Whether you’re using Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) or IngramSpark, making intelligent marketing decisions can drastically improve your book sales.
Are you a self-published author who is struggling to find readers for your work? Do you plan on self-publishing and want to know how to sell more books?
As writers, you spend countless hours developing a story, honing your craft, and editing your work. This makes it all the more frustrating when it’s being ignored by readers.
If you’re self-publishing, you need to be strategic about finding and retaining readers. If you’re not smart about marketing your book, you’ll end up decreasing your price or giving your book away for free just to get it out there. Avoid these struggles!
If you don’t make some intelligent marketing moves, you’re not likely to get the reader numbers you expect. The publishing world is crowded. So how can you stand out? It’s actually easier than you’d think.
The best way to find readers is to accumulate a genuine and targeted audience. With designated places your readers can find you.
If you have a group of people invested in your work, that following can be your ticket to more reads, more writing opportunities, and more sales. So how do you get there? Remember, people want to read your book. Give them a reason to take a chance on you! In another post, we’ll talk about how to start a blog. Here, we’re just going to convince you that it’s the absolute best way to sell more books.
How Not to Promote Your Book
I’m part of the #WritingCommunity on Twitter and I’m relatively active there. So I started noticing a trend.
People were posting these #shamelessselfpromotion tweets and the #writerslift tweets. And I kept seeing the same people promoting themselves and their work. On seemingly every post, there were the same people asking for people to check out their books. So I got curious. Does this actually work? I decided to find out.
There’s a few authors who promote their self-published books through Twitter A LOT. It’s the same few people who pop up on any tweet where someone is doing a promotion or asking for book recommendations.
They’re always the same exact tweet. So clearly a copy and paste scenario. And after, what I’m sure was (and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here) hundreds of posts, I thought, these writers must have it figured out. It must be worth it if this person is going to post over and over.
So I checked out their link. What do you think I found?
All three mass-promotors. Not a single one had more than 9 reviews on Amazon. Now, maybe people are buying the book and not reviewing. But if you’re going to be a self-published author, I doubt that’s what you’re looking for.
I don’t relay these stories to shame these people. They’re doing their best. However, they’re missing the big idea. Not EVERYONE wants a memoir about drug addiction. Not EVERYONE wants a middle grade fantasy novel.
There are so many talented writers out there. But you can get yourself in the door first if you know what you’re doing. See, some writers believe we just write a book and throw it out our front door and voila! Fame and fortune picks it up and comes knocking.
Writers often forget that writing is a business. That’s why big book publishers have entire devisions filled with marketers. You’re competing against them.
There’s a reason Nike advertisements pop up during sporting events. They’ve targeted their market! You need to do the same thing. You’re not just a writer, you’re the CEO of your brand.
You need to know and engage with your target market. Only some writers have figured this out. If you can create a following, you can create an army of readers.
Imagine a Sea of Readers Waiting for Your Next Book
What if every book you self-published immediately got promoted to hundreds of people who read your genre? Not only that, they read YOUR writing.
Without a blog, you’re missing out on an opportunity to stay relevant in your reader’s mind. If you can build a blog that people follow consistently, they’ll be more likely to buy a book when you release one. However, if you release one book per year, you might get lost in the shuffle when it comes time for someone to actually make a purchase.
However, the best thing you can do is to put yourself in a position to write the best post possible. To do this, you need a blogging process. See here where we lay out our blogging process. You can also check out our FREE blogging guide below.
How to Sell More Books
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Blog
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Quality Content
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Go to Your Readers
1. Blog
I can’t stress this enough. You need to start some type of blog. There are free options through WordPress.org. I personally use Squarespace because I like how easy it is to use. I pay for it but it also gives me a domain for free and some other options that I like.
A good blog will cost you about $10-15 per month. However, if you use it well, you’ll make that back in book sales!
Your blog will bring in genre-specific traffic. And that’s what you want. If you choose the right blog niche (something related to your genre) then you’re bringing the right kind of traffic to your book. Marketers use techniques like this all the time. Writers need to start! And if you start now, you’ll be ahead of the game!
If you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t know how to blog.” It’s okay! We have you covered. Here’s our article on how to outline a blog post.
Once you have a blog, you should open a free (up to 500 subscribers) ConvertKit account. This account will allow you to capture reader email addresses. This is a marketing tactic most writers aren’t using! Once you have a reader’s contact information, you can email them when a new book comes out. Imagine if you have access to hundreds of people who are interested in your genre (because they signed up to follow your genre-specific blog)!
2. Quality Content
This gets it’s own section because, of course you want to provide quality content wherever you’re writing. So you’ll want to ensure you’re putting your best foot forward on your blog. However, there’s another place I suggest writing.
Every self-published author needs to be writing on Medium.com. I’ve been writing on Medium for less than 2 months and already have well over 250 followers. Every time I write something, my followers get a notification and can read my article. In each article, I can link to my website or to my subscriber page where people can sign up to hear more from me.
If you publish on Medium, you’re tapping into countless readers! Plus, you can sign up for Medium’s Paid Partnership Program to earn money each month based on how many people read your posts. It’s a win-win!
If this seems overwhelming, I get it. It was overwhelming for me at first, too. That’s why I created a 5 day Medium Challenge with a 30 day support group to set you up for success! However, there’s a limited number of spots so I can give the attention needed to explode your follower numbers. So click the link if you want to sign up for the waitlist for my Free Medium 5 Day Challenge and 30 day support group. Be sure to sign up as soon as possible!
3. Go to Your Readers
Self-published writers need to think carefully about where their audience is. You don’t want to scatter-shot your message all over. You’re better off being targeted with your promotion.
Think carefully about where your readers are. Don’t promote yourself on Facebook if you write Y.A. That’s not where your audience is. You need to be on Tik-Tok. That’s where the young adult market can be found.
Avoid spamming the whole internet. People see through tactics like that. You’re wasting your time. Like I said earlier, if you’re promoting your sci/fi-fantasy book on every post, you might find one reader. Instead, do some research and find a Facebook group that discusses sci/fi fantasy movies. Join the group and provide value to others. Don’t start posting about your book. Comment on other’s ideas thoughtfully. Then, when it’s appropriate (and not too frequently), promote your work.
Another option is to go out and find a blogger who writes about books in your genre. Ask if you can do a guest post based on one of the 50 blog topics below.
This will focus your message to the kind of people looking for your book. There’s a reason it’s called a target market. Don’t miss.
Conclusion
I can’t imagine anything worse than self-publishing your book only to find that no one is buying it or reading it. You’re going to spend countless hours writing and editing your book. But if you don’t promote the right way, your book will never reach an audience.
If you’re struggling to sell books. Or if you’re thinking of self-publishing but you don’t know how many books you’ll be able to sell, you need to start by building a following. It’s not as hard as it sounds!
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