It's my pleasure to feature this article written by Elizabeth Garcia, Staff Blogger at The Word Slayers.
As an indie author, the thrill of creating your first book to share with the world can be exciting - but it can also be overwhelming, since the marketing of your book is entirely your responsibility. There are so many different types of marketing strategies, authors often don’t know where to begin. However, giving your book the best chance to succeed should be every author's main goal, and here are some helpful tips to do just that:
1. Establish the Best-Selling Outlets
Before starting your marketing plan, you must consider how you’d like to sell your book. You can do this many different ways, so keep in mind whatever plans you make are adjustable; for example, you can sell, place, and ship orders yourself, have someone else take care of order fulfillment for you, or link to an online seller.
2. Create A Marketing Timeline
To organize all the madness, creating a timeline will help you see what must be done in the long run. Setting goals within your timeline will help you measure the progress of your marketing efforts; you should also include various tools and tactics to help you achieve those goals.
As you create your goals, you should evaluate how best to measure them. For example, ask yourself: is the book designed to make money? Did you write it to inspire people? Or do you plan to use it to build your professional credibility? From there, you can focus on your target audience and how best to reach them.
3. Create an Online Author Persona
To build an audience ready to dive in and support your book, you should create an online author persona. So, build an author website, featuring different pages about yourself as the author, the book, how to contact you, and a daily blog. This will help distinguish you from other authors in the same genre of storytelling as you, and it’ll help connect readers to you and get them excited for your current book, as well as your future works.
4. Devise Your Social Media Strategy
Once you've created your online author persona by building your own website, you should start devising your social media strategy. Pick at least two social media platforms you believe can best help you reach your target audience, and from there you can share posts, memes, tweets, articles, and other forms of communications that share the same theme and message as your book.
Keep in mind at least 20% of your social media posts should be about your book and the journey involved in creating it, and the other 80% should be content your audience finds attractive that doesn’t directly promote your book.
5. Create A Social Media Kit
A social media kit is essential when you’re creating your social media strategy. This kit can include information about your book, a professional author picture, book publicity copy, and common questions answered. This will help you stay organized, and you can send the kit to reviewers or other social media accounts that may want to feature you.
6. Build an Email List
After you start building an audience on social media, begin crafting an email list. On your social media platforms, create a fun giveaway or contest, then collect interested people's emails so your audience can stay updated with the latest news about your upcoming books, collaborations, and events you may be having.
7. Connect with Other Creatives
To help promote yourself - and others - on social media, you can connect with other creatives, for example, bookstagrammers (book Instagrammers). You can send them a free copy of your book, and they can post photos of it on their Instagram profiles, as well as write reviews for other book lovers to read. Another creative partnership you can form is with podcasters. To help you do so, research podcasts that review books or are interested in similar themes as the ones you cover in your book.
8. Connect with Artists
Connecting with artists is also a great way to work on concepts, or even cover art for your book. But remember never to ask an artist to create something for free; you need to pay for the work you commission. Plus, the both of you can promote each other's work. You can also connect with "makers," people who create book-themed items, like candles.
9. Research Book Reviewers
Researching book reviewers is another helpful and inexpensive way to promote your book. There are many different outlets you can connect with, such as bloggers, companies, and influencers who can review your book, and you should follow this same strategy even after your book is released.
10. Choose the Right Book Launch
As your release date approaches, you should consider doing either a hard or soft launch for your book. A hard launch is a full release to the public, while a soft launch is a release restricted to a particular audience in advance of a hard launch.
The benefit of a hard launch is easier marketing; you can create a more targeted, precise plan to focus your marketing efforts better, due to the compact nature of a hard launch marketing campaign. With this kind of launch, you’re trying to make a loud splash in contrast to slow growth, and with that, you’ll build more publicity, which will lead to faster revenue gains.
One of the main benefits of a soft launch is that it helps you get early feedback; for that reason, many indie authors use soft launches when they don't have an established client base. It’s also more cost-effective, because you can spread out your development over a longer period of time. A soft launch can also help you maintain interest longer by allowing you to release features slowly over time, before your book is widely available. It's also an excellent way to build a solid fan base.
11. Create A Post-Release Checklist
After you release your book, create a post-release checklist with all the goals you listed before marketing it. This is an excellent way to figure out which tools and tactics worked to reach your goals, and which ones didn't, so when you decide to release your next book, you can save time, money, and energy by using the tools and tactics that actually worked.
Image Attribution: www.janefriedman.com
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