Tag Archives: book sales

How to Launch New Books to Boost Book Sales

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By African American Books Author Denise Turney

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One of the easiest ways to boost book sales is to publish a new book. To yield good results, you need to launch new books successfully. Then, you need to work to sustain your efforts. If you want to keep sales coming, you have to keep marketing and promoting your titles. This applies whether you’re a self-publisher, hybrid publisher or publishing a new book through a small press or a traditional publishing company.

Prepping New Books to Launch

But first things first. After you write a book that hooks you, pass the manuscript to an editor. And don’t just focus on price when choosing an editor. Look for an editor who has deep experience editing the type of book you wrote. For instance, some editors work mainly with children’s books, while other editors focus on adult mystery novels.

If you’re seeking a way to save on editing costs, polish your book before you send it to an editor. As a tip, you could submit chapters of your manuscript to a professional writer’s critique group. Another way to tighten your manuscript before you send it to an editor is to ask beta readers to read the manuscript and offer you feedback.

Now, here comes the fun part. And, not just the fun part – but the time-consuming part as well. Are you grinning?

To boost book sales and launch new books successfully, you must consistently market and promote your books. It can’t be any book marketing effort. To succeed, you have to incorporate smart book marketing actions into your book sales plan.

Map Out Book Marketing Strategy to Boost Book Sales

The book industry is fiercely competitive. Yet, you can earn six-figures or more a year in the industry. Part of the work to boost book sales starts months before your book is published. So, map out how you are going to market you new book months before the book is published. To save time, you could create two spreadsheets in the same Excel workbook.

In one spreadsheet, list free book marketing tools you’ll use. Examples include social media platforms, free design tools like Canva and word-of-mouth. Before you start filling out the second spreadsheet, listing paid book marketing options, do some research. Find out which book marketing agencies and websites specialize in your book publishing genre.

Research Book Marketing Options to Boost Book Sales

Also, find out which book marketing companies showcase new books. Here are more points to consider during your research:

  • Does the firm market new books to read in print, audio and e-book format
  • How many followers does the firm have if book promotions are only on social media? (Check their social media platforms to see how engaged their followers are. As an example, look for comments, shares and how many of their posts get re-posted.)
  • Are the firm’s newsletter subscribers mainly other authors who have subscribed to their newsletter, people who may never buy another author’s books? Another stat to check has to do with newsletter subscriber engagement. To boost books sales, find out the open and click rates the newsletters have.
  • Is there a limit on the number of books a book marketing website spotlights in a daily or weekly newsletter? After all, if there are too many books in a newsletter and your book is listed midway or further down the newsletter, few people may read far enough down the newsletter to see your book.
  • What’s the cost to run a daily, weekly or monthly website literary ad? And how many impressions does a typical ad at the firm receive?

Also, find out the number of people in your book’s target audience the marketing firm reaches. This is important. Remember, book marketers can promise you the moon, stating that working with them could land your new book on a best seller list. Yet, a promise and an actual result aren’t always the same. So, do your research.

Schedule Book Marketing Initiatives

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After you finish researching free and paid book marketing options, create a schedule. Within this schedule, include the date you will start and end free and paid ads. For deeper impact, consider running ads on your backlist books too. In addition to running ads (free and/or paid), here are more ways to boost book sales after you launch a new book:

  • Take pre-orders for your new books
  • Work with an experienced website designer and build an official author website. Then, add a blog to the website. As a tip, update your blog with a new article at least once a week. And use relevant keywords in your blog articles to attract readers. Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that you can use to find keywords. To highlight your books, add your book covers to the top or side of your blog.
  • Take advantage of Amazon’s free marketing tools if you publish e-books and print on demand books through Amazon. For example, you could do a Kindle countdown deal or you could offer a KDP e-book for free for a week. If you do use Amazon book publishing tools, apply to have your new book become part of their marketing newsletters.
  • Create your own literary newsletter. Add feature interviews, book coupons, links to your new book releases, etc. to the newsletter.

More on Book Marketing Initiatives

  • Schedule online and offline radio interviews. Also, interview on podcasts that spotlight authors. To get more traction, consider interviewing on podcasts and radio stations that are looking for guests who cover topics that your book focuses on. For instance, if you wrote a novel about a character who has ADHD, you could interview on shows that focus on mental health, learning or brain function.
  • Attend virtual and in-person book conferences, cultural festivals and writer’s conferences. These are good places to meet new readers and boost book sales. Even more, these are good places to showcase your books. As a tip, if you do attend conferences and festivals, consider bringing free book excerpts. For example, you could bring 100 copies of a two-page excerpt and hand them out to people who stop by your booth. But don’t just hand out excerpts. Ask people who stop by your booth to sign up for your literary newsletter. In fact, you could bring a printed sign-up sheet so readers can add their name and email address to subscribe to your literary newsletter. (Keep a copy of the sign-up sheet in case someone says they never subscribed to your newsletter.)
  • Use tools like Canva and Book Brush to design book marketing flyers and social media posts to share at your website, on postcards and on social media platforms.

Manage Book Marketing Budgets While You Boost Book Sales

Keep an eye on your budget throughout the book marketing process. After all, you don’t want to spend so much money on book marketing that, even if you sell 1,000 books a month, you find yourself in a financial hole.

And, going forward, always do your research before you pay for book marketing. Also, follow-up to ensure that marketing actions you paid for actually occurred. One good way to achieve this is to ask marketers and promoters you run ads thru to email you links to the places where they ran your ad. Get ad stats too, stats that show how many people clicked on your ads and/or bought your books.

Looking for more book marketing support? Check out the below book.

Types of Content Marketing That Increases Book Sales

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By African American Books Author Denise Turney

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As an author, finding the right content marketing that increases book sales is a shortcut to literary success. By itself, this type of content keeps your name and your book titles in front of book buyers. This may sound easy enough as a writer. After all, writing is your bread and butter. But it’s not a slam dunk. On top of that, content marketing isn’t a one-time deal. It’s not like writing a bestselling book.

Scheduling Content Marketing That Increases Book Sales

In fact, to gain enough traction with content marketing that increases book sales, you need to publish new content weekly. You might get greater results if you publish content daily. Think about newspapers and how they keep fresh content in front of readers.

So, before considering the types of content marketing that can increase book sales, get clear about how often you’ll push out fresh material. Make it easy on yourself. Create a content marketing schedule. Items to include on the scheduler are:

  • Dates that you’ll publish book marketing content
  • Topic or content focus (book marketing tools, image metadata, simple video marketing techniques, etc.)
  • Key phrases built into the content
  • Links to relevant content at your website
  • Social media platforms that the content will be marketed on

Types of Content Marketing That Increases Book Sales

Building out your content marketing schedule helps to keep you on track. As you develop the schedule, you may realize that you need to bring on a freelance content marketer to create the content. In fact, this choice frees you up to write more books. But more about that later.

For now, let’s look at types of content marketing that increases book sales. The effectiveness of each type varies. Yet, each of these types of book marketing content could introduce you to new readers. To begin:

  • Blog content is a type of book marketing you can control. If you add a blog to your author website, you can increase your overall website traffic. Just be prepared to add new blog content each week, at the minimum.
  • Newsy book marketing content may be a good fit for marketing platforms like Outbrain, Newscred and Contentful. With these platforms, you can push book marketing content out to media and digital websites. Exercise financial discipline to avoid overspending.
  • Social media book marketing content is an effective way to connect with readers. And, you have options. There’s organic and paid social media marketing. As a tip, before launching into paid social media marketing, take free training courses offered by the social media platforms that you want to work with.

More Types of Book Marketing Content

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  • Email marketing still works. For example, you can introduce book buyers to your titles via digital postcards, coupons and direct email.
  • Simple video marketing is a winner. As an author, you could use simple video marketing to read excerpts from your books. Other options include sharing book marketing tips, your list of top 10 books and details on upcoming book festivals you’re attending.
  • Text messages are another option. As with other book marketing options, make sure you gain approval to send book buyers text messages before pursuing this option.
  • Digital newsletters work too. Not only can you launch your own literary newsletter, but you can also cross promote books in other author newsletters.
  • Offline book marketing content includes direct mail, print book catalogs, print postcards and flyers.

Link content marketing that increases book sales to your official author website. After all, this makes it easy for book buyers to keep up with what you’re doing. And it helps to build reader trust, not to mention grow your online and offline presence.

Working With a Freelance Content Marketer

As previously mentioned, you may find it beneficial to let a freelance content marketer write your book marketing content. Should you take this approach, research content marketing prices. For example, you might pay a freelancer 15 cents a word. Or you might pay a freelance content marketer by the article. Also, decide if you’ll include editing in the overall price that you’re willing to pay.

Another option that you could use is a web content agency. Take this path, and you could leave book marketing content scheduling, key phrase research and writing to the agency. As a tip, work with a book marketing agency that gives you access to a personal dashboard.

This way, you can log into your marketing account and review analytics. For instance, you could review how many clicks key phrases generate. You could also review the number of visitors each book marketing article gets. Also, pay attention to social media accounts that certain articles get better results on. For example, do your images perform better on Pinterest or on Twitter? Or do shorter articles about your books’ topics perform better on Facebook while longer articles perform better on LinkedIn?

Working with a Digital Content Agency

Some digital content agencies let you indicate if you want their platform to automatically post your content when it’s likely to gain the most views. You could do a split test and ask that some articles be published at specific days and times. For other articles, you could indicate that you want to take advantage of the platform’s automated posting dates and times.

See which works best. And don’t worry. Even while marketing bestselling books, it’s good to be flexible. After all, the types of content that help with marketing books today may not prove effective tomorrow. Furthermore, the best days and times to publish book marketing content may shift.

This brings up another point. Even if book marketing content works, helping you to gain more book sales, you’ll likely need to make changes. So, be flexible and resilient.

Stay Free of Magical Thinking with Content Marketing That Increases Book Sales

Accept what data shows you. Definitely avoid magical thinking. In other words, steer clear of thinking that just because you wrote a book or because the story is a winner that a book is going to become a bestseller. Also, staying away from magical thinking can help you to spot changes in your book marketing results.

Even more, not only can it allow you to spot book marketing changes, but it can also equip you with the courage to adjust to those changes. For instance, you might notice that the digital content agency that you’ve been using for two years is no longer generating book sales for you.

If you’re in the habit of treating everyone with respect, it should be easy to sit down and discuss these changes with the digital content agency. Who knows? They may have received similar feedback from other authors and are rolling out updates within days.

Flexibility and Persistence Can Really Pay Off

In addition to being flexible and staying free of magical thinking, be resilient and persistent. Soon, you’ll see that persistence is at the core of content marketing that increases book sales. You have to do what you say. Simply put, you have to be dependable.

Book buyers need to know they can read fresh book marketing content from you at certain times. Although you might not realize it, there could be hundreds or thousands of people reading your content. Some of these people may be hopeful book authors. Others may be avid book readers, people who just need to know a little more about you and your books before deciding to buy your titles.

So, be persistent. Keep trying new content marketing types. Every day, do something to grow your readership. There may be thousands of readers who will love reading your books, if only they knew about those stories.

How New Authors Gain Book Sales

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By Book Author Denise Turney

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Yes. New York Times bestselling books are often written by household name authors. Readers know what to expect from these authors. To readers, there may be less monetary and time risks involved with these titles. But that doesn’t mean that new authors can’t gain book sales. In fact, following are techniques that help new authors gain book sales.

Launching New Books

That’s good news. Unfortunately, simply writing a book, even a beautifully crafted story, isn’t always enough to gain book sales. Furthermore, publishing a book on a major platform like Amazon, Kobo or Barnes and Noble also is no guarantee that new authors will gain book sales, let alone enter the ranks of bestselling books.

Despite the genre, new authors could gain book sales if they publish books in January. To get more sales, the book genre is another factor to consider. For example, romance and self-help books may perform better when they launch in January. Children’s books and cookbooks may do well when published in December, and science fiction does well when published May thru August.

Getting to Top Selling Books

Yet, here’s the thing. During the end-of-year holiday season, authors of bestselling books are marketing and promoting their titles. That puts new authors in competition with household name authors which is why January launches yield results. In addition to launching new books at the start of the year, to move books for sale, new authors can:

  • Design catchy book covers using tools like Canva, Book Brush, Pic Monkey, 99Designs. Consider posting two to three book cover options on social media and asking people to vote on their favorite book cover. Another option is to share three book covers with family and friends and ask them to tell you which image they like best.
  • Also, write an attention-grabbing book description. It’s this overview that may determine whether readers simply flip a book over and put it back down or pick a book up and buy it.
  • In today’s digital book world, it’s important to add the right keywords to book overviews. Why? Keywords are what will help attract readers to new, classic and older books. In fact, keywords will impact search engines, Apple Books, Google Books, audio books and Amazon bestselling books.
  • And here’s another tip. If new authors aren’t gaining book sales, they can update their book description, trying different keywords within the description.

More Ways for New Authors to Achieve Top Selling Books Status

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Here are more ways for new authors to gain book sales. The first choice sounds easy. Yet, there are still authors who don’t have an official website.

  • Therefore, it’s important that new authors have an official website. When developing a website, consider using the author name as part of the website URL. It may not be a good idea to use a book title as part of a website URL if a new author plans to write more books.
  • To polish the story, let an experienced book editor look at the book. New authors and established authors are so close to their stories, it can be hard to spot mistakes in the writing. Even more, authors may overlook parts of a story that should be carved out. Another thing authors can miss that can hurt sales is an area of a story that could be stronger with dialogue or scene change.
  • Back to the official author website. Don’t just create a book author website. To get traction, add a blog to the author website. Add a new blog article that has relevant key phrases at least once a week. Here’s another tip. Website content management systems like WordPress allow authors to add a link to their book’s Amazon sales page.
  • Depending on the budget, new authors should consider trying paid ads. But watch the budget to avoid getting dreamy and overspending with minimal results.

Even More Ways for New Authors to Gain Book Sales

Places to test books for sale ads include Book Bub, Bargain Booksy, Cush City, AALBC, Facebook and Amazon sponsored ads. Here’s another tip as it regards ads. Run two ads to test which images and ad copy pull in more book sales.

  • Also, review book marketing analytics. This could keep new authors from entering states of magical thinking. After all, magical thinking can cause new authors to think that their new title will soon be among the Amazon bestselling books and New York Times bestselling books just because they wrote the book.
  • Create, publish and market book trailers.
  • New authors can also create their own Vimeo or YouTube Channel, offering writing and marketing tips.
  • Notwithstanding, the fact is selling enough books to see a title among the top selling books takes work. Which is why book marketing analytics aren’t always fun to review. But they offer insight into the types of book marketing techniques that are working and the techniques and strategies that need to be changed or stopped.

Pathway to Book Sales Online and Offline

Even more, podcast interviews, offline radio interviews and television interviews are effective ways for new authors to gain book sales. Other ways for new authors to gain book sales are to design and mail post cards using tools like Canva or VistaPrint. Thanks to the Internet, these postcards can be in print or digital.

Other options to announce books for sale include posting flyers on college and university bulletin boards. As a safeguard, authors should ensure they get approval from school administrators to post the flyers. And creating book newsletters is another way for new authors to gain book sales.

Definitely encourage family and friends to spread the word about the new books. This is not the time for authors to be shy. This raises another point. If new authors are assertive, there are a myriad of actions they can take to promote and market their books.

Keep the Momentum Going

For example, new authors can attend book festivals and cultural events that attract their book’s audience. Teaching college writing courses is another way to pull in more book sales. Additionally, there are book tours, book reviews and book swag to share with attendees at major events.

In closing, as the Internet and the world continue to change, new authors can develop innovative book marketing strategies. They can also take advantage of marketing apps and social media book marketing tools. To continue growing book sales, authors have to keep releasing new books. And, they have to keep introducing their new books and their backlist to book buyers and book readers.