Question from our Facebook Group, How to Market Your Book:
Since my books sales have stalled (total of 5 for 3 books in April) do you think that I can now put up chapters on my sites to start and create interest. So far I just put them on Amazon and set out some tweets and Facebook post. So I guess my real question is first of all is it allowed and secondly has anyone found this to work???
My Answer:
I am a big fan of getting your book content out to the world. My recommendation is to blog your book bit by bit. Around 350-500 words in each posts. I have been using this method for quite a while to promote and sell my books. I do it with image books and my non fiction books. By doing this you are releasing quality, relevant content. Google brings interested readers and then you wrap ads for your books around the content and send the readers to Amazon with direct links. Selling books is like selling anything, you need a lot of viewers. I believe you are working in the 1% world, similar to direct mail. You need 99-199 people to get one person to buy. You need traffic.
One question that people ask is how does Google treat duplicate content, Kindle and your website. Google likes to find the best version of your content and an active blog with subject focused content will do that. The question also comes up as to why would someone buy your book when they can read it right there. Well the answer is most won't be buying anyways, you are looking for that one who does. It is also kind of a pain to read an entire book blog posts by blog posts. I always want to reward the visitor for making the effort of coming to your website. Solve the immediate question, and then move the reader to Amazon to read more.
The other thing you are doing is that you are curating content. In between your book content you will mix other relevant content. At the end of each post you put a small paragraph that says this content is an excerpt from your book, Book Title, by author, etc. with a live link to Amazon. You also put a thumbnail of the book on the side linked to Amazon. Google brings readers and off they go to Amazon. Instead of creating all kinds of new content you can use your current content to promote your book. In reality you might have 30-100 blog posts worth of content just sitting there.
The other thing that happens is that you can look at the Google Analytic and see what people like. You are doing market research on your book. You now have a very good idea of what people like in your book and don't like. Maybe you discover your book is focused on the wrong thing, or maybe the title is wrong. Start at page one and blog it out, Pick good pithy titles, maybe add a little more, put the title and links paragraph at the bottom and see what happens. If you book isn't really moving you have nothing to loose and test your content and see what happens. Once you post, then Tweet, Facebook post, Google +, the post. Make a video of the post, and put it up on YouTube. Get it out to the world. People aren't going to book stores and most of us aren't in book stores with our self-published book, you have to let the world know what you have.
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| Stats page from my Google Blogger Website |
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