First things first:
If you are building a writing career and are looking to do this for a living – book marketing is an iterative, long term process! As much as we’d like to do things once and be done, things change – especially in the Internet world. As marketers, we need to go where the readers are!
- Get my Free Guide to Book Marketing if you haven’t already – you can sign up here.
- Set up a website. It’s your main hub and most people will come back to it sooner or later. Note: I use Dreamhost (for private registrations and hosting) and WordPress sites because you don’t need to know how to write code and can make some amazing, beautiful pages without hiring a designer. Dreamhost has a 1 click install for WordPress making it very easy to set up Note: this site and my wife’s writer site are both wordpress hosted on Dreamhost. Confused about the difference between WordPress and WordPress.com – check out this video: Should I use WordPress to Host my Author Site?
- Add Google Analytics. It’s free and lets you track where your traffic is coming from.
- Newsletter If you have multiple books/plan to have multiple books and are building a brand – Add an newsletter. Dreamhost has a service included with their hosting and Aweber is also very good. If you are consolidating your newsletter from somewhere else, I found Mailchimp to be the easiest to import subscribers without losing anyone. Mailchimp is also free up to 2000 subscribers, so a great, inexpensive way to get started. A newsletter can be a huge source of traffic and will help you with repeat purchases over time.
Aweber is the easiest to use provider on the market, but they charge around $20 a month even for a smaller newsletter list
- Get accounts for Twitter and Start building it. It takes very little to get going on Twitter, I got 2000 followers in 30 days… As an author, you can quickly build an audience on twitter and should start doing this as soon as you can. In a few months, you can be connected to a good number of readers 🙂
- Create a Facebook Fan Page. You can create a Facebook Fan page here. It it separate from your profile, and is a place where fans can connect with you directly and “like” your author page.
- Create a cover image (I show how to do this blog post and this one)
- Create a Welcome Tab (see my tab posts)
- Create a tab to sign up for your newsletter.
- Create a Google+ page. Google+ is actually the number 2 service for social media (behind only Facebook). Not only that, it will become increasingly important.
- Goodreads. If you’re not already, sign up for an account at goodreads and consider making an author page. Goodreads is a community for readers and can be one of the best places to find your audience.
- Check out my page of Book Marketing Tips. This page is broken out by major topics (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). This page is constantly being updated, so check back often.
- Also, feel free to email me (mike at killerbookmarketing.com) if there is a particular topic you’re interested in learning about. Good luck and have fun!!!!
