Guest post from Cloe Matheson.
Writers often unleash their creativity in solitude. Even before your book is ready for publishing, you should be figuring out how to channel it to potential readers.
When you put your book out for the world to read, you may have to depart from the comfort of solitude. Here are six creative ways to take your marketing outside and get your book into people’s hands.
Speaking at Local Events
Choose an appropriate event to market your book, depending on its niche. If your book is about career building, try a job fair. If your work is targeted towards professionals and entrepreneurs, try speaking at a business conference.
To connect with your audience, you must understand them. Research in advance and structure your presentation around your target crowd. If you’re promoting a cookbook, prepare a few of your best recipes for your audience to taste. Instead of trying to ‘sell’ your book, give your potential readers lots of information and make sure you have plenty of copies on hand.
Have an Online Presence
Promoting and marketing your book on social media is a given. With everything moving online, social media is one of the most effective methods to maximise your book sales. Nowadays there are hundreds of platforms to showcase your new book.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are some of the best platforms regardless of your book’s genre. The key is to be active online. Like and comment on other people’s posts, and follow other strong authors. Freely share support for upcoming masterpieces and fellow creators in your genre.
This way, you can build your reputation as an expert and establish a strong presence on the Internet. If you have one, link to your website from all your social media pages so your audience can access it easily.
Don’t Forget the Local Bookstores
With more readers discarding hard copies and converting to Kindles or audiobooks, it can be easy to forget about bookstores. Enthusiastic readers love their local bookshops and libraries – you want to capture the attention of these loyal people.
Why not make an appearance and grow your fan base? There are endless ways to market your book at a bookstore or your local libraries and community centres. Try a read along, book club or even a traditional book signing!
Traditional Book Signing
Arrange a book signing when you’re speaking at a local event or when you’re promoting your book at a bookstore. Especially if this is not your first book and you already have an established fanbase, nothing makes a reading experience more special than interaction with the author.
Making yourself available to greet fans and enjoy chatting about your book and characters is a great way to give back to the people who have shown up to check out your new book.
Run a Freebies Promotion
Running a contest or a giveaway for your book is easy. You can do so through a local event, social media, at a library or bookstore.
Announce that you’ll be giving copies of your book away for free, using mediums like posters, radio spots, or social media. Think outside the box and be creative in how contestants can win! This builds awareness and generates excitement. Doing so can also establish a decent number of book reviews online!
Book Reviews
Whether your readers have picked up your book from a local event, a bookstore or from your giveaway, remember to ask them to submit a review online!
If your readers love your book, they will be more than happy to share it across all social media platforms and recommend them to friends and family. Honest book reviews on reputable sites such as Goodreads can give potential readers a better understanding of your book and can be very influential.
With all this in mind, ensure you keep a record of all transactions for each book sold. You can also track which marketing and promotional methods are working well at the same time. If you’re stuck for time, use an external accounting service that will do all the work for you!
Cloe Matheson has been a bookworm since opening her very first book, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. She is now enjoying her career as a freelance creative writer, producing content for local blogs and sites such as Crombie Lockwood. You can find more of Cloe’s work on her personal Tumblr and WordPress accounts, Writings of Cloe.
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