I liked Your First 1000 Copies: The Step-by-Step Guide to Marketing Your Book because I liked Tim Grahl’s marketing ethic: creating lasting connections though a focus on being “relentlessly helpful” (a tactic which works, as I’m much more likely to buy a book from an author whose blog I follow. However, it’s possibly a tactic that’s …
Marketing 101: Five Ways Not to Promote
I hope the last few posts have given you some ideas about how to determine and manage your author brand, how to ensure you have a quality product (book), and answered some questions about price, distribution and promotion. Today’s post is taking a different slant. It’s focusing on mistakes I’ve seen newbie authors make (or …
Book Review: How to Launch a Christian Bestseller Book by Lorilyn Roberts
I read and reviewed the first edition of this book. Roberts has since updated the information and issued it as a new book (thus ‘washing’ all previous Amazon reviews, including mine), so I paid for, downloaded and read this updated edition. I applaud the idea of the John 3:16 Marketing Network. It’s a great idea: …
Marketing 101: Christian Marketing
I’ve covered the basics of book marketing over the last two months, and included reviews of books I’ve read on the subject (both good and bad). Most of this information has been obtained from books and blogs aimed at the general market, not specifically the Christian market, which leads to an obvious question: Is there …
Review: The Book Publishers Toolkit by IBPA
This isn’t as much a book as a compilation of articles that were previously published in Independent, the monthly member magazine of the not-for-profit Independent Book Publishers Association. The Book Publishers Toolkit is very short, and took less than an hour to read. The articles are: Getting and Using Awards by Kate Bandos Tapping Into Twitter …
Marketing 101: Price Revisited
Five Reasons Free Isn’t Working A lot of authors choose to price their new release free to raise awareness and build readership. Or KDP Select members might use their five free days to increase visibility and sales. But free isn’t working the way it used to. Authors aren’t seeing the increase in visibility or the …
Review: Is $.99 the New Free? by Steve Scott
As most authors know, making Kindle books available free through KDP Select no longer has the powerful marketing effect it did a year ago. In Is $.99 the New Free? The Truth About Launching and Pricing Your Kindle Books, Scott explores whether free still has a place in a marketing plan, or whether pricing books …
Marketing 101: Platform
Platform It’s the buzzword in author marketing. Agents and publishers want new authors (especially non-fiction authors) to have an established platform: a network of contacts in real life and in social media that can be leveraged to purchase the book and influence others to purchase the book. The foundation of any good author platform is …
Review: How to Build a Powerful Writer’s Platform in 90 Days by Austin Briggs and Max Candee
There’s a saying in marketing that we know 50% of marketing activities work—we just don’t know which 50%. The same could be said for How to Build a Powerful Writer’s Platform in 90 Days. It includes what looks like some excellent information and advice—but that advice is wrapped up with advice that is incorrect, and …
Marketing 101: Promotion
When most people talk about marketing, what they’re actually meaning is promotion, specifically, advertising. We were raised in a time when promotion was a combination of radio, television and print advertising, perhaps supplemented by letterbox fliers (better known as junk mail). That’s how we found out about and were encouraged to try new products. Large …