Getting Started With Marketing Your Book

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!

  1. Get my Free Guide to Book Marketing if you haven’t already – you can sign up here.
  2. 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?
    Dreamhost
  3. Add Google Analytics.  It’s free and lets you track where your traffic is coming from.
  4. 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

    Aweber is the easiest to use provider on the market, but they charge around $20 a month even for a smaller newsletter list

  5. 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 🙂
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
    Goodreads Billboard
  9. 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.
  10. 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!!!!