Lets go a little higher with our book marketing. These steps take a little more effort and might cost a little bit of money but they will give you a much wider exposure. The keys here build out your platform and build connections with your fans and people who can influence the market.
Register a URL for your name,
Build an author blog or website
Create your One Sheet, post on your website
Build your online media kit for promotion and interviews
Put a graphic of your book cover on your website and connect it to the book’s Amazon sales page, use an affiliate link.
Set up with an email marketing service with Aweber, Mail Chimp or similar, start building an email list of fans and buyers
Add a email sign up box on your blog or website
Create a lead magnet from your book content and use it as a thank you gift for subscribers to your list, such as a sample chapter, a video series, pdf report, series of email autoresponder lessons
Give away free pdf copies of your book for fans, reviews and press
Work on building your author platform; bring these people into your mailing list
Build your Top 20 influencers and connect with them where they hang out
Build up a network of related blogs and websites that you can connect with and then use when it comes to launch time. Relationships need time and energy to build
Bruce is the author and creator of over 35 books. To learn more tips on marketing your book please sign up and download my Book Marketing Checklist over on the right. Watch for my new course How to Market Your Book releasing Monday, October 7.
Learn the steps to marketing your new book in this new online video course from J. Bruce Jones. I am the author or creator of over 35 books and in this course I bring you everything I have learned about marketing and promoting my books.
In this online course we will cover:
General book marketing concepts, my main lessons
Ideally book marketing begins the day we start writing our books. This video covers stuff to do before you release your book
Amazon marketing, learn to use the most powerful store in the world to promote your book
Preparing for your book launch, getting your fans, platform and the market ready.
Everyone is trying to get an Amazon category best seller, Video 5 covers how.
When you get right into marketing having a media kit becomes very useful. This video walks you through what you need.
Your book is launched and on its way but the marketing doesn’t really ever stop. In Video 7 I talk about what you can do on an ongoing basis.
And finally we cover off line marketing. Not everything is the web, this video covers things you can outside of the web.
Bonus Videos
A big part of my book marketing is building a home on the web where everything can be directed. A place where your fans can learn more about you, Google can find you, your connections to Amazon and your social media. A great way to do this is build an author/book blog or website. In these two bonus video I show you how to build a book blog of your own
Bonuses
• Book Marketing Checklist. I break it down to steps for each of the different tasks.
• Book Marketing Action Plan, this document gives you an outline for 3 different levels that you can work at for marketing your book. They go from simple and free to a full on book launch.
This post starts a series on some of the things your can do market and promote your book. Marketing is hard and is one of the most common questions I get asked. Usually in the form of I just published my book, now what? In this series I will break down recommendations to three levels.
Level 1, I don't know much and I don't really want to spend a lot of time or money what can I do. Level 2 we want to go higher, you want to build a web presence, and are willing to dig a little deeper into the technical stuff. Like setting up an email list and blogging Level 3 we go to full book launch and trying for an Amazon best seller.
I have broken these levels down into both online and off line.
Level 1. The minimum things I can do to promote my book
Online (Focus on initial exposure)
• Fill out your Amazon Author Central Account
• Link your book to your Author Central Page
• Use the Amazon sales page social media links to post about your book
• Take advantage of what Kindle and CreateSpace.com offers for programs
• Set up your social media accounts, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, Linkedin, Instagram, Slideshare, SnapChat, Twitter, etc.
• Announce your book on your social media accounts
• Update all bios on your social media sites with your current book information; include links to Amazon for your book if possible
• Ask for Amazon reviews in your posts
• Write and send out a press release on several of the free or paid PR sites
• Add your book title and link to your email signature line
Be sure to sign up for my new Book Marketing Checklist. Over on the right. Next post will deal with some of the Off Line possibilities for book marketing.
Reader Question: Hi Bruce, I just discovered your How to create a children's book with PowerPoint and was blown away at the simplicity of this process. I noticed that the Kindle books do not display any ISBN numbers. Do .mobi NOT need or have an ISBN? I also noticed that your print books DO. Just trying to make sense of it.
Also, is the Print version of your book also produced by the .mobi or some other file format?
I would love to try something like this with a simple project to see how well I could produce a book as well.
I appreciate your public videos. They are so helpful. Please advise @ ISBN nums. Thanks.
Answer: Hi Joyce thank you for watching my videos and for the questions. ISBN numbers are used for tracking book sales. So all physical books, paperback and hardcover, have them. Kindle books aren't tracked by the big tracking agency and are not required to have them. You can add them but Amazon doesn't need them. Physical books are also inventoried so the ISBN numbers are used for that. If you are publishing your book through CreateSpace you can use the free numbers that they will give your your can purchase them yourself and use that one. They cost $125 apiece.
Kindle book are created from html files or once it is processed mobi files. Mobi files and Kindle are really like a simple web page. No ISBN required.
Pretty much all of my print books are published through CreateSpace.com which is the print-on-demand side of Amazon.com. For book production I generally use Adobe InDesign or Illustrator. You can also use MS Word or Apple Pages or even PowerPoint. You might be able to use Scrivener if you can set up a page size at the size needed of your book. Really anything that can produce a higher res pdf file. CreateSpace/Amazon can handle books from 5"x8" up to 8.5" x 11". I will often create a Kindle version of my print books using the Kindle Kid Creator program from the source pdf. If the book is all text then I will format it from MS Word, just like everyone else does.
I received an excellent question the other day on how to publish a picture book.
Publishing Question:
"First allow me to thank you for doing a video on publishing a kindle book in powerpoint, very well done and great help to me. I wish to publish a hard copy book just like the ones you show at the first part of your video...large full colour, and high quality, I am in the process of putting together a book of antique illustrations which I have amassed in my personal collection, I wondered if you could tell me more about how you got the finished books done, (I'm not interested in Kindle versions)....thank you in advance for your kindness in viewing my request....Bryan"
Answer:
Bryan, thank you very much for your questions. So there are several ways to go with printing physical books. The range from pretty straight forward to really high quality. The prices go from pretty simple to pretty expensive.
Entry Level Book Printing with Great Exposure, Selling on Amazon
CreateSpace/Amazon, CreateSpace is the print on demand side of Amazon. This is primarily the site and company I use for most of my books. They only do paperback and up to 8.5 x 11 in size. But lots of sizes inbetween. Black and White or Color, always color cover. I love working with this site. They are a division of Amazon and all of their books sell on Amazon. Amazon should be part of your publishing mix. They take two pdf files, the interior and the cover, process them and sell your book on Amazon. This is the big gorilla in the room. Excellent company to work with. If you are good with a paperback book then CreateSpace is the way to go and how can you beat selling your book on Amazon, it is all seamless. The quality is excellent but not National Geographic quality. They also have excellent prices if you want copies for yourself for say selling like at a conference or event.
Learn more at http://www.CreateSpace.com
High and Higher Quality Book Printing, But Also Higher Price
If you want to go up in quality along with a hard cover or hard cover with wrap, there are two main companies, Lulu.com and Blurb.com. Both of these companies print high quality photo and image books with Blurb being probably the best. You can produce a really nice, high quality book with Blurb. Both of these companies also have relationships with Amazon for selling along with sales options from their sites. The also have a variety of binding options, especially Lulu.com with spiral, perfect, saddle, cover wraps and more.
My issue with Blurb is that the books are expensive to print, the quality is outstanding, but expensive at around $1 per page. Tough to make much money from these sites. Blub does have some pretty good software for building books on line or you can download and drop a plug in into InDesign. It works great, I just finished a book using it.
Learn more at: http://www.blurb.com http://www.lulu.com http://www.BookBaby.com
I have used all of these companies, except for BookBaby, and have been very happy with all of them. There are others but depending how much you are doing and how much you don't want to be a publishing company these are the main ones to look at. Some questions that you will need to answer also is are you staying just on line, or also looking at bookstores. Are you selling your book from a stage or your website.
The Bookstore Route for Selling Books
If you are going to the book store market along with Amazon then I would also take a look at IngramSpark.com https://www.ingramspark.com/ IngramSpark is a print on demand printer tied into the book distribution world.
I also recommend that when you have finished your book and have sent it off to be published to take the pdf file and run it through Kindle Kid Creator and make a kindle book. It takes maybe 10 minutes to make a Kindle ready book file from your pdf. Just gives you another platform
How I Make my Books
Along with where to publish is the decision of how you are going to make your book. Most of my books are made in Adobe Indesign or Adobe Illustrator, but you can also use several other programs like Apple Pages or MS Word. At its simplest, physical books are usually produced using one of the Adobe products. Using them to layout out your book, you create two hi res pdf files, one for the interior and one for the cover. These are then uploaded to one of the print-on-demand sites like CreateSpace and they move the final book over to Amazon.com for selling. It is pretty amazing. If you have images the big key is to be sure their resolution is 300 dpi. I generally use one of the two Adobe products to design and layout my books. I go into all of the details in my 7 Steps to Publishing Your Book online video course.
As part of mycourseI produced a video for Module 3 on Where to Publish Your Book, which covers this same topic. I thought I would include it here.
If you aren't publishing but just wanted to make photo books of your illustrations then I might look at PhotoBookGirl.com for some recommendations. Also look at the templates in iPhoto on the Mac, they are excellent and the quality is pretty good.
The beauty of print-on-demand publishing is that there is no inventory and no cost. No garage full of books. All of these sites are free, they take a percentage when someone buys. After your book is done there is no further expense. When someone buys your book Amazon or one of the other companies prints and ships the book to the customer. You do nothing. Your job is make books and do the marketing. It is an amazing process.
Be sure to download my free Book Marketing Checklist over on the right side. 14 pages of steps and tips for promoting your book.
The basic advice is start your marketing the day your start writing your book. I know that sounds like way to much work but you can start slow and gradually build out an online web and off line presence as you begin the book. You may not even know you are writing your book but it is important to start thinking in this direction. Below are some steps to get started on how to market your book, and most of these are free.
• Work on building your author platform
Begin building an author website or blog
Begin building your email list of interested fans
Register an author URL for your website, NameNameAuthor.com will work if you can’t get your name
Set up your social media sites, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube and any others that you think your fans will be at
• Research bloggers and people who have influence in your market and connect with these people using social media, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, their YouTube Channel, Pinterest, etc.
• Subscribe to the influencers blogs, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin groups and email lists
• Start commenting and engaging with them on their blogs and social media sites. Try to get on these people’s radar, start building a relationship. This will become much more important when we come to launching your book.
• Build an Open Facebook group around your topic, you can also do a Fan page
• Build social media locations for you or your book, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Linkedin, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube. Pick a couple to get started.
• Connect now for the future with local bookstores, coffee shops, and other outlets where you can sell your books. Depending on what your topic is there are many non-traditional places to sell also.
• Build a list of local media, TV, radio, and print that you can connect with. Connect with their social media sites, start to get on their radar.
• As you get close to publishing your book pull together your Book Media Kit. Write your author bio and book descriptions, collect cover images, bio images, videos, everything we will use to launch your book with.
• Start building out your author/book website with all of this content. Have it ready to go for when you publish your book, collect email names.
• You should be putting up regular posts related to the book as you work on the writing. These can be story lines, sample sections, describing the writing and publishing process, images and related content. These posts will be used to build interest, Google search traffic, and for building up your mailing list. Be sure to follow the Kindle Select rules on duplicate content if you are going to use this Amazon program.
J. Bruce Jones is the author and creator of over 35 books. Bruce also consults and teaches authors how to publish their books. If you want to learn more about how to market your book check out my new Book Marketing Checklist which is available for free. Head over to the right to download.
