Ten jet-propelled ways to ignite more sales from one book review
Just starting out? Have one review but feel that you need a hundred more before your book will take off? Fear not. Here are ten ways you can spin that one small review into ten fantastic book promotions:
1. Put the review on your website. If it’s short, include it on the sidebar. If it’s longer, put an excerpt on the sidebar and the full review on an inner page.
2. Include a snippet of the review in your email signature. This is an easy way to get a lot of mileage every day with no extra effort.
3. Use a sentence or two of the review on the back cover of your book. Easy to do if your book is in digital form or you are using POD (Print on Demand). If you have hard copies, print stickers on gold foil and add them to the copies.
4. Include a reference to the review in advertising such as Google AdWords or display ads in publishing magazines. Every word counts here but mention of an endorsement can be a big pull.
5. Mention the review in your bio line when writing guest posts or articles. It’s all about credibility and a few words from a review can do that in spades.
6. Send out query letters for radio or TV interviews using a testimonial from the review. Program hosts want to know that your book has public appeal before inviting you on their show. Nothing proves that better than a positive review.
7. Create a book flyer and use a call-out with a line or two from the review. You can write wonderful things about your book but praise from an outside source will carry more weight.
8. Send an email to popular bloggers in your genre for guest posting using a testimonial from the review. Make that email stand out from the deluge by mentioning the review in your subject line and in the body of the message.
9. Create a new business card and add a line from the review. Today you can print a new business card for as little as $10. It’s worth it to proclaim the message that your book is WONDERFUL without saying a word.
10. Change the message on your voice mail to include mention of the review. A gentle reminder with your phone message that you have a great book can lead to further discussion during the call.
If you want your book to sell, you must promote it. That means spreading the word to everyone with every opportunity. Often times family, friends, and business acquaintances can start that all important word of mouth.
Why authors should have 3 to 4 business cards to maximize book sales
How many business cards should you have?
A good estimate for an author is four.
That may seem like a lot, but there are several reasons why having more than one business card to support your writing is a good thing.
Many writers wear different hats. Whether they write fiction or nonfiction, they can have different areas of expertise. A good way to gain an interview, speaking assignment, or book promotion is to address each area individually with a different business card.
There is never just one way to sell a book. While some ways will work better than others, it doesn’t make sense to leave books on different tables, hoping the right audience will find them. Having a variety of business cards allows you to promote yourself as an expert in a subject to a particular audience.
For instance, if you want to sell books during a business conference, a card that merely states you are an “author” will not carry as much clout as a card that touts you as a “business consultant” or “entrepreneur.” Your books in this case are seen as tools of your trade, even if they bring in substantial income for you. Business groups are looking for solutions, not entertainment, and a book without an expert behind it will not be considered and will not get its author in front of the podium.
On the other hand, perhaps that same book can change lives in other situations besides business. Perhaps your book called Getting Organized would work in a parenting group or in a school setting. In this case, you would want your expertise to slant toward education and your business card to state that.
In another scenario, perhaps you are part of a writers association or plan on attending some large book conventions. At these events having a card that promotes your success in the field of writing will make deeper impressions.
Business cards are an inexpensive way to network and build relationships. Use multiple cards to your advantage to promote your books as much as possible.
Too much competition for your book?
It used to be quite easy for someone to start a small business in a small town and make a success of it. Granted there weren’t ten million customers available for whatever they did, but there was a small group of people that were available and these people would stop by and give the new shop a try. Or at least take a peek in the window. After all, there wasn’t that much going on in the small town and you were something to look at.
Today with the Internet, every business is toted to be available to a millions of people all at once.
It’s true. It’s amazing. Millions of people.
But there’s a catch!
Just because your online business is available to millions of people doesn’t mean millions of people are going to take a look.
In fact, maybe none of them will.
There’s nothing wrong with your business perhaps, but your business itself is just one in a million and who has time to search you out?
You might start raising a hand and waving it as the visitors go passing by your website, but so are ten million other hands out there waving.
Stop trying to reach everyone. Back up and pull into a small corner of cyber space and start reaching out only to a few.
Do whatever it takes to reach ten people. Make that your goal for the whole month.
Ten people. That’s easy, right?
Contact two people a week and tell them about your website or book.
• Write a personal letter.
• Get on the phone and start a conversation.
• Write a blog post about your book.
• Offer to send a book to someone for review.
• Visit a blog and leave a comment.
• Tweet something about your book
• Pin something on Pinterest about your book
Forget about the millions of people out there. You can’t reach them all at once. You have to start small, person to person.
To learn about real book marketing strategies and to get a jump start on your marketing, check out the Authors Academy.
Word of mouth begins with a listening ear
Looking for a better way to sell books?
Not comfortable with standing on a street corner and waving your latest edition in the air?
How about doing something that authors forget to do?
It works perfectly for the introverted author who’s more comfortable listening than speaking. In fact, that is what the way is. Listen your way to selling more books.
You see, most people would rather have someone listen to them than listen to someone else.
Wouldn’t you like someone to listen to you? Really and truly listen?
In this day of mass communication and social media overdose, many people are overwhelmed with tons of words being thrown at them from every direction. Everything is coming in mega doses. Email boxes overflow, Facebook contacts pop in from every corner of cyberspace, and Twitter, text and instant messages multiply faster than the national debt. Who’s listening?
If you give some quality listening time to your readers, you will actually sell more books. Here’s how to listen your way to book selling success.
If you have a blog, ask your readers to share their story or comments. When they do, prove that you have listened to them by answering with a thoughtful reply. Of course, it takes time, but listening does.
If you listen and respond to others, they will listen and respond back to you. That is how author/reader relationships develop.
Concentrate on making friends, not cultivating customers.
The next time you are in a conversation with someone, listen to what they are saying.
Enter into the conversational topic that is on their mind. If you listen well and establish a rapport, you will find that an opportunity to talk about your book will open up at some time in a nonconfrontational and natural way. It may not be in the first five minutes, it may not happen with the first conversation or even the second or third, but it will happen. And, when it does, your new friend (because that is what develops when people listen) will be much more open and willing to hear about your book.
So think of it this way. You could tell a hundred people about your book who have no time to listen to you and it goes over their heads, or you could tell a much smaller number that will result in sales. Of course, I know you want to sell millions of books and you don’t have time to “listen” to a million people, but, surprisingly, if you become a friend to a few who become willing and eager to tell their friends about your book, you have started that most important factor in successful bookselling.
That small number of friends can quickly grow and expand into a large fan base that eagerly buys every book you put out.
Start small, be patient and slowly grow your audience one conversation at a time.
At Wheatmark, our work with authors does not stop once their books are published. In fact that is just the beginning. That is why we place an emphasis on educating our authors about book marketing.
9 reasons authors should still commit to sending press releases
Google has new rules about press releases. Writing them simply to get links back to your site and create Google synergy is no longer a favorable action but there are still plenty of positive reasons that authors should use online press releases.
After all, when it comes to selling more books, there are other entities to impress, besides Google, in the bookselling world. Think of people like book readers, book reviewers, bookstores, publishers, media-hungry folks looking for a good story, bloggers looking for someone to interview, radio and TV stations looking for the next great guest on their program.
Still not convinced? Here are nine reasons that writing press releases every 30 to 90 days should be part of your yearly book marketing strategy:
1. Exposure. This goes without saying. Wonder why no one is buying your books? One good reason may be they simply don’t know your book exists. Let people know.
2. Expansion. A well-written press release will expand your audience beyond the market you are now reaching.
3. Excellence. Sending out press releases is a powerful way to let potential readers know about all the great things your book has to offer.
4. Excitement. A press release promotes your book as something new, interesting, and exciting to look at. Get folks to move beyond ho-hum and put a few sizzling tidbits in that leading paragraph to hook them into finding out more about this new, great read.
5. Authority. Press releases call attention to you as an author. You become the expert when you present facts, figures, and compelling reasons why your book is important to the reader.
6. Credibility. Do you have a media page on your author site? If so, listing your press releases is a definite sign that you are a professional writer in the book world. When the press wants to know more about you, this is the first page on your website they will want to look at. Not only can you list your own press releases in this section, you can also link or display other news events about your book.
7. Relationship. One of the most powerful things Wheatmark stresses to all their authors (new and old alike) is the importance of building strong reader and media relationships. Start locally with newspapers, radio stations, magazines, and blogs in your area and move outwards. If you send out a press release to your local paper three to six times a year, they will start to recognize and remember you.
8. Proactive Mindset. It takes work to write a press release. You have to think about what to write, get creative about how to present your book, and be bold and courageous in presenting the powerful ideas your book offers. Writing positive things about your book gets into the very fiber of your thinking processes and builds up a positive self image for the person who probably needs it the most: You.
9. Elevator speech. Can you succinctly tell someone about why they should read your book? A well-written press release starts out with one or two sentences that nail that speech down. Once you have written a few press releases you won’t even have to think about what to say at your next networking event. You will have already implanted those words in your head and they will pop out without a struggle. Nice.
Hopefully, I have convinced you of the importance of press releases. If you want to read more, here are several links to fuel your press release thinking process.
Get free publicity with provocative press releases.
How to sell more books with news releases.
Press release sites for authors.
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.
Create an audio excerpt of your book for more book sales
Here’s a great way to get new visitors to your site to read your book: Let them hear an audio excerpt!
An audio excerpt from your book is simply another medium that your potential audience can consume. Why not let them have it?
Many bestselling authors offer at least one audio presentation of their books. While you may not want to create a complete audio version of your book, adding the first chapter or pages of your book in audio form is easy to do.
Here’s an audio excerpt from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.
If you have a blog website, it can be as easy as creating a separate page and adding media to it in the form of an mp3 audio clip.
How do you get the audio clip?
The process is fairly simple. (Or at least it can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.) The free, quick and easy way is the best place to start. Once you get the hang of creating an audio clip, you can spend a few more dollars if you want to and add a few bells and whistles.
This example starts with two notes from a music clip and then begins the story: The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold.
There’s a certain magic in hearing a book being read out loud. Hearing the author’s voice creates a connection between the author and the “reader” that printed words otherwise cannot.
Several free services allow you to simply record your voice over the phone or through a microphone. You can read aloud the first chapter of your book and simply post it to your website.
You can use a program such as Audacity and record your voice using the microphone on your computer. It may not be sterling quality, but for voice it will be good enough. Don’t worry about little hiccups in your reading; unless it is a serious cough attack, the listener will hardly notice and, in fact, it will make it more believable that it’s the author reading rather than a professional voice talent.
If you want to edit it, you can do that with Audacity easily. You can remove pauses as easily as you would change a misspelled word in your word processor.
At Wheatmark, our work with authors does not stop once their books are published. In fact that is just the beginning. That is why we place an emphasis on educating our authors about book marketing.
Why you should create small realistic book marketing goals
Every author would like to sell a million copies.
More authors can achieve this goal if they go about it with a realistic plan.
For instance, while you may not sell a million copies in a week or a year, there is a much stronger possibility that you might sell that many books over a longer period of time.
It’s better to make a reasonable goal that you meet and then, once it is achieved, set the bar higher for the next round. Make the first goal easy and doable. Success builds upon success. With each achieved goal you will have the knowledge and expertise, contacts and methods for raising your next level of book selling.
The first goal should be small because you will be putting in a lot of the ground work for future sales. That ground work will take more time and have a deeper learning curve as you get started. Some of the big stones you need to put into place will be creating a website, getting established with several social media outreaches and, of course, creating your first book marketing plan.
Start with a number of books that you can sell in six weeks. Perhaps it will be only 100 books. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it actually will take a lot of work to sell that many for a first-time author. Breaking down that 100 into weeks you might think that it means selling 15 books every single week. This is probably not how it will work. Your first week you might sell only one or two. The second week five and the third week 20. Each week as you put more things into place you will sell more books. The fourth week you might sell 25 and the fifth week 30! By week six if all the wheels are churning and turning you may reach that 100 book selling goal.
To learn about real book marketing strategies and to get a jump start on your marketing, check out the Authors Academy.
Paid book reviews by Publishers Weekly: A dangerous place for self-publishers?
Getting book reviews for your book is one of the prime ways for authors, old and new, to sell more books. Unfortunately, the stigma of self-publishing, though rapidly disappearing, is still a factor to be dealt with in seeking the more established book review channels.
Publishers Weekly has a program called PW Select that is open to self-published books. It comes with a catch though. And, a price tag.
For $149, you can enter your self-published book and get a possible review. They state that approximately one out of every four books is reviewed in their magazine. Now for a regular, mainline, published book getting a book review by Publishers Weekly is usually a good thing. Even with a poor review a sentence, or even a part of a sentence, can be found redeeming and be put to good use.
The fact that Publishers Weekly has broad-mindedly opened their book reviewing doors to the self-publishers of the world sounds like a wonderful thing. But, a little Google research revealed some interesting feedback on their program.
Turns out those promised reviews may not be what you want even if your book is one of the prized 22% selected.
Kim Strickland made an interesting observation on her blog with this post. Publishers Weekly seems to relish scathing reviews of self-published books. She goes on to share that during the time she monitored them, out of 52 reviews for self-published books, only 4 were positive. The negative reviews were not simply mild suggestions that the books be left on the shelf but were as she put it, “completely scathing.”
A general rule of thumb when it comes to reviews of any kind is, that if you have to pay for them, don’t!
To learn about real book marketing strategies and to get a jump start on your marketing, check out the Authors Academy.
How to use a storyboard to plan your next book
While storyboards are commonly used for creating video scenes and movies, they can also be used for planning your book. Whether your book is fiction or nonfiction creating a storyboard can help you to plan a timeline, plots, subplots, characters, and events.
To get started you will need a wide board that is smooth enough for sticky notes to stick. A 4 x 8 poster board can be rather expensive but you can make one yourself either with butcher paper that you tape to a wall or cut a large cardboard box cut to make a single surface. Use a big enough size that you can spread your notes apart and read them easily.
Initial Idea Session
You will need a small pad of 2- or 3-inch Post-it notes. To start, simply put a single idea about your book on a Post-it note. One idea per note. Slap it on the board. Any place will do at this point. Any idea that comes to mind should be added to the board. Write down as many ideas as you can think of. Plan on working on this stage in several sessions. Once your mind gets percolating on ideas you will find that more and more will come to mind as the days go by.
The Plotting Stage
The next part of your storyboard process is to group different ideas together. These will become future chapters. Because Post-it notes are easy to move around you can change their order as many times as you need to make the most sense for each chapter.
You can also create different storyboards for different aspects of your book. If your book is fiction, you might want a separate storyboard for each character, setting, or event. For nonfiction, you might consider separate boards for the main book chapters, indexes, and resource sections.
A storyboard is a useful tool for creativity. It allows for spontaneity and yet develops a cohesive structure as it grows. Even when you have written the first draft of your book, you may still want to refer back to your storyboard for revisions.
At Wheatmark, we believe in helping authors with every step of the writing and publishing process. Whether your book is is in the beginning or final stages to tell us about your project, tell us about it.
Create an easy feedback form for your author website
One way to interact with your audience is to have a form to get feedback or receive input for special events. With a form, you can ask for book reviews, endorsements, or submissions for a book contest.
Putting up a form can be done in a myriad of different ways. One of the easiest is to use a simple, free online tool such as JotForm. With this tool, you can put up a form on your site in a few minutes. It’s a simple drop and drag tool that creates forms as simple or complicated as you like. You get 100 free submissions a month. In most cases this will be all you need unless your site is wildly popular.
The site has over 3,000 form templates. You can find one for almost anything that you can think of such as story submission forms, sharing feedback, or even ask for a donation. You can edit any form or simply start from scratch and create a brand new one.
To get started, watch the two-minute tutorial video. In no time at all you can put a form on your site and start collecting email addresses, information, or anything else that you can dream up for your readers to share with you.
Once you get a submission, you can reply to the writer if you like.
A few ideas are:
- Collect recipes for a cookbook
- Collect humorous instances of something in your niche
- Collect stories for a book
- Collect testimonials for your book
- Ask for feedback about anything relating to your book such as book title, cover, characters, plot line, and location details
- Collect submissions for a free book drawing
It’s important to keep connected with your readers. If you have a blog, of course they can always leave comments but sometimes the information is such that you would like to receive it privately for use in your book or research. A form keeps that information private between you and the sender. (Well, and perhaps the NSA.)
If you do collect information such as emails and address information, it is a good idea to include a privacy statement that you will not use their information for any purpose other than what it is intended.