Guest Expert: Phyllis Zimbler Miller
Thanks to the Internet, the release date of our published or self-published books no longer matter as long as the books are available online. We can continue to market our books indefinitely.
And this is a great time of year to look ahead and commit to trying new promotional opportunities.
Here then are some ideas to help you promote in 2012. Choose a couple of them to try out in the new year.
- Sparkabook.com – a site for selling rights that includes the ability to upload video and audio.
- Booksforfilm.ning.com – ask to be accepted for this site that promotes books ready for film.
- Join the “Book Marketing” group on LinkedIn to ask questions and exchange information. (Please follow the guidelines for the group.)
- Try out the new QuickQuiz feature on BookBuzzr – see http://www.freado.com/quickquiz.
- Participate on tweetchats on Twitter – there are weekly tweetchats on a variety of topics; consider book/writing topics as well as topics related to the subject of your fiction or nonfiction books.
- If you have been using your book cover as your social media profile photo, consider switching to your own headshot. People relate to people – usually the relationship comes before the interest in the book.
- If you are only using the initial of your last name instead of your full last name on your LinkedIn profile (assuming the profile name is your author name), switch to using your full name. As an author, you want to promote name recognition.
- If you do not yet have ebook versions of your books, get them now! The year 2012 is going to be the year that ebooks, already exploding all over the place, are going to explode exponentially because of the introduction of more and more ereaders and tablets. You can do the ebook conversion yourself or hire an ebook converter. Just make sure that your ebooks are formatted correctly so that they look good on ereaders and tablets.
- If you are self-publishing books or ebooks this year, consider hiring a professional editor if grammar, punctuation, and spelling are not your best skills. Do NOT rely only on your computer’s spell check and grammar check. If you get people to sample your book, you want them to read the entire book. You don’t want them to stop reading because of annoying errors in the book.
- Whenever you notice someone is having a contest and asking for prizes to give away, consider if the contest is appropriate for you to donate copies of your books. If your books are in digital format, this is very easy.
- Listen to marketing webinars, including the ones that BookBuzzr sponsors, for promotion ideas.
- Check that your Amazon public profile and your Amazon Author Page are current. If you have new information to add (or new blog post feeds), do so. (You can also now get a customized Amazon Author Page URL.)
- Final tip: If you want to use one service (there’s a free option) for scheduling your social media updates, check out Hootsuite.com .
The above are some ideas for possible New Year’s resolutions for promoting your books in 2012. If you have other ideas to suggest, please leave a comment below.
Remember, we authors are NOT in competition with each other. The more we encourage people to read the more readers there are for all of us.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the marketing consulting company MillerMosaicLLC.com, which works with clients including book authors to effectively use social media, blogging and WordPress websites.
She is also the author of fiction and nonfiction books and has a new website at www.PhyllisZimblerMiller.com about her books and her volunteer activities.
