Book promotion ideas: choose the best – part 1
With so many book promotion ideas offered by different services, it’s hard to decide which ones will work for your book. If with free promotions it’s obvious that we should use everything we can, when it comes to paid options, how can you tell which one will be good for you if you’ve never done it before?
I’ll get to the free book advertising later, but now I’d like to focus on the differences between paid promotions, and also the results they bring. I’m no guru in this, and most of these things I only realized after I made some bad decisions during my first promo. I don’t regret losing my money as much as I regret losing my KDP free days. And while there’s a lot of general information on how to run a book promotion (submit the book to promo sites, use social media, post on forums), I couldn’t find the answers to the specific questions I had:
- should I pay for a guaranteed listing everywhere or only on the best sites? which ones are the best?
- site placement or newsletter promotion?
- will a Twitter blast bring a lot of downloads?
and so on.
So, here I’d like to share my vision of how it works and why sometimes it doesn’t work. If I’m wrong somewhere – please, do let me know in the comments or via the email at the bottom. My goal is not to badmouth any ebook promos, but to learn how to do it all right together with you. To prove that, I simply won’t use any site names.
1. Site placement/spotlight. Of all ebook promotions, I think this one is the most subtle. Depending on your genre, the site popularity, and its audience, it can be useless or especially effective. It’s usually more expensive than simple listing/email promos, and at first, seeing it, I believed that it was more effective somehow. For some reason, I forgot to think about it from the perspective of a web-developer/marketer that I’ve been for 8 years, and trusted the fact that the site was popular, working, selling its services. “If people buy them, they must work, right?” you may think. Right and wrong.
The right questions would be: 1. If they say thousands visit them every day, who are those people? Are they my target audience? 2. Do the authors who promote here write in the same genre as I do? 3. Is it the best site in this niche?
I’ll give you an example to make it clearer. If you write children’s books, what would you choose, a site with all kinds of books that supposedly has a bigger audience or a site focused only on children’s books? I write brutal urban fantasy, and I chose a site that seemed to promote books in all genres. Only after it didn’t bring any result did I dig into their archives and noticed that all those different genres were mostly for 40-something readers, it could be clearly seen from the covers, blurbs, and authors. No surprise it didn’t bring any increase in downloads, and for the $30 that I spent on it, I could’ve bought 3 guaranteed listings with newsletter promotion. Simple but effective.
Now back to those thousands that visit the site. Your first question should be who exactly visits them? How do people come to those sites? You can see it easily on alexa.com if you search the site and scroll down the page and take a look at the keywords that people searched to get to the site. If it’s “indie authors” or “free books” or “children’s books” – I’d say try it. But if it’s “book promotion” – do you really want to promote your book to authors? My personal opinion is that very few people visit those sites looking for free books, they receive them in their emails and can browse them on Amazon. I, personally, only visit them to look for the promos and don’t even pay attention to the books that are spotlighted there.
So, resuming this post (that turned out too big again and now I’ll have to split it so I don’t bore you), be very specific with the site placement and only invest in it if you’re sure it’ll help you reach your target audience. Otherwise, even if thousands do visit those sites, chances that they’ll click on your book are very small.
Subscribe if you would like to get a notification when I post the next part of book promotion ideas, where I’ll talk about choosing the best guaranteed listing and the effect of Twitter promotion.
