Short Excerpt from 111 Tips on How to Market Your Book for Free
The moment a reader finishes your book is the perfect time to sell them more of your writing. Use this opportunity to promote all your other books.
Not only the content of your e-book is crucial to win a long-term reader, but the very last pages are equally important – not only to say thank you for purchasing and reading your title, but to invite your readers for more books, to join your mailing list, your social media sites or for reviews.
You may even include the first chapter and a cover image of your next book in the series, or one of your other books. Add links to purchase it at the end of the excerpt. Include a list of all your other book titles you have written, hyperlinking each title’s sales page.
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Leverage your book layout.
Take advantage of hyperlinks. An e-book is simply a specialized web page. Use your ebook for “free advertising” of your other books, of your Social Media sites, to gather email newsletter sign ups and book reviews.
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Set up the Following Pages:
Right after the book’s last page, give your readers a reasons to leave positive reviews and to recommend the book to others. Once readers have finished the last page and like your book, they are more inclined to leave an immediate book review. Other important hyperlinks should be:
- An opt-in link for your newsletter / mailing list
- The Amazon author page and all your book online retailers
- GoodReads.com and other book communities
- Your own website and blog
- Google+
- Twitter.com
- Pinterest.com
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If there are buttons already set up for Google+, Twitter, Goodreads, etc. on your website, just click on them, copy the URL out of the address bar on the bottom of your page, and create the link.
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Make it Easy for Reviewers.
Amazon uses their own identifier for ebooks—ASIN—which means you have to wait until after the book is definitely published on the Kindle Store to create a link. As soon as your book is uploaded, you can use your books Amazon page, for example http://www.amazon.com/your-title-ebook/dp/B00000ABC/ and link to “Post your own review”.
Building these links is just a matter of copy/paste. If you are not familiar with HTML, ask your e-book formatter or your web designer to do it. It’s worth the small effort – and a great chance to make the next sale, get reviews, new fans who rave about your book and followers on your Social Media sites.
You can certainly use logos or sharing buttons. How this works is detailed described by David Kudler for HTML-based ePub files and here for Word and Smashwords.
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Retweet Buttons.
People are naturally inclined to share content they find valuable. It shows to their followers that they are someone worth following because of the useful information they share, making them a valuable contributor to the social networks. Encouraging your readers to share your book’s content in social media also extends the reach of it to people outside of your direct network.
Special retweet buttons allows readers to easily post a tweet into his or her Twitter account. And it’s not just any tweet, but one that is pre-fabricated by you and links back to your e-book. Retweet buttons allow any reader to easily post a tweet into his or her Twitter account.
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Retweet Buttons: Step by Step Explained.
Create a small graphic (a blue bird on the graphic gives a visual signal to Twitter users) you can place it in your manuscript. Place the retweet image in more than one location of your future book.
So where do you want to send readers? Certainly to your books’ sales page! Use a link shortener, such as bit.ly, as the original Amazon link is too long. Create a short recommendation text to accompany the link.
Avoid hashtags or replace them with %23, so instead of #reading, use %23reading.
Acrobat Pro will allow you to create hot-links inside your e-book file.
Use the “Link Tool” in Acrobat Pro (under the advance editing menu), locate the retweet buttons you added into your file and create a clickable link for each retweet graphic.
To keep the link type invisible, highlight style to ‘None’ and select ‘Open a web page’ as the link action. Then hit the ‘Next’ button. You will be prompted to enter your special URL.
Now repeat the process for all the retweet buttons you have in your e-book manuscript. More tips, for example how to do it in InDesign, can be found in this article by Marissa Treece.
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Once you created all these URL’s, add these pages to the end of the book:
- List of your previous books with sales page URL’s
- Acknowledgements
- “About the author” or bio
- Bibliography
- Index Links (for non-fiction books)
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Remember: The first page sells your book. The last page sells your next book! Setting up your book layout in the same professional way as trade publishers do, and leveraging the fact that you can incorporate links, re-tweet buttons, sign-up forms and review encouragements in your e-book will bring you many more new readers for your books!
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Social Media: Is it a Total Waste of Time?
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It’s always surprising: when searching on Google for a certain word or topic, I often find our own articles and blog posts, as well as re-posted content from our Google+ sites on Google’s first page. This very high ranking on Google’s Search Engine means that users find easily our content. And if YOU, as an author, write a lot of posts, blog articles etc. – always with a link to your website or Amazon author page – you will be high in Google ranking too and more people will learn about your books.
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Total Waste of Time
Authors flock to Social Media sites to get the word out about their books. However, many writers see it as a waste of time and would rather write on their next book. Smart authors combine the best of the two worlds and post small snippets of their writing or interesting details of their research on Google+ posts. Think about it: if you combine your Google+ page with your Twitter presence, explained here in detail, you post only once on Google+ and it appears on Twitter as well. You save 50% of your time on Social Media!
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Your Goal for Being Online:
Unless you have ten-thousands of dollars every month to spend on advertising for your book, you might use the more subtle way of book marketing and meet your readers online on Social Media sites. But what would your (potential) readers be interested in or want to hear from you? They certainly want to learn more about you as a writer and they want to learn about your books and get samples of your writing. It means you can do what you like most: WRITING and at the same time give your potential readers and buyers of your book reasons to follow you and tell others, or re-post and re-tweet your content.
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Use Your Creativity
Authors often ask: “what should I post on Google+ or on Social Media sites in general?” Nothing easier than that. You can use every word, every fact, every location or scene in your book to write a short post, blog or even a long article. Even novels, such as a Science Fiction story has lots of potential to be used to write short articles. Just one example: I recently thumbed through a clients’ book and found on the first page, under acknowledgements, that she thanked the police chief of her town for giving her a tour and explaining her certain laws when she did the research for her book. Her meeting with the police chief and each one of the laws she learned about, could be the topic of a short article or blog!
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For Authors: It’s a Must to Be on Google+
Google has been using Google+ to discover new content, and many authors have discovered that URLs (links to their sites or articles), but also posts that they commented and shared on Google+ are indexed very quickly – and they find themselves often on page 1 on Google’s search results – one of the main reason to be on Google+ or to post on Google+ communities.
Compare this to Facebook, where privacy settings and restrictions on data sharing, make it rather often impossible for posts to never be crawled or indexed by Google at all. Unlike Facebook, which hides data from Google, or Twitter – which directs Google not to follow most of its links – Google+ data will be immediately and fully accessible on the Internet and readers can find you and your books easily. Each post on Google+ acts like a mini blog post and adds highly share-able, link-able context to the search engines. Last but not least: Don’t miss to link to all relevant profiles from your Google+ “About” page.
To sum it up: Use your research and your manuscript to write lots of blog posts, articles and Social Media content and post it first on your Google+ page. Combine your Social Media sites, linking to each of them. Post with one click on several of your Social Media sites, which can be done by using scheduling sites, such as Hootsuite.com or Shortening Sites, such as Bit.ly. This is just for posting your articles – not for directly connecting with your followers or readers. The time you save when linking your Social Media sites is not only time you save to write, but also some time you can spend to connect directly with your readers! Social Media = Social Networking.
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More About the Benefits of Google+
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/how-to-get-your-author-page-on-googles-page-1/
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/5-tips-for-a-successful-google-presence/
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/3-top-reasons-to-be-on-googles-page-1/
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/15-reasons-to-be-on-google/
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/how-to-get-more-followers-on-your-google-page/
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If you would like to get more support in all things publishing, have your book intensively promoted and learn how to navigate social media sites – or to learn how you can make yourself a name as an author through content writing: We offer all this and more for only $179 for three months – or less than $2 per day! Learn more about this customized Online Seminar / Consulting for writers: http://www.111Publishing.com/Seminars Or visit http://www.e-book-pr.com/book-promo/ to advertise your new book, specials, your KDP Select Free Days or the new Kindle Countdown Deals.
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Tagged: Google+ a MUST for authors, GooglePlus is the best Social Media site, how to link all your Social Media sites, how to write great content, leverage your manuscript, Social Media Content, Social Media: Waste of Time?, your reason for being online