7 author marketing tips for books that appeal to women
There are as many ways to sell a book as there are people who write them. The one thing that is common among all book selling approaches is that you match the right book with the right buyer.
If your book is written typically for a female reader it makes sense to direct your book selling efforts to the places that women tend to congregate. The following seven tips are perfect for locating new readers for books written for women.
1. Women’s magazines. As a writer, try to get an article published in a women’s magazine. While it may be difficult to get accepted in the beginning by the top magazines in this field (Better Homes & Gardens, Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day), it is still well worth your time to get published in smaller outlets that reach out to women. Work your way up by starting with magazines that have smaller circulations and you can increase your odds of breaking into the field. Once you have a few successes, it is an easier step up to try for the top ones.
2. Blogs for Women. The best thing about tapping into women’s blogs is that many, such as 5minutesformom.com , are open to guest posting. One way to find out is to search online for the name of the blog and add “+ guest post” in the search query. This will tell you in a second if the blog accepts guest posts. Most blogs that do accept guest posting will have guidelines to follow that make it easy to create a post that will be a perfect fit.
3. Women’s Clubs. Once your book is published, it’s a great idea to get a few speaking engagements for spreading the word about your book. Start by connecting with women’s groups in your local area including garden clubs, church groups, women’s book clubs, volunteer organizations or women’s community groups listed by meetup.com.
4. Shops where women shop. This one makes so much sense but many authors do not think about this simple strategy. Where are the places that women in your book target group go to buy things? Whether it’s a store for food, clothing, hair, or pedicure nail art, try to start up a conversation with the owner if it’s a local place and ask if they would be open to selling your book (with commission perhaps) in their outlet. Offer a free book for the owner and leave a free readers copy on a table with coupon and information for purchasing inside.
5. Women’s Holidays: Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day and Christmas are all great book gifting holidays. You can go the quick and easy route by spending a few advertising dollars or come up with a fun and informative three-to-five minute radio talk geared around the holiday and get on the radio. Submitting an article to your local newspaper that focuses on unique gifts for the woman in your life is another way to get great media coverage around holiday time.
6. Women’s Conventions. These are wonderful places to make book selling connections. If you are lucky enough to be a speaker, you will be able to connect to potential fans, but even as an attendee, you can meet other women and make a friend or two that could lead to book marketing opportunities. Women love helping other women. Find ways to help out and you will have a golden opportunity to slip something about your book into the course of conversation. One source to find women’s conventions is at eventsinamerica.com. There are 56 women networking events listed for 2014.
7. Women Authors. Don’t forget your comrades in writing! Put aside your fears about competition and instead think of ways to team up with fellow authors to create a bigger splash. Get together and brainstorm ideas and possibilities. Listen to what other authors have done and what works and what doesn’t in your area. Find out where other authors have successfully held book events and what they have done to sell books. Be generous in sharing your own successes and failures as it will generate reciprocal sharing.
Once you start thinking in terms of connecting with your female readers, more ideas will come to mind. When they do, write them down and be open to trying them out. If no one else is doing it, it may be the perfect opportunity for you. You’ll never know unless you try.
5 book marketing lies that stops authors from selling more books
Fiction authors are good at lying. Little lies and big lies that haven’t a speck of truth in them. Authors have no qualms filling their books with lies. They sugar coat their heroes with such virtues of talent, smarts and good looks that ordinary mortals step off the sidewalk to let them pass. Make way for superman and wonder woman! They describe their villains as malicious, scurvy folks that can be killed off with no more remorse than slapping a buzzing mosquito.
Imagination is what authors call it, of course. No one thinks of an author as a liar. That is much too crass and negative a word to describe such literary flights of fancy. Creative flow and artistic license is a nicer, digestible term. And people buy those lies; they love them. Who can stop with just one? They slap down money on the counter and walk off with the latest novel and can’t wait to escape into the lies and deception of the author’s latest creative endeavor.
So author lies are not all that bad in a novel or short story. But when authors hold onto lies as truth or cling to fears (false assumptions appearing real) as fact, serious problems develop. A lie, whether told to oneself or told by another, can be very damaging if the lie is believed and changes how one acts, believes and feels. The remedy for a lie is to expose it for the falsehood that it is.
Here are five lies about book marketing that many authors believe. These lies hold authors back from selling more books. When these lies are accepted as truth, they cripple every action the author wants to take to put their book on the best seller list. These lies about book marketing keep authors from making more money, getting more fans and, worse of all, stop them from writing more books.The good news is that once an author recognizes the lies that are stopping them from selling more books they can move boldly forward.
1. If my book is really good, I do not have to market it.
Many authors believe that good books should simply be discovered. Word of mouth should spread the news of the book like wildfire once a single person reads it. If my book were really, really good, I wouldn’t have to do anything at all to promote it. In fact, promoting my book demeans it and demeans me.
The truth is that 99.9 percent of every book is helped with promotion. Good book promotion builds the trust and credibility of an author and creates more fans. The more popular the book, the more popular the author becomes. The more books that sell, the more publicity dollars major book publishers put behind it.
2. Authors who promote their books have more talent, time and money than I do. They don’t have families to support, bills to pay or a full time job that takes up most of their day and saps most of their energy. Book marketing is too hard and takes too much money.
The truth is that book promotion can be as simple as telling a friend about your book or mentioning it on a Facebook post. You can spend as little as five to ten minutes a day promoting your book and get results over time. The most important thing is that you do something at least several times a week.
And yes, you should be prepared to spend some money to promote your book, but it doesn’t have to be a lot. You don’t have to put an ad in The New York Times or hire a publicity firm, yet spending a few dollars to create a nice website, sending a few postcards and buying a tank full of gas to go to a book event shouldn’t be overlooked.
3. Authors who are constantly telling others about their books are egomaniacs. They are only out to promote themselves. They are not nice, ordinary folks and they wish nothing more than to toot their own horn on every street corner.
The truth is that all kinds of people become authors — introverts and extroverts. A few are pushy, in-your-face types but many authors are more comfortable hidden away in a room with a typewriter. I rather imagine authors who are introverts far outweigh those who enjoy crowds and cameras.
4. My book is not good enough to compete with other books in the same genre. Maybe this is true. Possibly your book would be better if you did more research. A few more rewrites and editorial changes might be good. Perhaps your book would benefit from tighter narrative, shorter descriptions and more gripping sentences.
But the truth is there is a time for every fledgling to leave its nest. Baby birds don’t develop wing muscles until they start flying. Get your book out there and see what response you get from actual readers. If you publish your book digitally, you can easily do that fifteenth rewrite while it is selling.
5. If my book is over a year old, it is too late to do anything to market it. No one wants a year old book. The only way I can sell my book is to write a new one and just chalk this one up to experience.
The final truth is that people buy books because they enjoy them and want to read what the author has to share. Maybe your book is not a classic, but it doesn’t mean that it won’t be enjoyed by new readers ten or even fifteen years after it is originally published. Popular authors such as John Grisham get new readers of their old books every year. William Shakespeare, by the way, is still selling well several centuries later.
5 great places to give a book reading
Today when most people think of book marketing the first thing that comes to mind is social media — building a mailing list and getting likes on Facebook and tweets on Twitter. But surprisingly, the old fashioned methods of connecting face to face with live book events are as important as ever.
In fact, the connections made in person are stronger in many cases and can make a deeper, lasting impression. Shaking hands with a person, making eye contact and sharing a few minutes of conversation will create a more memorable bond than online connecting.
Definitely, it takes a bit more effort, and for the introverts among us, it may seem like a stretch out of the comfort zone. However, in many ways, meeting people in person can be a lot of fun and provide valuable feedback and encouragement that is limited when sharing 140 characters on Twitter or a three sentence photo comment on Facebook.
While it can take up to six months to build significant online connections, you can give a presentation to a small group for one hour and create relationships that will be remembered for years. There is a reason that politicians running for office spend long hours shaking hands with as many people as possible. One handshake is probably worth a hundred dollars in advertising spent online!
Most of us can recall connecting with someone in a one-time only, face to face encounter that may have lasted less than a minute, but we can recall every second of that minute years later.
Even casual personal meetings are more likely to be shared with friends both online and offline. Think about it. Many of us would naturally share at the dinner table about talking with a stranger in line at the airline counter but not even think about relating a Twitter connection or Facebook conversation.
Book events such as a simple reading do not have to be complicated, take a lot of preparation time or follow-up. And here is an important factor to consider; even if your book reading is not well attended the advertising of the event can be invaluable. For instance, if you offer to do a book reading at your local coffee shop at 3:00 on a Wednesday afternoon, you might have only half a dozen people stay around to listen. But most likely the coffee shop will advertise your event on their calendar, write it up on their chalk board and even allow you to leave flyers about the reading at the checkout.
If you arrange to do a reading at a hospital, school or public library you may get free radio advertising for the event simply by sending a public announcement news release to local radio stations. Offering to give a book reading at a local church will probably mean you get exposure in their church bulletin and perhaps even an announcement during the service.
Plus, every book event you create makes an instant newsworthy bit to share online. Get a friend to take a picture of you while you are doing the reading and share that on your blog, Facebook and Google Plus.
To give you a few ideas to get started, here are five great places to give a book reading. Not every book will lend itself to every venue but you should be able to find at least a few to get you started. Once you cover the places in your immediate neighborhood, you can venture further afield. Use the exposure of one event to encourage other places to allow you to give a book reading. Create a scrapbook of places you have given a reading and share that with those in charge of event planning.
1. Local Churches. While you can certainly target the whole congregation, you might want to narrow it to a specific group such as women’s club, men’s club or youth group. Many church groups are always on the lookout for something new to spice up an ordinary meeting.
2. Retirement Communities. Great place to find an audience for 15 to 30 minutes. Simply call the residence and ask to speak with the activity director. Most of them have a monthly Calendar of Events and are always scrambling to find a new twist to the regular monthly activities.
3. Schools. When starting out you may not be able to present to the whole school but even presenting to a single class creates a fun event. If your book has a historical background, you may tie it into a history class as well as a creative writing class. Business books will connect with classes in marketing, advertising and networking. From grade school to college, there should be places for you to make a relevant tie-in.
4. Bookstores. While it is getting harder and harder to find a mortar and brick bookstore, they are still out there and one of the things that makes customers shop at them instead of online is just such events as book readings!
5. Local fairs and community events. Drop in at your local Visitors Center and check out what is going on. While you may not want to pay for your own booth at an event, perhaps you can find someone who would love the extra exposure of having an author present a reading during the day.
What authors need to know before starting a crowd funding campaign
First-time authors as well as seasoned ones have successfully raised money through crowd funding. Campaigns have been funded that were as simple as $150 to pay for an inexpensive cover design and as complicated as over $49,000 to publish a coffee table book with glossy, colored pages. The main crowd funding sites used are Indiegogo, Kickstarter and Pubslush , although there are countless others.
Whether the amount is small or large though, crowd funding for a book has some hidden benefits that might be equally or perhaps even more important than raising money to pay for book printing and marketing costs. Consider these:
Benefit No. 1: Connecting with new readers.
Benefit No. 2: Getting your book known on a wider platform.
Book marketing is about finding readers who will be attracted to your book enough to read it. Once you have shared the book with family and friends you must find new readers who will be willing to take a chance with your book. One brilliant way to find these new sources is with a crowd funding project.
Crowd funding provides a platform to rally friends and supporters to your cause and encourage them to spread your message. Create a 1-2 minute video introduction, offer a few perks and special benefits and now you have a vehicle for friends to share with friends.
Indiegogo in a recent study showed that only 3-5 percent of people responded from a typical mailing list. If your fan list is quite small that might mean very few will buy your book. But if you can persuade “those” few to tell their friends and their friends to tell their friends you can create a momentum.
Unfortunately, creating a successful funding program is not as simple and easy as it may look. A typical crowd funding campaign lasts between 30–60 days but before you hit the “Go” button many important things have to be in place. Most successful campaigns require five to six months of building a solid networking base of social media contacts and creating publicity materials for the crowd funding project.
Plan for Success
Here is an important fact that you must take into account. The first 25 percent of your goal starts with your own fan base. This means letting your friends, family and fans know what you are doing and building up excitement about your projects weeks before it actually starts. The magic doesn’t just happen. You have to build it, breathe into it and support it as you would in lighting a new fire. Unless you start with some dry paper and small kindling the big wood will never catch. This is why it is so important that you make your inner circle aware of your project from the beginning stages.
Campaigns that get their first donations on day one have the best chance of reaching their goals. A recent Indiegogo study showed that 85 percent of successful campaigns all received at least one donation on their first day. To ensure this happens, important ground work must be done. Friends and supporters must know about your project, be excited to commit with a donation and believe in it enough to share with their own circle of friends.
Once a project shows momentum it will rise on the charts and begin to be noticed. The faster and hotter you can get that to happen the probability for greater exposure will increase. Remember you only have 30-60 days to get this to happen. So it is of the utmost importance that you have people who will commit in the beginning.
It’s Up to You
Many crowd funding projects fail simply because the ground work has not been done. The percentage for actual funding goals reached is less than 50%. In many cases, this is because people only find out about the project in its last days. That’s too late! The biggest mistake is to think that simply creating a crowd funding project will attract people to donate. The reality is that there are thousands of crowd funding projects going on every day. How will yours get noticed unless you get the word out? It’s up to you.
Besides family, friends and fans, you should try to connect with key influencers who might have interest in your project. For a book, this might be other authors who have their own significant fan base, or it might be local and national radio stations that will interview you during the span of the campaign. It might mean working with your local newspaper for a story and asking church and organization groups in your area to give you a promotional plug during the campaign. All these things must be set up before the campaign begins and then rolled out carefully day by day through the length of the campaign.
Create a Video
You absolutely must have an introductory video. It should be short, no longer than two or three minutes, outline your project and provide reasons for people to support your book project. Make sure it connects on a personal level, with a touch of friendliness, earnestness and passion. Make it as professional as you can, but most of all, remember if you do not show enthusiasm for your project, no one else will! So let your own conviction shine forth with an explanation of why you wrote your book, what your hopes for it are and why it will benefit the reader.
Find the Perks!
Finally, you must have a series of gifts called “perks.” These are a graduated list of gifts that donors will receive according to the amount given. For instance, a personal thank-you email might be the gift for $5, a pre-release ebook for $10, and the opportunity to name a character in your book for a donation of $250. The important thing to remember here is to match the gift with the targeted donor. What would they like to receive? What would encourage them to give more to receive more? Be creative!
A successful crowd funding campaign can start your book on its way to bestseller success. Not only will you get the necessary funding to publish your book, but the friends and support you build along the way will be invaluable for every book you create.
Should you hire a ghostwriter?
A huge percentage of the American population wants to write a book. The numbers are staggering, something like 88 percent or higher. And with today’s technology, it is easier for most of these people to actually write a book and publish it themselves.
But here is the situation. Not everyone who wants to write a book should, at least not if they plan to sell it in bookstores. Writing for one’s family is a very different case than writing a book so that it competes with bestselling books on Amazon or sells to the general public.
Even though you may have a great story to tell, you may not have the technique to write it in a way that captivates the reader and draws them deeply into the drama you want to share. Recognizing that fact does not mean you “shouldn’t” write your own story, but it might be helpful to look at a few other ways to get your book published.
The easiest way is to work with a ghostwriter. The story remains entirely yours. It’s your name that will be on the cover and you have complete approval of your story, but the actual writing and plot structure is done by a professional writer. Major celebrities, business people and just plain folks with an interesting story will hire writers to help them in the actual writing process.
Working with a ghostwriter does not mean the “ghost” creates the story. In the case of a business book or nonfiction book, the writer collects the information from the author through series of interviews, recordings and gathered information such as letters, articles, photos and various material that is relevant to the book.
Fiction books written by a ghostwriter can be entirely written from scratch or the author can supply the story idea, character development and plot outline and have the ghostwriter take it from there. Some authors are no more than a brand name such as the famous Nancy Drew mystery books that were written by five different ghostwriters.
If getting your message out in a timely and professional manner is important then it may make more sense to hire a ghostwriter rather than struggle through years of learning and perfecting the writer’s craft. In some cases, people who hire ghostwriters are perfectly capable of writing a great book themselves, but they don’t have the time to do it.
Many different factors come into play when hiring a ghostwriter. Time and expertise are the big ones but so are such things as health, age, business and family commitments. It may make more sense to get a book done quickly when the market is hot for the topic than waiting until all the stars line up to create a writing schedule.
Writers who have English as a second language in most cases will not write as well as those who have English as their first language. But finding a great writer involves much more than looking at what country they come from and what language they speak. Professional writers should have invested as much time and expertise in their field as educators, doctors, lawyers, and scientists.
Finding a professional writer that writes in the genre that you want your book written is another important factor to consider. A business ghostwriter may write a bestseller on marketing but flounder completely when writing young adult fiction. Medical writers may trip over writing a book on social media. Take the process of hiring a ghost writer as seriously as if you were hiring a financial adviser. Both can have critical outcomes if the selection process is not carefully considered.
Once the decision is made to hire a ghostwriter then it’s time to get serious about how much you are willing to commit financially to the project. While you can go to places like Elance.com and Guru.com and hire a writer for as little as a penny a word, you will get a book that is written at a penny a word. Try putting it on the market and you will be doing your business more harm than good.
Expect to pay a professional ghostwriter as much as $100 to $250 a page and up. If you cannot afford that amount, consider working with the ghostwriter to split royalties, name recognition or make payments. If your book sells even as few as ten thousand copies you will easily make back every penny you put into it. If it sells 100 books tops then even a $5000 investment is wasted money.
Of course, there is more to creating a bestseller than a well-written book. Book packaging, marketing, promotion and timing all play decisive factors. But those elements only come into play after the book is solid enough to stand on its own. Even if you can afford to pay for a full page spread in the New York Times (some estimates are $150,000) and sell a few books simply from advertising, once it’s discovered that the book doesn’t deliver, the fallout will be worse than not writing a book at all.
Conclusion: If you want to “be” a writer more than simply get an important message out, then ghostwriting should not be considered. On the other hand, if the message is more important than how it’s delivered, hiring a ghostwriter may be your best solution.
Why authors should use Google Hangouts on Air
Google Hangouts on Air is a type of video call that operates like your own private television broadcast talk show. You can have up to ten people participating on the call with as many as 5,000 live viewers submitting questions via text chat. Once the show is completed an automatic YouTube video is published.
For authors, this can be a great way to build up weekly or monthly content as well as deepen connections with your target audience. A recent article on Forbes reported that the reach of video “over white papers, case studies, even live demos with reps” was significantly higher in how audiences choose to absorb new content.
Getting Started
To get started doing your own Google hangout on air, you will need to pick a topic that offers valuable content to your target audience. Offer a tutorial on a subject such as photography, business, cooking or create an “interview with an expert series.”
Cookbooks are great for hangouts on air. Simply present a program on how to make a recipe from your book. Set up a webcam in your kitchen and create a show!
Business books offer great content for a weekly video broadcast. You can offer your own material or bring in guests to reach out to a broader audience. As your audience grows, you can bring in bigger and better experts which will significantly impact how your audience views your own expertise!
If your work is fiction you can talk about your book’s characters, background, theme or setting. Talk about the research that went into creating your book, the struggles to get characters to behave and the joy of finding answers to problems that arose during the book’s creation. You can invite other authors that relate to your audience to be guests on your show. Readers love discovering new authors and the benefit to you is that every author you showcase will happily share being on your program to their own audience.
With a hangout on air, you can offer to do a unique presentation to a book group or study club. Instead of showing up in-person which means travel, time and expense, they can either watch you as a group or from their individual locations. Once you find a book study group, invite one or two members to be guests on your show. They won’t have to drive to your own private studio to be on-camera with you but can simply tune in as with a video call on their laptop.
The big benefit of Google Hangouts on Air is that even if a group you present to has only a few “live” viewers, once your program is published on YouTube it will continue to reach new people in your target market every day.
Once you have created a few programs, you can create a special video page on your website which will enrich the content you offer. Bundle two or three videos together as a “free giveaway” for new subscribers. Include a link in your email signature to one of your best videos .
Every video you create can be tagged with related keywords to your book audience. Once the video is published, broaden its reach by sharing it on your favorite social media sites. Posting a video on YouTube is an instant win, as well as tagging it for Google Plus and Twitter. If you have a Pinterest site, you can create a unique board with your videos.
Google Hangouts has an upside and a downside, and they are one in the same. That is this…
Google hangouts is pretty new.
Downside: People are not yet familiar with how they work, how to create them and even how to participate with them. The learning curve is a bit steep but there are lots of free tutorials, mentors, tutors, classes and master groups that can help you get going.
Upside: If you want to get into the latest social media blitz before it tips – this is it! Google handles over 80% of all search engine traffic. Hangouts on Air is Google’s new brain child and they are putting all their guns and warships into winning this latest social media front. If you are a new author with little traffic and few followers, Google Hangouts On Air might be your winning ticket to pushing your book to the top.
Adding personal style to dialogue
When it comes to dialogue and writing in your character’s voice, how do you add your own twist? How can you add your personality to the material without forcing the dialogue into an unnatural progression? How can you add style, interest, and your own pizazz to someone else’s words? Writing dialogue can be tricky, especially if you’re writing in an unfamiliar accent. Proofreading your work can help identify sneaky accent errors and help you add your own style back into the dialogue. There are several easy ways to place your touch to each accent, character, or place that you write about.
1. Imagine yourself as the character: If you sit down to write a scene between two characters, imagine what you would be thinking, feeling, talking about if you were them. Everyone thinks about scenarios differently and this process could be crucial in you letting your own ideas and voice shine. Taking on the mindset of your character in addition to your own views, opinions, likes, and dislikes will set you apart from other writers naturally. You’ll be able to create organic, flowing dialogue that sounds like your character with a touch of you. One of the biggest struggles I have as a writer is putting myself in my character’s shoes to write their dialogue. But once I manage to think about how I would feel in the situation and then think about the character’s similarities and differences to my own ideas, it becomes much clearer how and what I need to write; plus, I’ve added my own unique touch in the process.
2. Use slang and words that you commonly use in your character’s dialogue: The use of slang in dialogue brings your characters to live, shows setting, and shows their personality; but it can also show your own. If you’re writing a story about a southern gentleman who wants to run away to Brazil with a girl he met at Mardi Gras, think about what slang or broken words they would use to communicate. Think about how you would try to communicate in English to someone who mostly speaks Portuguese with small bits of English. Think about what Portuguese slang words are common that the female character would teach her southern mate and vice versa. Think about your own slang and where you picked it up. Would the southern gentleman or the Brazilian girl use any? Could you add some of your own in there and show your background? Yes, of course. You want to put your own jazz in the story. You can use your slang intermixed with theirs and create your own versions of multifaceted characters. Adding pieces of yourself into your characters through their dialogue is one of the best ways to create a unique story that’s all your own style.
3. Write in your own words: One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given was, “No matter what you’re writing about, write from your own mind in your own words.” When you write dialogue, try not to get bogged down in worrying over every little thing your character would do. Use your own mind; what would you do? How would you react? What would you say next? How would you solve the problem? Putting the story back in your own mind will easily give your story style because it’s all coming from you. You can pretend to be one of your characters or pretend that you’re an older Canadian woman with two cats moving to Belgium and don’t know the language; however, if you think about your reactions to the situation, your dialogue will not only be easier to write but shine with your own personal style and voice.
Remember that when you’re writing dialogue it’s always important to proofread your work. It’s extremely easy to make an error when writing in an accent or in your character’s voice. I like to use online resources for this because they’re fast, more accurate than Microsoft Word a lot of the time, and identify my most common errors and teach me how to avoid them. Grammarly is one of the most comprehensive proofreading tools I’ve used. It’s great for quick proofreading, grammar and punctuation checks, or learning more about avoiding errors. It also helps improve the style of my dialogue by suggesting more pungent words and adapting to the voice I’m writing in to find more specific errors. Proofreading your dialogue is essential to having a completely clean story. Even if you’re writing with a lot of accent marks, strange punctuation, or slang, cleaning it up to make it grammatically correct is important. When it comes to writing dialogue, using your own voice is the most important piece to adding your style to the character’s speech. Nobody can say it like you can.
Bio
Nikolas discovered his love for the written word in Elementary School, where he started spending his afternoons sprawled across the living room floor devouring one Marc Brown childrens’ novel after the other and writing short stories about daring pirate adventures. After acquiring some experience in various marketing, business development, and hiring roles at internet startups in a few different countries, he decided to re-unite his professional life with his childhood passions by joining Grammarly’s marketing team in San Francisco. He has the pleasure of being tasked with talking to writers, bloggers, teachers, and others about how they use Grammarly’s online proofreading application to improve their writing. His free time is spent biking, travelling, and reading.
How to create a fun quiz for your book
No matter what your book is about you can easily come up with ten questions that relate to your book. Authors of fiction can create questions about the setting, characters and events in the book. Ask questions about small town living or inner city hazards for your hero or heroine. Whether your book is about finding a partner in a romance or solving a mystery, create a quiz about the situation.
Authors of non-fiction can create questions around a topic that would build interest in readers. For instance, if you were writing a book about public speaking you could ask the following questions.
How do your overcome your fear of speaking in front of groups?
Where do you find places to speak?
How do you promote your book in small group settings?
The great thing about creating a fun quiz for your book is that it stops people for a few seconds and gets them thinking. If you post the quiz online, then offer a prize for answering all of the questions correctly or just for participating. Since your motivation is to build audience participation, it is better to make it easy for contestants to win.
The more interesting and fun you make your quiz, then the greater its chance of going viral. If you have problems coming up with questions, ask a friend to help you brainstorm. Sometimes authors get so absorbed in creating an unforgettable book that they forget the simple, basic questions that readers might have.
So what do you do once your book quiz is created and you have no visitors to your own blog? Take it on the road.
1. Offer it as a guest post to a site that gets more traffic than yours.
2. Share it in a Facebook comment to a post about a topic relevant to your book.
3. Share it on Goodreads. There is a section just for quizzes.
4. Tweet it on Twitter.
5. Pin it on Pinterest.
6. Google+ it.
7. Create an infographic.
8. Put it in your email signature
9. Create an adwords campaign around it
10. Promote it with a Facebook ad
11. Send an email to a friend and ask them to leave a comment
12. Post it on your Amazon author profile
13. Make a mini video about it and post it on YouTube
14. Send it as part of a news release to newspaper, radio, print or online media
15. Use the questions for advance publicity for book club speaking events
Take a look at your book and come up with a few simple questions about it. Ten questions is ideal but you can do as few as 3 good questions in a quiz. Then put it out for participation.
Improve your writing by adding dialogue
Including dialogue in your writing, even for nonfiction pieces, is a powerful way to move your story or article forward and keep the reader’s interest.
The appeal of including conversation is that it brings the level of your writing down to a human level. While you can always be obtuse and convoluted in your conversations, it is probably not your natural way of speaking. When you talk with someone, you leave out 90% of the wild, descriptive phrases and get to the point.
Compare “Hey, Mom, I’m going to the store!” to the writer’s penchant for superfluous information.
Most dialogue consists of short sentences sandwiched in between longer ones. So, adding dialogue not only makes your article more active and stimulated but also gives it variety. That’s a good thing. Plus, dialogue can add a measure of warmth, passion and even humor.
“Want to give it a try?”
That one sentence has only six words, but it gets the point across in an easy and conversational tone. You can sprinkle dialogue throughout an article like seasoning on a bland dish and immediately get an increase in readability and appeal.
Try adding a few sentences of conversation to your writing and see if it creates interest for your readers.
Most newspaper articles will often include at least one quote in the article. This tends to bring greater credibility to a story, rather than simply stating facts one after the other.
Conversation, dialogue and quotes can be just the ingredient you need to improve your next article.
Do authors need RebelMouse?
Rebel Mouse is a social media tool that pulls in your social media from many networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Tumblr, blogs and even your email, into your own personal RebelMouse page that can be embedded on any domain. Authors can use it to collect, connect and distribute information for research, writing and sharing.
Margaret Looney in her post The Year’s Best Social Media Tools for Journalists cited that IJNet (International Journalists Network) named RebelMouse as the number one tool of the year.
The idea behind RebelMouse is that it becomes your social front page. Everything you do across multiple platforms such as your blog, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. automatically gets updated on your page. Instead of repeating your content in a spin that is frowned upon you can add something new on each platform and share it all in one place.
Once the page is built, you can keep it private for your own use or share it with the world.
Private use can be helpful for doing research or following social information that you want to stay abreast of but may not be of particular interest to your followers.
On the other hand, creating a RebelMouse page can be a fantastic way to add extra value to your “About Me” page. Building a successful book marketing platform is all about creating relationships with your ideal target reader. With RebelMouse you can share the sites that you find helpful, fun and interesting with your followers. Providing a hub of vital resource information can be a great way to make your site more sticky.
A bookmarklet lets you post anything of interest as you browse the web to your RebelMouse page. You can post articles, videos, posts and links.
A small box to the left allows you to enter a few words to describe this page.
If you’re an author and feel stuck in your book marketing, get a jump start by learning about the best and latest book marketing strategies in the Authors Academy.