How the Last Pages Sell Your Next Book

Leverage-Backmatter-of-your-Book

111 Tips on How to Market Your Book for Free

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.
.

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.
.
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
    .

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.
.

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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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)
    .

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!

 

<><><><><>

 

Social tagging: > > > > >