Marketing 101: Promoting Your Books… Without Ever Leaving Home!
Yesterday, I told you that advertising is a waste of money akin to a wishing well. I also said that there’s a big difference between promotion and advertising and that I would tell you how to promote your products in careful, measured ways without spending a lot of money, without even leaving home.
But first, I want you to understand why it’s important to promote your products as a small publisher. Believe it or not, a lot of people who get into the publishing industry think that their products are good enough to sell themselves. They’re wrong, plain and simple, and I want encourage you not to be one of them, because you will never sell books to anyone beyond your friends and family if you’re not willing to promote them.
Consider this example: Frank decides to publish Ye Olde Guide to Swordmaking, a book that details how to make a sword using medieval techniques. Frank is an expert in his field, and he puts together a detailed book that is the definitive guide to his craft. Frank publishes the title, prints 500 copies, and puts up a link on his personal website saying that the book is now available. And he waits, and waits, and waits… but aside from his brother and a handful of friends he’s told about the book, no one wants to buy a copy.
Truth be told, this happens all the time. Being a published author is easy if you’re willing to do the work and put up the money. Self-publishing is fairly simple and inexpensive, and there are always small publishers who will be happy to help you get your book printed if you shoulder the costs and pay them a fee. But getting people to actually buy a book you’ve published can be ridiculously difficult unless you’re willing to give them a reason why. Simply put, if you’re going to publish a book, you have to promote it if you want to sell any copies. Not promoting the book is not an option.
I’m not sure why this is such a big deal to people; many of them seem to have the wrong idea about promotion, as if you have to be some sort of super suave personality bursting with charisma and charm if you want to promote a product. Many people also seem to associate “promotion†with media appearances, book signings and personal selling, all of which are difficult for a small publisher to set up, and often doomed to fail if the book is not designed for a large audience. In the past, these might have been the best ways to promote a book, but with the wealth of resources available today through a personal computer connected to the Internet (which you clearly already have if you’re reading this site!), there are plenty of ways to promote your book without even having to leave the house.
1) An official website. I’ll admit it — I have an ulterior motive behind this site. I’m planning using it as a promotional tool to help sell my books. You probably didn’t notice, because I’m not going to great lengths to make it obvious. That’s because I’m not trying to pitch you anything; instead, I’m trying to offer you a wealth of free information that will help you out. I figure that if you like what I have to say for free on this site, you’ll be really excited to see what I have to say in my upcoming books. And if I’m wrong, it doesn’t cost you a dime; you still get all this information for free. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost me much either. Cool, huh?
But how did you find my website? Chances are good you didn’t sit down and ask yourself, “Hmm, I wonder what Sean Jordan has to say about publishing?†You probably didn’t even know who I was. Rather, you probably discovered it through a search engine or a link from another site. That’s because I set this page up to trigger search engine results, and other people have read it and found it informative. I didn’t pay anyone to get my site listed, nor did I ask anyone to link to me. I simply put the power of the Internet to work for me so that you, the reader, would find my site as you researched self-publishing topics and hopefully become a regular visitor who might one day buy my books.
All it took was an account with blogger, a few hours of website setup, and about an hour a day’s worth of writing. Google and other readers did the rest.
I don’t mind revealing this little secret because it’s actually one of the most useful tools a small publisher can have. If you want people to discover your product, create a website that will draw them in. It’s not hard to do, it’s easy to maintain, and it will give you a chance to hone your writing abilities as you put together original content for your readers.
If you decide to set up a website, let me offer this piece of advice: talk about things that relate to your books. Stay away from the personal stuff unless it relates. One minor benefit is that you’ll get better search engine placement. But the more important thing to understand is that readers want to see that you’re an authority on your topic, and they want to hear what you have to say about it. They don’t want to hear stories about taking your kids roller skating or going parasailing or why you like chocolate ice cream better than vanilla. The one exception would be, of course, if you are a humor writer and you’re able to offer a unique perspective on mundane topics. But otherwise, keep the personal stuff and the professional stuff separate. You can always set up a personal website (or a livejournal) to share those opinions that don’t relate.
I also wish I didn’t have to urge people to maintain good grammar and spelling on their professional websites, but for some reason, I do. If you want to be taken seriously as a publisher, you need to either learn to edit yourself or hire an editor to review your posts. It’s not optional. No one wants to buy books from someone who can’t be bothered to edit their company website. It’s better not to have a website at all than to have one where apostrophes are used in plural nouns, “you’re†is used for “your†and words like “lose†are spelled “loose.†These errors undermine any credibility you’re attempting to build, and they can make you look like a fool. Just accept that you need to edit and get it done.
If you set up a website, be sure to set up a tracking counter with a free service like StatCounter. This will allow you to see how many visitors your site is receiving, where they’re coming from, and what they’re reading, among other things. It’s valuable information. Just make sure your counter is invisible; there’s nothing more embarrassing than having a counter that shows the world that only 53 people have visited your page since
2003.
Since a website is capable of doing so much, I will post future articles with ideas on how you can make your website work even harder for you!
2) A Myspace Profile – Myspace is a giant, bloated mess of a community, with some of the ugliest web pages I have ever seen. But for some reason, it’s extremely popular, and it offers enough benefits to outweigh the drawbacks. One thing I really like is that the site allows you to receive instant feedback from “friends,†and you can check out their profiles if you want to learn more about them. This is great for some quick and easy market research if you want to get a rough idea of what your readers are like.
You can make a Myspace profile for anything, so I’d suggest setting one up for your own name if you’re a writer and for your company or your individual products if you’re a publisher. Resist the temptation to promote yourself aggressively by requesting 5000 friends your first day (you’ll get kicked off), and don’t mess around with your profile so much that you make it incompatible with any web browser but your own. Maintain the profile weekly, removing worthless comments and rejecting all the hot girls who want to be friends with you so they can spam you with advertisements about nude pictures and Viagra. And use the site’s “blog†feature to post occasional updates, since you can see how popular the blog is by watching how many people have read it.
The beauty of Myspace is that once you make a few “friends†on the network, you’ll gradually make more as friends of friends check your profile out!
3) Facebook group: Facebook is another popular social networking site; I like it a lot more than Myspace because it’s fairly clean and easy to use, without all the ugly pages and spam. The drawback is that Facebook doesn’t let you create a profile for just anything; the site only accepts real people and links them by the schools they attended. But once you
set up a profile, you can create a “group†for any topic, and this group allows you to interact directly with other members on a virtual bulletin board.
Again, like Myspace, this is a great way to meet people who are interested in your products and to get to know them personally. And since the site doesn’t require nearly as much maintenance as Myspace, it’s much easier to use.
4) Youtube: Many major companies are mining Youtube right now with “viral videos†– videos that have only a small relation to whatever brand they represent, but that are entertaining and interesting. Whether these will actually help companies sell products is still debatable, but you can’t deny the power of the popular video sharing network.
What I like about Youtube is that you can embed the videos in outside webpages, which means that you can put up a video of yourself talking about your book and then offer it directly on your official website for viewing without requiring readers to visit Youtube. At the same time, Youtube users who haven’t heard about your product can discover the video and potentially discover your site, if they like what they see. And those are just two of the ways the site can be useful.
What I do not like about Youtube is all the hype around it as people talk about it becoming the future of Internet entertainment. Youtube is an interesting concept, and it’s a valuable resource for those looking for short bursts of video. But as a publisher, I wouldn’t invest too heavily in producing videos for the site; aside from the pirated stuff that shouldn’t be up on the site in the first place, the clips that seem to do the best are the most irreverent, not the most useful or slickly produced.
5) Wikipedia: Wikipedia is quickly becoming the world’s first source of information, partially due to its primary search placement in Google. This is both enormously exciting and enormously terrifying, because Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia maintained entirely by volunteers, and anyone with an account can edit an article to say anything
they want.
There is, of course, a system of checks and balances; other users can edit your edits if they need to be refined, and some users even have extra powers, like banning people from editing for a set period of time or pulling the article down for review entirely. But the site still has a lot of opportunities for a publisher, provided that you follow the proper protocols.
First of all, understand that Wikipedia does not allow vanity articles, so I can’t go on there and write an article about “Sean J. Jordan,†no matter how objective it is. I know this because I tried, and my article was immediately marked for deletion. But I could go in and write up an article on my publishing company if I wanted to. I could also go into topics
about things like “marketing†and add quotes from my website to support points in the article, though others might remove them later for not being authoritative enough.
Second, understand that if you do post a profile of your company, anyone can come in and edit the article to say anything. You can challenge the changes, and they usually will be reviewed and reverted if they’re out of line. But if someone decides they have a score to settle with you and they want to do it publicly, they can do it easily through Wikipedia. I’ve seen it happen, and it can get ugly.
Third, understand that Wikipedia prefers sources, so it’s best to link any claims you make to publicly available company statements (like press releases or interviews) or your official website. Wikipedia editors will also remove anything that sounds like marketing text, so try to keep your tone neutral.
With all that said, setting up a Wikipedia article for your company and each of your products can be a wonderful experience… and a great way to get prime search engine placement for free. Just make sure you link those Wikipedia articles to your webpage so you can take advantage of the traffic!
Frank let the books sit in his basement for a few months, wondering what he could do to make them sell. He didn’t have the money to attend trade shows, and he couldn’t find any retailers who wanted to carry the title. But he knew there was a market for it, so he started looking around on the Internet for people who might be interested.
Frank began by hitting message boards for people interested in swords and in smithing. He became an active member of some of these communities, answering questions and mentioning that he’d written a book on the topic with a link to his website. Within a week, he made five sales. The next week, three more came in. Something was working, so he decided to expand his efforts.
Next, Frank began improving his own website, including chapters and diagrams from his book with several indications that the book could be ordered directly from his website. He also set up a merchant account so that he could accept credit cards, at the request of several would-be customers. Orders continued to trickle in, but in larger numbers as the months
went by and people began to discover his site.
Eventually, Frank discovered that a member of the Society for Creative Anachronists was putting out a monthly newsletter about swords, and he offered an interview and a free copy of his book to the author in exchange for a mention. Once the newsletter went out, Frank’s sales exploded, and he found himself running low on copies soon thereafter. He revised the book and printed a second edition, this time making sure to feature the book prominently on his website and to let his readers on the message boards and from the newsletter know. Eventually, he added the title to Amazon.com, and his sales continued to rise accordingly.
The moral of the story? Promotion breeds success. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to cost much money, if any. It simply requires persistence and a willingness to take the time to spread the word.
-SJJ
Articles, Marketing 101 | SeanJJordan | 
July 27, 2007 3:15 am
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