Marketing Plans: The Indie Author Mentor Show, Ep 30
An email question came in: "I just published my first book. How do I promote it?"
All marketing plans will be different based on your plans for the book, your career, and your personality, and--to some degree--your budget.
1) First, you'll need to decide what your plan is for this book and for any future books you plan to write. And you'll need to define TO YOU what success would look like for this particular book and also for your writing career. Do you want to write any more books? Do you want to be award-winning? Do you want to make a living with your writing? Et cetera.
The answers to these types of questions will determine the answers to your other questions. Namely, how to market and promote your book(s). It's also important to note that if your goal is to make a living with your writing, you cannot do that with book sales from one book. Think, 10 or 20, or more. UNLESS, you are also providing author services, like editing or retreats or teaching.
2) Paid Advertising. It's the way to go these days. It is a Pay to Play Market now. There are 8 million titles on Amazon alone. The three top paid ads sites are BookBub, Facebook, and Amazon Ads. Additionally, there are FreeBooksy and BargainBooksy. As well as others. (For instance, if your e-book is published on the Kobo platform, there is a Promotions tab on your dashboard that enables you to partake in their promo days.) Each of the ads platforms have different rules and suggested methods of operation. There are loads of books and other resources on all of them. (Help! My Facebook Ads Suck by Mal Cooper; Mastering Amazon Ads by Brian Meeks; Bookbub Ads by David Gaughrin; Bryan Cohen has an Amazon Ads School on his Instagram site @bryancohenblurbs--just to name a few.)
That said, up until very recently--and is still considered truth by many--the industry "standard" advice for advertising for authors with less than three to five books in one series is to NOT advertise. The return on your investment won't pan out very well with nowhere for the reader to go after reading your one book. (I don't know how many books you've published.)
If an author has several books, then paying for an ad on one book can often lead a reader to reading the other books in an author's backlist, thereby making the cost of the ad click go much farther.
3) I believe the best thing an author can do to build excitement about their books is to write the next book. Seriously. If you look at it like any other business, a business owner (read: bookseller) needs to create more than one product for their store. They need to create free content marketing for their audience and to build a(n) [author] brand through engagement with their [readers] customers.
The most important first step in getting people to buy your product is to get readers to know it exists. That comes with getting on podcast interviews, going to networking events, doing book readings, teaching workshops at libraries, etc. That's Attract Marketing. Letting people know you are out there.
Then, you Engage with them. Write a blog, or do a podcast, or create some other way of engaging with the people that now know you exist, but still have not become a customer of yours (like get them on your mailing list).
Then, you Nurture them. That's where they begin to Know, Like, and Trust you. Still before they buy! This is the time when you'd be posting regular content for them in a newsletter or FB Live posts, or pictures of your life on Instagram. Only then can you Invite them to buy.
And, in order to keep them as an ongoing client [reader], you must Delight them. Create the best book(s) possible and they'll come back for the next one and tell their friends.
This process isn't something you do in a week or even a month. It's a long-term strategy. It's part of the author life and part of our job. Have fun with it.
*** I hope some of that was useful and has given you some ideas for your marketing/promotional plans. Another resource I would highly recommend is How to Market a Book by Joanna Penn. Good luck!
