Owen Jones
How to Begin Marketing Your Book Online
So, you have written your book.
That is a great feeling. I remember it well. My first book took me seven years to finish.
There it is on your virtual desktop, and then you transfer copies to CreateSpace, Kindle, Lulu, Smashwords and wherever else you might try to sell from. You tell your family and friends and are pleased when you see the first sales register in your account.
A week later sales have dried up and you tell yourself that another wave of sales will take place when your current readers tell their friends.
A week, and then two and then twelve pass and nothing happens.
That was my experience anyway. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know anyone who had written a book and I knew how hard it was, so I expected my book to be lapped up, but nothing. So I looked up a few publishers and sent them what they asked for.
Again I sat back and waited and again, it was in vain.
By now, I had wasted a year, so it was time to grab the bull by the horns.
The first thing to realise, when you begin marketing your book online, is that you have to have something to market. You may think that that is your book, and eventually, you are correct, but really you need to put that book on a pedestal, and shine a light on that – like they do in shops and musea.
So, what could be your book’s pedestal? Well, for online, sales that has to be either a web site or a web page.
The next job is to make your presentation as perfect as possible and then promote the Hell out of that page on Twitter, Facebook and the Blogosphere. That sounds easy, doesn’t it?
If it does, I am going to burst your bubble again – no-one has ever heard of you or your web site and becoming even remotely ‘well-known’ is very, very difficult. You might think of promoting your Amazon page instead, but let’s be honest. We all know that Amazon is only about selling, and I for one am not happy if I click on a link for more info and get presented with a buy button.
No, that has to be stage three. Stage one in beginning marketing your book online is to alert your Twitter or Facebook reader to the fact that your book exists and the second step is to warm the potential customer up with further information before eventually presenting him or her with the buy button on Amazon’s own web site.
So, if starting out with a new site is difficult when you begin marketing your book online and advertising your book’s page on Amazon is no good, what can you do?
My solution is to hire a page on a busy, focused web site like this one. If you want to sell books or other works of art, you can be almost guaranteed hundreds of ‘lookers’ because well over a thousand pages are viewed every day and the website’s title ensures that these visitors are focused on the Arts, and specifically on books.
I can offer you a sales page with it’s own unique URL that you can advertise, for $4.99 a month. For that you can put on the page what you like and edit it when you like and all sales go directly into whichever account you specify. Furthermore, each acceptable image will be shown at random throughout the website, including the front or home page and there is no contract, when you stop paying, your ad dies until you reactivate it.
It is the simplest way to begin marketing your book online that I know.
Look here for more info:
http://meganthemisconception.com/bookshopartshop/place-ad/
by for now,
PS: this is one of my ads:
Marketing For Small Businesses
