Readers love nothing more than suggesting books to their friends and family and anyone else who will listen on social media.
As a whole artist, your job is to set things up so you can feed into this recommendation system with minimal ongoing effort. You’ll need to learn some basic tools and techniques and stay vigilant as new trends and opportunities arise. Remember, despite how it might seem sometimes, you are not pandering or trading in your soul. You’re meeting people where they live, communicating with them in terms they understand. Marketing in the Internet age is about seeking connections and respecting and maintaining them once established.
The fundamental building blocks of Internet book marketing are as follows:
A website with well-crafted SEO (search engine optimization)
An email list (usually used to send out regular communications, like a newsletter)
An up-to-date and completed Amazon author page
Some sort of social media presence
Relaunch every 3 months
Yes, relaunch every 3 months. There is no publication date, or rather, every day is pub day. What do I mean by that? Your book is like a child. Just because they grow up and move out doesn’t mean you don’t have to parent them. Books have a long shelf life. They need to be reintroduced to audiences all the time and the best salespeople for your book are the readers that already love it.
So, relaunch with new content or a different format or new art. Have fun with it. It’s a celebration!
And now an Obit:
“Resurrected and Recycled”
Phil Jesson, born in 2001 in Indianapolis. He passed away last Sunday. He had laid under an 18-wheeler at a truck stop in the middle of winter and waited until the driver came back to the truck and unknowingly ran over him. He left a suicide note on the windshield. The driver (name withheld) was quoted as saying, “I thought it was a ticket so I didn’t bother reading it first.” The note simply read: “Thank you for making the thoughts stop.”
In the obit, it is interesting to consider whether the driver is partly responsible or not.