Writing a book is all fun and games until it doesn’t sell in the market. Here are some advertisement ideas that can boost sales.
Writing a book requires creativity, time, effort, and many sleepless nights – quite literally. After you have finished your manuscript, you should do everything you can to make your book a success.
One of the most effective ways to boost sales is by advertising your book. By advertisement, we don’t mean billboards and television coverage. Instead, effective use of social media for book advertisement, as well as other ideas, can boost your sales.
· Build an Author’s Platform
Connecting with your audience is very important. An author needs to know what their audience wants, what might trigger them, what might be the cause of their delight, and what might keep them hooked to the book’s plot.
The best way to connect with your audience is to build a website of your own – a place where they can find all the necessary information regarding your book. Create a Q/A section on the website and interact with them there. Ask for their feedback and observe their reactions keenly.
An author’s platform should have a blog as well, a place where you can talk about the book writing process and where you can share your thoughts and feelings. This practice makes the audience feel you are personally connected to them.
· Consider a redesign of the cover
Designing an appealing book cover is another strategy to grab a reader’s attention. Most people, when searching for a new book, look at the cover, turn it around, and decide whether they want the book or not. Therefore, design the book cover in a way that attracts your reader’s eye, compelling them to buy your book.
If your book is not selling well, there could be multiple reasons for that. One of which is that the book cover isn't good enough. One of the most important things about a book cover is that it shows instantly what the genre is. If your book looks like a sci-fi novel, where it's actually high fantasy, you could attract the wrong audience, possibly leading to bad reviews.
So have a good hard look at the cover to decide whether it's powerful enough to grab the attention of people scrolling through hundreds of covers online. If you feel it's not up to par, have a new one designed, and make sure to use a professional cover designer.
· Optimize Your Book
Optimizing your book is an effective strategy for book promotion. As effective, the promotion is, as many readers as it attracts.
If you are launching your book online, tease your audience with sneak peeks of your book. Let your targeted audience access a part of your book for free to get interested – sort of like a demo. Once you have grabbed their attention, leave it on a cliffhanger. They will have no choice but to buy the book then to find out what happens next.
If you are printing your book, take an excerpt and print it at the back of the book. Let your readers get curious about your book. Make sure you choose a part that’s interesting but doesn’t give too much away (don’t follow the trend that movies are now adopting). Their curiosity will get the best of them and leave them with no choice but to buy the book.
· Build a following
One of the best ways to boost your sales longterm, especially if you are planning to write multiple books, is to create a following. Meaning, an emaillist. Getting a big following on social media is also an option, but if Facebook (or any other platform) decides to change things or delete your account, you are left with nothing. When people sign up for your newsletter, they will always be on your list unless they unsubscribe or you don’t want them there. Plus, getting in someones inbox is more effective and personal than on social media.
How do you build an email list? Well, there are several ways. But the easiest way is to use a platform where you can write your emails, make it look professional, send the emails out to all your subscribers with one click and you can even automate things like welcome emails and email sequences. Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Convertkit are just a few (cheap) online programs that you can use.
However, having an email list and automating everything sounds great, but if you don’t get any new subscribers it’s worthless. Luckily, there are ways to get them relatively easily. One of them is getting a pop-up on your website (on sites like Mailchimp, Mailerlite, etc) you can set this up easily. Another way is to organize newsletter spaws with other authors in your genre (meaning they promote your book in their newsletter and you do the same with their books) or participate with cross promotion. I would recommend a website called StoryOrigin for this. The two options mentioned above are only two of the many wonderful tools they offer. You can also use that platform to create landingpages for your launch team, create reader magnets, direct download pages, and more.
· Book trailers
If you also want to use social media as a marketing tool it’s a great idea to use promo materials like banners, images, your blurb, etc. But keep in mind that everybody is doing this and that images and text won’t grab the attention any more. If you have something that moves, like a book trailer, you might have a chance that people will actually stop scrolling and look at your message. A book trailer can be something very fancy, like a movie trailer, but this is not a necessity. If you don’t have a lot of money to spend, you can have a book trailer created for under $100 that will animate your book cover and add text to the video that will grab people’s attentions. Book trailers is one of the many services we at Cutting-edge-studio provide. Click here to find out more.
· Paid advertisement.
There are also possibilities to pay for advertisement. The 3 major platforms for books are Amazon, Bookbub, and Facebook. Most of these platforms are pay-per-click platforms. If you don’t know how these work I suggest starting with Amazon ads, because Amazon are a bit more reluctant with spending your money in comparison to the other platforms. The great thing of advertising on these platforms is that you are getting in front of your target audience. If you want to learn how to create these ads yourself, you can take a look at our course section by clicking here.
If you want to outsource this, we've also got you covered. Click here for more information.
Final Word
Advertisement is an effective way to boost your book sales. Make sure to make use of all your social media platforms to attract readers. Boost their interest by indulging them in a Q/A session. Interact with them via videos and live sessions. Let them know the author before they decide to know your work.
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