Archive for the ‘Marketing Basics for Authors’ category

The Best Reason to Write A Non-Fiction Book

September 30th, 2008

Just as there are two kinds of books, there are two kinds of authors.  There are authors who write Fiction and there are authors who write Non-Fiction.

This post is directed to the non-fiction author.

The best reason BY FAR to write a non-fiction book is to promote your business.

This is especially true if your business happens to be selling nothing but air.  Whether you’re a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist or a consultant, when your business revolves around selling a service, then your strategic internet marketing strategy should include writing a book to demonstrate your expertise.

That’s what Andrea Hess has done.  Andrea is the founder of the Soul Realignment professional intuitive training program where she assists clients and their businesses worldwide in creating a new level of financial abundance.  She calls what she does being an Intuitive Consultant.

If you’re an entrepreneur, struggling to make more money with less effort – Andrea is available to act as your secret weapon.

Andrea  understands that she’s selling nothing but air.   So, to market her practice, she’s set up a Blog Intuition in Business AND she’s written the book “Unlock Your Intuition: How to Accurately and Reliably Access Your Most Valuable Resource.”

When you visit her blog, you can easily see she’s written a book.  If you think she might have the answer for your business, you can do one of three things:

  • You can subscribe to her blog to get more “free” information.
  • You can buy her book.
  • You can schedule a free 15 minute consultation.

Chances are, you’ll first subscribe to her blog to get more information for free.  If, after a few posts, you like what you see there, the next step is to invest $11.53 to purchase her book.  You’ll read her book and see if she REALLY does have the answer you’re seeking.

Finally, after you’ve taken those steps, then you’ll be ready to click on the “buy” buttons she has on her blog pages.

Writing a non-fiction book can be the BEST advertising you can do for your service based business.  Combine writing your book with a blog and you have a powerful marketing strategy to promote your business.

Book Marketing is Numbers Game

September 8th, 2008

Book marketing is really no different than any other kind of marketing.  As an author, you face the same trials and tribulations every other small business person faces.  In a word, marketing your book is simply a numbers game.

Many authors launch a website or blog hoping to magically draw in hundreds if not tens of thousands of potential book buyers. It’s a good plan – after all, a successful website can attract thousands of tightly targeted visitors each month and marketing is a numbers game.  The more visitors you can attract to your website, the more books you’re likely to sell -it’s just that simple.

If you’ve already got a book blog or website, then you’ve probably discovered that simply launching a website (or a blog) is no a guarantee that you’ll be creating a sure fire “visitor attraction tool”.

Creating an effective book marketing blog isn’t hard – if you have the right tools.

Unfortunately, for many authors, building a book marketing blog is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where you have to go on a scavenger hunt to find all the pieces.

To make matters worse, it’s hard to know when you’ve gathered all the pieces OR if every piece you’ve gathered really fits in your particular puzzle.

Over the past 2 years, I’ve launched hundreds of blogs for clients.  Some of those blogs have been for authors who self-published their own books.  At first, I thought that authors would be the BEST bloggers of all because, after all – authors know how to write!

I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

While authors are, as a general rule, GREAT at writing – they aren’t well versed in the skills of successful blogging.  So while my blogging authors were creating GREAT blog content, they weren’t getting serious traffic to their blogs.  That broke my heart.

After all, there are lousy blogs out there that are getting nice visitor traffic!  A blog with great content could do even better – if the blogger only knew the secrets to blogging success.

That’s why I created the 8 Week Power Blog Launch.  The 8 Week Power Blog Launch is comprised of 56 individual lessons.  It’s a simple step by step method to increase traffic to your blog.

More traffic = more eyeballs.  Since book sales are a numbers game, the more traffic to your blog, the more books you stand a chance of selling.

If you’re an author who wants to sell books, you need a blog.   However, a blog you don’t know how to use won’t bring the needed traffic to sell books.  That’s why you need the 8 Week Power Blog Launch.

Enter the code “author” when you purchase the course and you’ll save $20 off the retail price!

Book Marketing: The Book Cover

August 6th, 2008

Yes Virginia, people DO judge a book by it’s cover. A great cover stops a book browser in his or her tracks during a lap around the local book superstore and makes the book browser want to learn more.

That is why one of the most difficult aspects of book marketing lies in the cover design.  An effective book cover will stop a book browser in his or her tracks and then, through color, images and typography, entice the book browser to pick up the book and, dare we hope, buy the book.  That’s a LOT to ask of a single image, but it’s what your book cover designer MUST be able achieve!

Over at Smashing Magazine, in the post Excellent Book Covers and Paperbacks

Book covers are hard to design and nice to look at. An effective book cover manages to catch human’s eye and convey the idea behind the book on one single page. However, it’s getting even harder: to make a book really hard to forget, designers need to design the cover in a unique, creative and striking way. That’s not that different from Web where it’s important to build a sound information architecture upon a rather restricted design layout.

The post includes a lot of “old school” book covers of best selling books from the past.

Charlie Johnson over at the Graphic Design Blog also has a great post on 12 Remarkable Book Covers – They Will Make You Grab the Book.

When I can’t say it better, I quote…. he writes:

An expressive cover page does not let the reader forget a book. Attractive book covers play an important part in making a person choose a book, while wandering in a bookstore looking for an interesting book.

It won’t be wrong to say that majority of people judge a book from its cover. These covers help the readers guess about the storyline of the book, so it needs to be attractive and revealing.

He then goes on to display 12 FANTASTIC book covers that would stop any book browser in his/her tracks.

If there’s anywhere in the book publishing process to try to save a buck or two, it isn’t in designing the cover!