20 Lessons I Learned on Book Marketing from Publishing Over 40 Books, Part 2

Over the years of creating and publishing over 40 different books I have learned quite a lot. Below is a list of some of the main lessons. So lets get started with some general concepts and ideas about book marketing. In future posts I will be digging deeper into many of these

1. Your book marketing begins the day you start writing your book. We often don’t even know we are starting a book project, but we need to start building out our author platform as soon as you can. Your author platform are all the ways that your readers and fans are connected to you. We will be talking more about this shortly.
2. Amazon doesn’t do your online marketing for you. You have to market your book.
3. It is important to build some kind of central web home for your book, this can be a website or a blog. Facebook and Twitter are not homes for your book. You want to have a place online that you can blog from, host content, collect email names, have your bio and your book description and info, and have connections so readers can buy.
4. Build a web site around your own content and sponsor your site with your own books.
5. Build your author platform!
6. Build out your marketing wheel. Have a central home where all your social media and other properties can point to. From this home have a clear path for buying your book.
7. Give Away to Get. Give away sample chapters, maybe even full books, related content, and information. Deliver however your reader wants. Fans need to touch and feel your content.
8. Web Traffic Matters, only about 1% of visitors will buy, but you need to bring in the other 99% to get those one. Be out there, be public and bring in readers.
9. Build a mixture of online and off-line marketing.
10. Book marketing is a continual process, do something everyday.
11. Publishing on Amazon is important, start here first then branch out.
12. Amazon book reviews are important, ask your readers to add a book review to your book.
13. Have the best cover you can afford,
14. Edit, Copy Edit and Proof Read, pay an editor to clean up your book. It is one of the most important things you can do.
15. Good healthy book descriptions are important, use all the space they give you. Books are found by words in Google and Amazon search but only if the words are there to be found.
16. Your Table of Contents are your book’s benefits, don’t do Chapter 1, Chapter 2, be descriptive in your list of chapters.
17. Try not to end up with a garage full of books, use print-on-demand and e-books. Keep your costs to a minimum. You can always print later.
18. If you think you are going to be selling your book in stores be sure to buy your own ISBN number, also look at IngramSpark.com instead of CreateSpace.
19. Create an event around the release of your book. Build some buzz about it using all of the tools available.
20. You don’t need to advertise in traditional media to have a successful book

 See Part 1 of this Post: Book Marketing Concepts for Self-Publishers

This list is an excerpt from my latest book Book Marketing Checklist for Self-Publishing, Complete Book Launch Action Plan Included! by J. Bruce Jones Available at Amazon.com