SELF-PUB:Six Great Tips for Marketing Your EBook

#ebook #selfpublishing #marketing

I was asked by a friend of mine what marketing could be done to promote her new novel. She’s secured an ebook-only deal with an imprint of a major publisher. As seems to be the norm now, the publisher’s marketing budget is tight (or non-existent), so the lion’s share of the work is left up to the author. I suggested what I would do, and what seems to be working for a lot of ebook authors out there.

1 Get social. 

Go online and sign up with any social networks that take your fancy, but the essential ones are facebook and twitter. If you’re canny, you can schedule updates on something like Tweetdeck so you don’t have to check it all day. Don’t just spam people with tweets and updates like ‘Buy my book! Buy my book!’ as it soon gets annoying. Follow any publishers and authors you respect and see how they promote their stuff, and do likewise. Be nice, and reply nicely to people, just be lovely and you’ll amass followers in no time.

2: Reviews and blogs

Consider doing a blog tour to promote your book. This is where you contact people writing online about your genre of book and suggest to them that you write about how you got your book out there, or your way of writing. If they’ve any sense they’ll bite your hand off as it’s one blog post they don’t have to write, and it will bring your followers to their website.

You can also (if possible) suggest sending ARCs (Advance Reading Copies – Proofs by any other name) to bloggers and reviewers of your genre. They will review it and you can re-post their reviews on your social media. Just put something like ‘romance novel bloggers’ into google and see what comes up. If you can’t get ARCs from your publishers, then maybe just email them to tell them about your book. (or if your publisher allows – send a PDF of the ebook to the reviewer by email)

3: Join Societies

The Society of Authors can have good social events and conferences on marketing, as well as great benefits.

4: Get the hard copy into libraries

This is just a matter of asking! Make sure you have all the details from your publishers and email a polite and short message to the central libraries email addresses. Make it FAO: Stock Manager and include any reviews you have. Some councils have a webform where you can suggest books, so do that!

5: Papers, Radio.

Email local editors of radio stations or newspapers to see if they’d like to feature you. Get a nice picture of you with the hard copy, and you’d be amazed what it can do.

6: Keep going!

Do whatever it takes. Book launches, readings, talks at local societies (U3A, WI etc). The sad fact is that most authors can’t just sit back and wait for the proceeds to gush in – half the job is pushing the book you have out while writing the next one. Best of Luck.

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SELF-PUB is a series of posts on the business and complexities of publishing your novel independently. If you have an issue you'd like to see covered, leave a message in the comments below.

Image:By Maximilian Schönherr (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons