Today, I want to give you a smorgasbord of five more ideas. Four of these can be done for free, while the fifth idea will probably cost you somewhere around $10. Some of these ideas might require you to do a little bit more legwork and research, but they could be worth it to round out your promotional planning. Continue reading Five More Ways to Promote Your Book→
Today, I’ll give you five promotions you can do for $5 or less. I’ll also include some ideas for how you could spend a little more if you have a larger budget or decide you’d like to borrow from next month’s marketing fund. Let’s jump in! Continue reading Five Ways to Promote Your Book for Five Dollars→
So, you’re a self-published author hoping to get out of the I-only-sell-a-few-books-a-month rut. You’ve set a marketing budget, no matter how small, maybe even just $5 a month. There’s just one problem: Now that you look at your shiny new budget, you feel like it’s really, really small.
I’ve heard it time and time again from self-published authors everywhere: “I know I would sell more books if I did some marketing, but I don’t have any money to spend on advertising.”
The word marketing just sounds expensive, and advertising is even worse. But there’s plenty that you can do for free or very cheap. Let’s explore it together.
Today all I want to do is ask you to set a marketing budget. I’ve talked to many authors who tell me their books don’t sell too well and they can’t afford to spend more than they’re making. And that’s a fair point. So I’m just going to suggest this: Could you afford to spend $5 a month? Continue reading Why You Should Have a Marketing Budget—No Matter How Small→
Do you know what a movie TV spot is? It’s simply a TV-commercial version of a movie trailer. These run about 30 seconds or less, and are generally very targeted to a specific audience. Studios will run multiple ads targeted to different groups of people, and TV is a great place to do that because one type of person likes one show, while another person will watch something entirely different. But both people enjoy the same movie.
I know you’re wondering what this has to do with you. You’re probably thinking, “I write books, not make movies. And I can’t even afford a TV ad in the first place!” I hear you. What I want to do is draw your attention to the concept behind movie TV ads—the idea of customizing your marketing efforts to reach more than one group of people. It’s something I see a lot of self-published authors gloss over in their marketing. Most self-publishers will pick a single message and hammer that home everywhere. You’ll have one talking point about your book—essentially limiting yourself to one audience.
This past weekend, I experimented with putting Finding the Core of Your Story on an Amazon Kindle Countdown promotion. If you’re not familiar with the program, it’s a feature that Amazon recently added to KDP Select. The idea is that your book goes on sale, counting back up to the normal price over a period of time. So, for example, when I did my sale, I set up five countdown milestones that each lasted 12 hours. My book began the sale at $1.99, then went up $1 every 12 hours until it returned to the usual price of $6.99.
Something big happened when the Kindle became popular. Suddenly, it wasn’t just important that your cover image look amazing in real life. You also needed to have a great cover that worked as a teeny tiny thumbnail image. Don’t believe me? Find a book on Amazon and look at the cover images under “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought.”
What you should see is a sea of good and bad covers. What makes them stand out? Do any of them catch your eye? Why? You’ll probably notice a few things about the standouts:
Big, readable text
Clear imagery—big pictures that are obvious what they are
Eye-catching colors
You don’t have to have all of those to stand out, but even just one helps. But how do you tell that your cover is working amidst a sea of others? Continue reading A Sea of Covers→
