goodreads, which has over 30 million users, is a social media site just for book lovers. Your presence there provides yet another wonderful avenue for readers to learn about you and your book. It’s a great place to connect with like-minded and interested readers and bibliophiles.
A Facebook author page gives you a great resource to connect with your readers. You can share quotes from your book, interact with readers, answer their questions, create events, discuss your book, advertise sales, and more. With over 1.7 billion active Facebook users, having a Facebook author page can be a great way to promote yourself.
Twitter has over 300 million active users. Twitter is a quick way to send short messages to keep your readers updated on your latest projects, activities, and thoughts. Twitter has strong book communities. Use Twitter to engage with fans, find interested readers, connect with like-minded people, and more.
See Inword Publishers’ Book Marketing Services.