How can I promote my self-published book if I don’t have Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, etc. and very few people care about my ideas?
There’s just no way you’re going to be able to promote your self-published book without having an online presence and especially a social media presence. It’s one thing to not want to have personal social media accounts but you’re going to need to open accounts to promote your book. They don’t have to be personal, you can use your book’s name or series if there are more than one.Also, it doesn’t mater how many people know about you and your ideas now, that’s why it’s so important to have an online presence. You want to leverage the power of social media to help those people that would be interested in your book find you and the way you do that is by casting a wide net and being present on all major social media networks.Next you have to be active and I don’t mean spamming your book. You need to engage in relevant conversations and communities with people that could be interested in what you write about. Share interesting things and generally add to the online conversations, let people get to know you and what you’re about.That’s the only way to slowly build an online network that you can then use when you want to promote your book. In other words, it’s going to take some time since you don’t already have a network, but it’s well worth the effort to build one up.Once you’re part of some relevant communities and have a decent amount of people following you, you can promote your books and actually have people take notice. You can still promote your book without a network but it’s very unlikely you’re going to have much traction unless you get very very lucky or happen to be friends with someone who does have a following.So how do you actually promote your book on social media? People are only going to take a couple of seconds to look at your post or tweet and scroll on, you’re going to need a great book cover to convince them to stop and check your book out.If you don’t already have a good book cover I would suggest trying out Placeit’s book cover maker. Here are some book covers I made using the templates:These are super easy to make and work great for sharing them on social media. Here are a couple more examples and a how-to video so you can make your own.Hope that helps!Full disclosure, I work at Placeit :)
How can I promote my self-published book? Should I begin a promotion even before I have published it?
If you have a source of capital for advertising then you can hire a firm to do all your advertising well-ahead of the publication of your book — if you are publishing independently. If publishing is through a Traditional Publisher, they take care of this, and all the care about is that you finish your book when they want it.I publish independent having 15 titles available on Amazon. My mention, right here and right now, is a promotion for my material to the over 300,000 views I have had, with questions I have answered, since being on Quora. Now, it is just a matter of those 300,000 people deciding to check me out on Amazon and who, if any one of them, will buy one of the titles.Social Media, and there are over a dozen platforms, is another inexpensive method to let people know you have an available title or titles. Problem with Social Media, however, is that most people on there may not even notice your personal promotion, and in some cases the ad you post or the YouTube Link you give, may actually be deleted by the host company because they want you to PAY FOR ADVERTISING your work. They don’t get it that, if sales are generated from some of the free self-promotions that then the writers will have money to pay for advertising.If you have a book and you know you will have it finished and available for sale on some platform, then you can advertise maybe a month ahead to see whether people will show some excitement to see your work.I will advertise only a week, or two, ahead of a new title release. The enthusiasm has not been so great, especially in America. Many people just don’t read like they used to and this is the irony of living in this great age when we are no longer at the mercy of being accepted and promoted by an established Traditional Publisher. We have the platform to create professional work and we can try to get the word out, but we cannot force the sales.
How do I promote self-published books in India?
First, set your book on a discount. This price will vary by genre, but it usually means $0.99 if you’re doing promotions.There’s a few different ways that many authors I know promote their books:Take out advertisements. Facebook is a big one, but you can quickly drop a lot of money on this if you don’t know what you’re doing.Targeted newsletter outreach. Search for newsletters (such as bookbub) in your genre and buy a slot. There’s a lot of readers signed up to these looking for discounts.Connect with other authors and organize newsletter swaps. A lot of authors actually sell slots in their newsletter as well.Create a promotion on Booksprout. It’s currently free and our readers are outnumbering the authors by too large a margin.In reality though, you should be thinking long term.Grow a newsletter and your following in Booksprout. In the front and back of every book you publish, direct people to your website. Note: Facebook does not count. You need a real website, especially if you want to ever send out newsletters in the future.Write well targeted books. If people are already looking for what you’re writing, then it’s a lot easier to say “hey, I wrote one” than “you should try this instead.”Get active on social media, or wherever your readers hang out. Eventually, they’ll start recognizing your name and it’ll be a lot easier to sell books to them.
How can I promote my eBook which has been published on Amazon/Kindle and apple iBookstire?
I wrote a book and paid a self-publishing company to do the formatting and publish it. They said they have over 30 websites like amazon to put it in, but I found they only put it into Amazon and Apple iBookstore. When I try to find it there, I actually have to type my eBook title into the search window to get to view it. How can I get my eBook exposed to the public?
How do I promote my self-published book the best possible way as a teen author?
The same ways any author of any age would push their books.Find channels of advertisement that would put your book in front of as many people in your target audience as possible. BookBub is a good resource. Look at websites that you think would be visited by people you want to be reading your book and buy advertisements on those websites.Using your age as a selling point can backfire against you. While there are a number of stories of wunderkinds who have made it big, they became big stories after their books caught on. Not because of their age. There are probably more teen authors than most people suspect.Encourage readers who like your book to leave good reviews and good ratings. This will always help your book sales and promotion. Bad reviews have almost no effect on sales and can ironically increase your sales because they lend visibility. (The best way to kill a book’s sales is to never mention it at all.)When your book is out, offer to talk about your book to reading groups in your local area. Look into whether or not your local library has a “Meet the Author Day” for local authors. I sit down with my local radio station every once in a while and talk about my books and being an independent writer.Carry business cards with you, identifying you as an author. Put a QR code on the card that points to your webpage that has links to where people can buy your book. Prepare for yourself an “Elevator Speech” explaining that you are an author and your book is about “#######” and you hope they will like reading it.Be the best, nicest, most humble, and polite version of yourself as you can to other people. Especially when you are feeling tired and cranky. When they find out you wrote a book, they will buy it, even if it is in a genre they don’t like. Act like a jerk, and they’ll talk about what an asshole you were to everyone without ever having read your book. Which behavior do you think will result in more sales of your books?
How can I promote my mother's self-published Kindle book?
The fastest and cheapest way to let the people know about the relevance of the book is to get a Forward or a Review from a famous Author or Press in your Genre. If you can get more than one author or press to do that your reach would multiply.For any product to reach to the market one would need credibility or reference. The formula is very easy to understand. Lets consider a launch of a movie. Prior to the actual launch the movie trailer is released. The trailer would have the most eye catching snippets from within the movie. This builds in excitement and context within the audience about the content and a suspense of the story line for the movie.Then there are publicity events for the same through various media channels like press interviews, social media, and other public endorsements.Once the excitement is built is when the launch date is revealed. This would be the "Save the Date" notion.There after the actual launch is made. The audience may or may not like the movie. But the initial built up for the movie prior to its launch will soar the sale of the movie seats.If the movie is amazing people tend to watch it over again and speak about it over their own social network making it a viral phenomenon.Hence the movie makes millions of dollars.Use and apply the very similar strategies to any business and help it build. Start small and let it be organic. Ensure that the content of the book is authentic and above expectations. You may blog about the research. Share video summaries of the book on You Tube. Create a sense of missing out on opportunity if they do not pick up the book. Reach out to as many authors as possible and have it promoted to their audience. Writing about the book to media channels like New York Times and getting them to review would be a great kicker.Building an authority over the subject is of importance as well. Like a professional achievement within the subject.Build a story around how the principals of the book did change your life a normal citizen.Putting out a book launch in your neighbor hood public library or a toastmasters club. Anything to build awareness on the product is a win.Starting local and spreading the word is the most efficient way. That is building social proof.These small principals will work as these have been tried over and over again on all of us by the big companies all the time. They may take some time to convert. You will not be disappointed.All the best.Cheers!
Should I make a book trailer to promote my self-published debut novel?
As someone who produced book trailers for my clients early on (starting in 2002), it might surprise you that my answer is “No.” But it’s precisely because of my experience that I say this.The disconnect is that novels are a medium of words while videos are a medium of images.Think of it conversely: Which would more likely excite you to see Black Panther or another new film… a video trailer or a written description of the movie?Additional detriments:Book trailers just don’t translate into sales most of the time. There’s no evidence to the contrary from my experience or elsewhere. If you have the means to make one for fun, not for sales, then go for it. But unless it’s really good, you actually have a greater chance of hurting your sales than even having zero influence.They’re very rarely done well. Either the production value or the artistry tends to fall way short, and often both. Keep in mind that the public has become extremely used to seeing high-level Hollywood trailers, music videos, and extras like the “making of” documentaries on DVDs. It is really hard to compete with the visual expectation these have created.For a novel trailer, you start to visually create the world the reader is normally left to imagine. This may not seem like a big deal, but part of the magic and connection between a reader and a novel is that the reader visually creates the fictional world they’re experiencing through your words. Unless your trailer is extremely abstract, it tends to ruin this magic. This is exemplified to some extent by the public’s reaction to a major novel when it’s released as a film — inevitably, some (sometimes many) readers are very disappointed with how certain characters are portrayed or who portrays them. This is because the readers had already created the image of those characters in their minds. (This can certainly be true of settings and other elements as well.) Even if the author feels it to be 100% accurate, it doesn’t matter because the readers are already invested in what their imaginations brought to the story.All that said, I’m mostly referring to trailers for novels. These can work well for non-fiction books, but then I don’t really consider them “trailers.” Usually, the good ones are not really done in a trailer-type way, so to me they’re just promotional videos.
How can I promote my self published book that will actually get people reading it?
Thanks for the A2A. All marketing campaigns work best if they start with a consideration of the benefits that the book provides to its readers. If your book is a novel, and you answer "entertainment," you need to do some more thinking. Each of us finds different types of things entertaining because of the way they meet our psychological needs. We may get a vicarious validation of our self-image, or distraction from stress, or . . . .When you understand the top 2 or 3 benefits that YOUR book offers to its best readers, then you can figure out who those best readers are, to a similar level of detail. Knowing who tells you where they'll be found. Go to those places. Watch what messages and traffic generates a positive response. These may be op-eds, or excerpts (aka second serial sales), anecdotes from the writing or from your life, or any of a hundred other sorts of things. Look also for the people who have the most influence over your target readers in those large groupings. Figure out how you can show (never tell) people in those groups, using those types of messages, that you can deliver the type of benefit that they most want. Make sure that you do NOT mention your book except occasionally and tangentially, but also make sure that it is in your bio, tagline, or profile, so that those who want to know more can and will find it. You should also comp copies to the influencers, after asking them if they'd be interested in reviewing it. You may or may not get a review, but more importantly, you'll get a recommendation from them if they like it. Whatever you do, don't spam social media with "announcements." No one cares that there's another book out there, added to the hundreds of thousands published in the US alone, this year alone. Give them something that they already want, and leave a trail of breadcrumbs. It's more effective.
What is the right time to start promoting your self published book?
6 months to a year before you publish. A good rule of thumb is never to set the release date until you have the finished, edited book in your hand.Writing and publishing may be the easiest part. The hard part is marketing and promoting it. And not just marketing and promotion but doing that to the right audience and that takes some trial and error and work to get it right.Also takes some money too. You'll have to get some skin in the game with advertising to get the right people to your product.Think like a marketer and not like an author because that's what's going to sell your book.The more promotion you do before the book is ready and available, the easier it will be to rack up some sales and recognition to get the ball rolling.