OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
Today I'm excited to introduce Rachel Abbott, independent author of Only The Innocent which has topped the Amazon.co.uk overall charts for the last few weeks.
As I write, the book has spent 36 days in the Top 100 sold overall on Amazon.co.uk, oscillating between #1 and #2, a place I'm sure many of us would love to be! It's also #1 in Thrillers and British Detectives.
When I first launched Only the Innocent I literally had no idea what the next few months had in store for me. I honestly believed that it all came down to uploading my Word file to Amazon (big mistake), and then waiting for the sales to come rolling in (bigger mistake).
It became clear to me from my early research that :
- I needed to take more care with my book than just uploading it as a Word file
- I would actually need to do some marketing
- There is a seriously massive amount of information on the web to help with all this.
When it comes down to it, though, there are a three key factors that will help you to market your book effectively.
Professionalism
The way in which your book is formatted will be key to how your book is judged by some readers. It is rare that a Word file uploaded without any tweaking will come out as a professional looking book. So spend some time getting this right.
The cover is so important too. I have seen many debates about this – do you judge a book by its cover? Well, hopefully the answer is “no” – but with so many books to choose from, you need something that will attract attention. The decision to buy may be based on the product description or on reviews, but you need to catch the eye of the potential purchaser to start with.
Everything that you do should be about taking a professional approach – even the way that you ask for reviews is important. The reviewer will immediately have a view of you based on your approach.
Think of yourself as a professional, and it will become natural to work in this way.
Preparation
Some of my top tips relate to social media. Don’t do as I did – only start marketing after the book is published. Be prepared for the big day, and build yourself followers and a community of interested people. Consider sending out pre-release copies to reviewers too – having some early reviews could make a big difference.
Visibility
This is the key to it all. Your book needs to be visible. Amazon has loads of ways of making your book visible, and you need to exploit them all as far as you can. One of the best periods for doing this is in the first 30 days after your book is published. A lot of people check out new releases, and you need to increase visibility here. Those pre-release review requests could do it – if there are some ready to go immediately after launch. This is a time to push your sales as hard as you can. You are looking to get your book linked to others – as in “customers who bought <this book> also bought <your book>”. Think of ways of maximizing that visibility, and build it into your preparation.
These are the underlying principles. What actions can you take that might make a difference?
(1) Prepare a marketing plan
Start this well in advance of launch of your book. A plan will keep you focused. Break your plan into sections : Channels (eg Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords), Social Networking (eg Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums), Web presence (eg. Blog, website). You may want to include a PR section, or a face to face section (which I can’t do because I live in Italy).
For each section of your plan, identify the issue, and create a action list. For example, under Amazon the issue was visibility, and my action list included Listmania lists, Author Central, etc.
Give yourself a time limit for each activity on a daily or weekly basis so that you don’t get completely carried away with just one task.
(2) Request reviews
Get yourself well prepared with a list of reviewers. There are a huge number of websites that offer reviews of books, so have the list ready and make some inquiries. Create a professional review request document – it takes a bit of time, but once you’ve done it, it’s always ready to send. It should include an image of your book cover, your book blurb, and details such as genre, number of words, etc. Do this before release, if you can, but if your book’s already been released you can use the opportunity to include any review extracts that seem appropriate, and list where the book can be purchased.
(3) Create a polished product
This is where the professionalism mentioned above comes in. Make sure that your final product looks as if it has come from a professional publishing house.
(4) Write a really good blurb
This is what goes onto Amazon (and elsewhere) and you might upload it at the same time as your book in the first instance. But then make sure you have joined Author Central and go into the US version. There are various options that enable you to edit your blurb so that it looks more professional, such as bold face and italics. So make that look as good as possible, and make sure it includes some of your best reviews – if you have any.
(5) Think carefully about your categories
When I launched Only the Innocent, I just put it in the Thriller category. That’s what it is! But one thing that made a big difference was narrowing those categories down. Look at the subsections in the main categories, and see if your book fits into any of them. Mine is in British Detectives, and as soon as I put it in that category, it showed up in the charts – and then it’s all back to visibility! If it’s in any charts at all, the visibility increases.
(6) Create tags for your book
Some people think the tags on your book are irrelevant – but they’re not! And we’re back to visibility again (now you know why I wanted to talk about it!). Amazon frequently displays “similar” books – and although they could just do this by genre, the evidence suggests that they do this by tags. But think of fairly unique tags, or look at books that you would like to be linked to, and see what their tags are. If their tags apply to your books (and ONLY if they do) add those tags. Then try to encourage people to click to agree with your tags. But no funny stuff, please! I looked at my tags the other day, and people had added tags – the names of their own books.
(7) Use social networking wisely
I have never been a huge Facebook fan, but if you are, then look at how it might help you. For me, Twitter was the way forward. You will find many people who will claim that Twitter doesn’t result in sales. Okay – it may not be responsible for huge volumes of sales, but in the early days you are interested in the ones and the twos. You need to find the right sorts of followers – the ones that follow other authors that write in a similar genre. There are tools like TweetAdder that will help you with this. You name a Twitter account, and it will find all the followers of that person. It will then (over time) automatically follow these people for you, on the basis that a lot will follow back (if you’ve made your Twitter personal info interesting enough).
(8) Get chatting
Use the forums – Goodreads, Amazon – there are plenty of them around that are designed for people who love to read. Set up a thread about your book, and get to know people. I have enjoyed so much the chat with readers that it actually distracts me from writing (which is why, of course, you need a marketing plan with timescales!). Some of them will read your book, and if they like it they will recommend it on other forums too.
(9) Web presence
Think about your own web presence. I have a website which is really aimed at readers, and a blog which I write for other authors. You don’t have to do it this way. You could write about other books in your genre, get guest posts from authors. One author that I know actually writes about cooking, with a recipe once a week. You have to write about something that you love, or you won’t keep doing it.
(10) Which bits hurt?
This is less of a tip, more of a warning. When I reached #1 on Amazon UK, a well known author contacted me and said it was time to develop a thick skin. He said that this is when all the nasty reviews start. Until then, I had only had 4 and 5 star reviews – and found it hard to believe that people would just choose to try undermine the success of an author. But he was right. The scams are relatively easy to spot, because they have normally never written another review. But if you do start to get them, make a decision to read the ones that appear genuine, learn from them and take them in your stride. And ignore the others. Don’t take it personally – they’re not criticising you, they’re commenting on your book.
If you’ve written a book and published it, it’s a massive achievement. Be very proud, and accept that you can’t please everybody.
Good luck with your writing, and I wish you every success with your marketing.
Top image: Flickr Creative Commons Horizontal Integration
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1 2 3 … 5 Next »Thanks, Joanne and thank you Rachel.
I've been following the progress of Only the Innocent for a few weeks now and I'm amazed what a well thought out marketing plan can achieve. I get the impression, Rachel, that your business experience really came to the fore when you planned your overall marketing/sales strategy - all very professionally handled. Thank you for sharing tips and techniques - now we can all try to implement your successful methods.
Cheers!
Impressive marketing and shows a huge amount of tenacity and dynamism, congrats Rachel! I'm taking it all in (I live in Italy too so what you say is spot on!) but I'm afraid I'm not half as good as you are...but learning!
I would just like to add to your tips that book "packaging" is also important: by that I mean whether your book is part of a series or a trilogy or whether it's a stand alone. Everyone has heard that having more than one book on your shelf is a good idea and that Amanda Hocking made it big with a trilogy. So I figured I'd try to sell my book (which was fairly long, over 500 pages) as a YA trilogy last year, releasing each ebook as I wrote it (every 3 months a new ebook), but alas, that didn't really work. People liked the first book allright (got plenty of 4* and5* reviews), but didn't have the patience to wait around for the next one to come. Three months is a long time if you're not RR.Martin!
So now I've re-released it as a single book and I'm on KDP Select, busy using their free days for promotion (today's my last day for Fear of the Past - btw, not really a YA, probably better for an older audience) but it's definitely uphill from a marketing point of view and one has to use the advice and info about marketing that is all over Internet with a big grain of salt!
But as I said, your advice is spot on and thanks to Joanne too for sharing it with us on her blog!
Rachel, thank you for such an informative post!
Claude, I agree with you about how important "packaging" is. My book mentor, Ezra Barany (author of the bestselling thriller "The Torah Codes") says there are two ways your fans-to-be find and buy your book: 1) The packaging (professional cover, good title, good blurb, professional layout, etc.) and 2) the content (your great writing and controversy sparks word-of-mouth sales).
Ezra said he attributes most of his initial sales by his title. He applied search engine optimization (SEO) to come up with "The Torah Codes." Something like 50,000 people a month search for that phrase. And since there's next to no competition, his book comes up near the top of Google's and Amazon's search results. Check out his blog post on how to come up with the best title for your book here: http://www.writersfunzone.com/blog/2012/01/18/3-elements-of-a-good-book-title-that-sells/
Also, what you said about the three month delay not working was a real eye opener. Using KDP select to make your book free for five days sounds like a good solution. Ezra suggested when I have a few books out, that I make my best book free for people to discover me and buy the rest of my ebooks at $5.99. (Price doesn't matter if they're fans of your writing.)
So Claude, maybe it makes sense for you to make your first book free. After using KDP Select, have your books on other online stores and set the price of your first book to zero. Then have your friends notify Amazon about the zero price so that Amazon will match it.
My erotic retelling of Alice in Wonderland will be my first novel and comes out in April. Ezra's going to have me put an erotic short story (Red Riding Hood) in a free anthology of short erotic fairy tales by several authors so that not only will my writing be found by people looking for free erotica, but it will also be marketed by everyone in the anthology to all their friends, followers, and fans. So I'll have a huge audience discover my writing and, if they like it, they can buy Alice.
Thanks again, Rachel, for your great post! And thanks Claude for sharing your experience with selling a trilogy!
~Liz
Thank you for this guest post. Great cover, easy and attractive website and blog, and everything you do follows the above advice. Well done, Rachel.
Hi Rachel,
Thank you so much for your brilliantly helpful tips. I've been taking notes!
All I can say is, thank God my husband knows a thing or two about marketing on the web, because although I now know what I need to do, there's a lot of technical things that I don't actually know how to do. In the last week or so I've learned how to upload posts to my blog, which zillions of people have been doing for years, but I'm a total novice! I've joined Twitter and have got the hang of that now. And finally I've started sending one of my ebooks to various review websites in the hope of getting reviews.
I feel like I'm at the beginning of a long journey where I've got to get to grips with the technical side of marketing on the internet as well as put my writing voice out there on more platforms than just in my novels. I have to confess, I had always hoped that I would get a publishing deal, that the publisher would take care of all the publicity and I could remain hidden away, with no other task than to get on with writing my next novel! Anyway, I've woken up and smelt the bacon, and I'm pleased to say I'm making progress, albeit slowly.
Congratulations on a great website and the continuing success of your book.
Thank you all for your comments - it's really great when people go to the trouble of giving feedback. I'm glad that you've found it useful. AND I've met another newbie Italian as well. It's great living here, and we just had lunch on the terrace (although only about 4 weeks ago we were completely snowed in!).
I just wanted to say to Tasha that if you need any information on Twitter, I wrote a whole series of posts on the subject - aimed specifically at people who were new to it. There's a link next to my picture in the article above that will take you to the blog. If you go to Author Help, you will find a Social Networking option, and under that is Twitter. Click on that and you should find the full series.
I also wrote a post that you'll find under Marketing (Author Help) which has a huge list of review sites, with links. So you might find something useful there too.
Good luck to you all with your books!
Great interview but all of this is starting to sound a bit redundant.
I don't think it is redundant Aleshia, it's just that it isn't new and shiny anymore. The basics of internet marketing remain the same. We just have to repeat the process for each new book. I think there is also an element of luck and zeitgeist with some books catching fire because of something happening at the right time, but preparation and hard work can make luck more likely to happen!
This was an interesting and informative post. I'm about to launch my novel, Cosette's Tribe, and I have no idea what tags are or how to find them on other books. Okay, so I'm a late bloomer and I'm playing catch-up with some of the more tech savvy people. I do intend to catch up eventually;)
Thanks ahead of time for answering my question.
Leah Griffith
While there is a lot of marketing info on the Net, yours is fresh and offers points that resonate with me.
(Thanks, Joanna. You're savvy enough to know what your readers are looking for and what authors can provide it.)
Number 2-Request Reviews is one I haven't given much thought to until now. I'm not far from beginning the self-pub process and I've been somewhat intimidated about asking for reviews when the time comes. The professional review request document takes all that fear away. Thanks for that, Rachel. I'll stop by your blog to see what other treasures I can mine. :)
Thanks for the kind comments, and I'm so glad that it is useful information.
With regard to tags, you can find them on any book by scrolling right down the page. They are positioned differently on the UK and the US (right at the bottom in the US and above the reviews in the UK). If you go to my page on Amazon.com - http://www.amazon.com/Only-the-Innocent-ebook/dp/B00684EBC0/ - (or click the link in the article above) and scroll right down, just after my picture you will see all the tags that people have put for my book, together with the number of people who have agreed with them. You can add tags for your own book very easily here, and then encourage people to agree with them. If that doesn't help, let me know.
It's great to get feedback! Thank you.
Thank you Rachel. I appreciate your help. I'm planning on launching Cosette's Tribe in two weeks and have basically been moving forward on my own with the help of what I can read, and understand, online. I do have an amazing book designer and cover artist who has polished my novel until it shines. I'm sure I will see things more clearly once I'm on the other side of this experience. I just don't want to be smacking myself in the forehead over silly mistakes that could have been prevented.
My best to you and wishes for great success with your novel Only the Innocent. I look forward to reading it.