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Online Retailers —
Amazon and Barnes &
Noble primarily sell print books, but if you're eBook goes to
print, then you need to take advantage of a couple of things.
§ Amazon —
Create an Amazon
List and add books that you've enjoyed or that are in the same
subgenre as your book. You can also include your book on the
list as well. Take advantage of friending people on Amazon.
Although the draw might not be huge, it is one more way to
inform and/or introduce people to your books. You do this
through
Amazon Connect. Also, post to
your Amazon Blog whenever you have news. It is a way for some
readers to connect to you.
§ Barnes
& Noble —
Barnes & Noble
gives you the ability to best quality bookmarks I’ve found are
at
Earthly Charms.
Su does and outstanding job of working with me to get exactly
what I want in my bookmarks. I always do the 4-color front and
B&W back.
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Bookmarks —
A
nice bookmark is extremely useful in promoting your book. Order
some and hand them out whenever you get the chance.
§ Ordering —
The best quality bookmarks I’ve
found are at
Earthly
Charms. Su does and outstanding job of working with me to
get exactly what I want in my bookmarks. I always do the 4-color
front and B&W back.
§ Design —
On the front, make sure you’ve got
a picture of the cover, your website URL, the ISBN, a tag line
if you’re using one and the publisher name. These aren’t set in
stone, just some guidelines to follow. On the back get your
name, review quotes, your URL, the book name, ISBN, publisher’s
name, and where it’s available. If you don’t have any review
quotes, use your blurb for the book. It might have to be
rewritten to condense to a small area on the back of the
bookmark.
§ Quantity —
this is going to depend on a
couple of things. Are you planning on doing a mailing? Are you
planning on doing in book signings? What will you do with the
bookmarks? For my first book, I over bought bookmarks. I ordered
around a 1000 bookmarks. They’re still cluttering up my closet.
Generally, 500 bookmarks for a first-time eBook is considered
sufficient. Bump that number up by about 250 each time you put
out a new book. The more books you have out the more people
you’ll need to hand out your bookmarks too. You’ll have places
you can send your bookmarks for promotion opportunities. If you
know your book will eventually see print as is the way with a
lot of ePubs now, then you should consider whether or not you’re
going to heavily promote the book down the road in the print
arena.
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Website
—
If
you don’t have a website, get one. A website is one of the first
lines of contact readers have with an author, especially an ePublished author. Make sure it’s crisp and clean. Update
content regularly. For more info, see my article on
why you neawebsite
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Contests —
People will tell you to run a contest and save all the emails
you mine for future notifications of your upcoming books.
There’s just one problem with that thought process. There are a
lot of people who visit websites for contests, simply because
they want to win. Once the contest is over, if you start
emailing those individuals information about future books, they
usually unsubscribe from your mailings or tell you to stop
bugging them.
There are people known as sweepers who belong to bulletin boards
where contests are listed by venue. People who belong to these
boards run over to your site and enter. Even if you ask
questions, the people on the bulletin boards share the answers.
So there’s no easy way to keep these people from entering your
contest. These are NOT people you want to target, but they’re
part of the mix. So the only way to avoid them for the most part
is to limit your notification of contests.
I don’t advertise my contests anywhere except on a couple of
romance review sites and in mailings I do to people on my Yahoo
group. I’ve never understood why some authors promote their
contests on author only loops. Yes authors do read, but we’re
not as likely to buy as someone who isn’t an author due to time
constraints. Besides, it’s important to attract people who are
truly interested in my books. I keep my contest link prominent
on the home page of my website, but that means someone has to
make the effort to visit my site regularly to see when I’m
hosting a contests. Since changing my strategy with contests,
I’ve pretty much eliminated sweepers from the mix. On top of
that I get to reward people who actually buy my books.
It’s important to do contests, but don’t go all out. The ROI
just isn’t there.
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Book Trailers
— Book
Trailers (a trademark of Circle Seven Productions) are the
hottest thing going now for promoting a book. Just like a movie
trailer, they provide the viewer with a glimpse into the book.
It's an enticement to encourage the sale of print and eBook
alike. You can make the trailers in simple video software that
usually comes with your computer. I use Swish Max (a rather
expensive software), but can find cheaper ones. The
video should run no longer than two minutes to ensure full
viewing. Check out one of the book trailers on any of my book
pages for an example.
Warning, if you're on dial up, you may not want to open these as
they might take some time to load.
Keep in mind that any music you use has to be bought. There are
royalty-free sites where you can find decent music for
reasonable cost. Royalty-free photos are available on the
Internet as well. Once your trailer is done, load it up to
YouTube and any other place that will allow you to upload a
video such as MySpace.
σ Newsletter for readers
—
Develop a newsletter for your website and for a yahoo
group.
σ Blogs and MySpace
— the hottest tools going these days are blogging and MySpace.
Both are huge time drains, but they’re viewed as essential in
getting the word out on your eBook because your target audience
is the reader who cruises the Internet.
§ Blog Options —
Blogger.com and WordPress
are two popular blog softwares. Blogger has been the most
popular, but WordPress has advantages as well. If you don’t know
how to code a site, then you can use free templates Blogger
offers or pay someone to build you a template.
§ MySpace —
Like Blogger, MySpace is very popular. Create an account and
visit different profiles on MySpace. Find a template you like,
and figure out where the individual got it from. There are
usually links advertising free templates.
σ Yahoo group —
open up a Yahoo Announcements only
group. Anytime you get an email from someone send them an
invite. This way you know that the people who are on your
announcement list are actual readers. People you can target for
spreading word of your book to other people they know.
Word-of-mouth selling is still the most effective means of
selling a book.
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Author Quotes —
Do you know a published author in the same genre you
write in? Inquire as to whether this author would be willing to
provide a quote for your book. This can help to build a
readership as it tells readers that if Jane Author loves your
book, then it’s likely they will too.
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Review
Submissions
— Reviews are nice, but don’t generate sales. What they do
generate is name recognition, and that’s what you want. You want
people to see your name over and over again until they are
compelled to buy your book. One free way to do this is to
provide your book to a review site for them to read and post a
review. Check with your editor/publisher first as to whether
they have any sites they send to automatically. Below is a list
of possible review sites to submit your book for review.
A Romance Review News
Fallen Angel Reviews
Cataromance
Just Erotic Romance Reviews
Love Romances
Road to Romance
Romance at Heart
Romance Junkies
Romance Reviews Today
Sensual Romance Reviews
The Best Reviews
The Romance Studio
A Little Romance
Heartstrings Reviews
Historical Romance Writers -Romance Designs
Romance Reader at Heart
Romantic Times BOOKreviews
The Romance Reader's Connection
These are just a few options you have for
promoting an eBook. Remember that your target audience is
different from a print book. What might work for print, won’t
necessarily work for eBooks. The eBook reader is someone who’s
fairly tech savvy. They’re going to know where to look for
reviews and information about your book. So get out there and
promote, and good luck!
