You have written a book. A romance, a thriller, a mystery or a self-help book!.
You have created your blog, website and social media presence.
Now what?
Just because you built it does not mean they will come. Now comes the task of targeting your audience and getting them to notice you and purchase your ebook.
Here is a step-by-step approach to marketing your book in the first ninety days:
- Be prepared to have your book be exclusive to Amazon in this period. This will allow you to enroll into their KDP select program and use their promotional tools. Amazon is the major source of sales for popular fiction and non-fiction genres. So, the advantages of promoting through them usually outweighs the disadvantage of keeping it exclusive for one term (90 days) of the KDP select program.
- You need reviews to take full advantage of the KDP program, so start immediately and ask your family, friends, co-workers and any existing readers to write honest reviews of your book and post them on Amazon.
- Organize a librarything giveaway to get more reviews. www.librarything.com is a fantastic social network, where readers discuss books. They have two programs for giving away free books. One “Early Reviewers Program” is restricted to publishers. But they also have another one called Member Giveaway in which anyone (you need to register as librarything author, which is a fairly simple process) can sign up to give away certain number of copies of their print or e-book for free. If you have also published a print book through Createspace or other channels, you can organize a similar giveaway on goodreads as well. E-books are not accepted for their giveaways.
- Now that you have some reviews, enroll your book in KDP Select (exclusivity to Amazon is required to enroll). By enrolling in this program you have access to two promotional tools – “Kindle Countdown Deals, time-bound promotional discounts for your book, available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, while earning royalties; or Free Book Promotion, where readers can get your book free for a limited time.” When you enroll in KDP select, your book also become part of the Kindle Lending Library. This will give help give your book more visibility, as well.
- You can only utilize one of these promotions during the 90-day period. If you are a new author, you might want to select the Free Book Promotion. If you are already established and have some visibility, you can go for the Kindle Countdown Deal. You decide on the dates that you will run the promotions. You can also submit your book to other book promotion websites which send out blasts of free or bargain e-books. Submit at least a week in advance of the date when your promotion starts. Here is a list of some of these websites-
- If you have a budget, you can also try a paid service like bookbub. Many self-published authors swear by their effectiveness.
- After the ninety days of KDP select exclusivity is over, you can now publish on platforms other than Amazon.. All of these promotions will have helped you increase your sales rank as well as get more reviews.
With 3 months of Amazon and Kindle promoting your book – you are now ahead of the game. But what to do after Amazon’s exclusivity is over? Where do you go next to get your book noticed and your web brand established? In our future posts we will look at the other e-book promotional tools available. If you have questions about creating or promoting your e-books or want to leave a comment, please don’t hesitate. We look forward to hearing from you.
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