Top 5 Basic Marketing Tips for a Self Publish Author
In one of our earlier articles, we discussed that for self publishing authors, writing the book is one part while marketing it effectively is another major part. If you spend 60% of your time and effort on writing the book then 40% of the time and effort needs to go into marketing it.
Self published authors are not just authors, they also need to be quite good marketers to sell their books. If you’re a self published author and want to sell your books, you’ll need to do several things. You will need to market the book in a way that will bring in more buyers for your book.
However, you’ll also need to be smart about what you do, since the book will be your only product. This means you need to be careful about how you spend your money. You can’t spend a fortune on advertising. You need to spend it in the right places. You need to choose the best online marketing methods to promote your book.
So let us look at the basics of marketing for a self published author.
1- Define Your Target Market
Defining your target audience is the very basic of marketing. There are two ways to go about this. The traditional way is to look at your content and determine which segment of the society or age group identifies with it. Are you targeting the Young Adult group, children or adults? Men or women? Fiction or nonfiction? And so on.
Whatever your target market is, figure it out before taking any other step. Once you have fully understood your target market, then you can devise your marketing strategy to target that section.
The second way is to identify a target section and then curate your content on the demand of that section. For instance, if you think that the YA section likes crime and thriller novels more then you can write a thriller on crime.
Which ever approach you prefer, make sure that you know your target audience. Because the rest of your marketing strategy is going to be based on your target audience.
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2- Set Up Your Own Website.
The first thing that you need to do as a self published author is to set up your own website and social media presence. Social media accounts are not difficult to set up but you should back them up with a website.
In 2021, if you are an author or any sort of professional then it makes absolutely no sense not to have your own website to showcase your talent and skills. Your website serves as your business card. For self published authors, this is where your readers will search about your works.
How good your website is depends on how much you are willing to spend on it. Most platforms like WordPress allow users to create quite decent websites for free but you may need to upgrade to access full features that include mailing lists and payment gateways.
3- Mailing List
The importance of having a mailing list cannot be stressed enough. Your mailing list is how you stay connected with your readers, without them having to visit your site for every bit of news.
Having a mailing list allows you to alert your readers and subscribers in advance. Self-published authors have reported that having a mailing list allows them to sell the first few copies almost instantly, giving the books much needed traction on platforms like Amazon KDP.
4- Social Media Presence
Having a presence on social media platforms is vital for self published authors. This is how you can remain in touch with your readers. The more you interact with your readers, the more your reader base will grow. Think of it like this, every engagement on social media is basically free advertisement and promotion of your books.
How to develop your own social media presence?
This is an important question. There is no one size fits all approach here. There are so many social media platforms but if we talk about the big ones like facebook, instagram, youtube, twitter and snapchat. Then you do not necessarily have to be active on every single platform.
Create your accounts on every platform but choose one where you spend most of your time. It can be twitter for instance. Many self published authors choose twitter as their primary interactive platform. Christopher Paolini, the author of Inheritance Cycle is one such example, though he is not a self published author.
Use platforms like facebook to promote your newly released books. You can buy advertisements on facebook to promote any content that you like. You can also boost your posts but it is always better to build your pages up organically.
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5- Collaborations
Once you have got your website and social media presence sorted out, you can then think about collaborating with other authors or influencers. The more following you have, the easier it will be to collaborate with others, especially influencers.
You may have to spend a bit to collaborate with influencers. You can get invited to their channels for short interviews, if you are looking to increase your reach. Collaborating with influencers and other authors is the newest marketing and promotion method that has taken the market with a storm.
So make sure that once you have established your social media presence, you go for some collaborations to generate more traction.
Although there are more marketing techniques, we have distilled down the five most important and basic marketing techniques that self published authors absolutely need to implement. Follow these basic techniques and once you are done, you can check out some other articles on this site where we talk about more detailed marketing and promotional tips.
Main Image Source: Pixabay
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