How to Stand Out
Despite being in the age of business and social media, the publishing industry continues to flourish. The data from Statista revealed that at least 675 million books were sold in 2019 alone!
For a future publisher like you, that’s a big thumbs-up, but it also tells you another: you’re up against thousands of competitors. How do you make yourself stand out among the sea of high-caliber and talented writers?
The secret is to compete in a platform most people are using nowadays. You can define an advert that will be most effective online.
Things to Consider During the Planning Stage
To market your book without a plan is to traverse the unknown waters without a map (or any navigation tool you like). It gets you nowhere.
The question is, how do you plan? What factors should you consider when you’re close to promoting your masterpiece? Below, our Phoenix AZ PPC agency shares a few:
1. Market
Who are you writing to? One of the biggest mistakes authors make is to write to everyone. Instead, be as specific as possible.
Let’s pretend you’re writing a children’s book. Is it for females or males? Do you have an age range in mind? Usually, big-picture books are more attractive to the little ones. They are also often short since they have a shorter attention span.
2. Marketing Channel
Where do you plan to promote your book? Today, you can already define advert online through different ad platforms such as Google and Amazon.
These two are excellent choices for the following reasons:
- They have an incredible reach. For example, with Google, you can publish your ads across its networks such as YouTube, Google Search, and Gmail.
- You can control your expenses. You can set your preferred budget for the campaign and adjust it as you go along.
Even better, you can do online marketing without doing away with offline or traditional marketing. Both can complement each other. After all, one of the objectives is to reach out as many leads as possible.
3. Urgency
Some books are evergreen, which means they have a more timeless feel or theme. Think about folktales and love stories. Then, there are manuscripts that are time-sensitive. A good example is a work that tackles US elections or trade wars.
How soon you need to see results and sell can affect your marketing strategies. Online, you may perform, say, organic SEO and paid advertising. When time is of the essence, you may benefit from focusing on the latter first while you work to appear in organic searches.
Challenges You May Face
If you think writing a book is difficult enough, wait until you have to publish it. You will encounter a long list of challenges. For newbies, these may be the primary concerns:
1. Budget
It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing online or traditional marketing or both. You will need and have to spend money. Writers may spend as little as a thousand to as much as $20,000, according to Self Publishing School.
2. Competition
All you need is to go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble to find out how competitive the industry is. You’re up against not only new writers but also highly experienced ones. These include popular authors such as Paulo Coelho or Tim Ferriss.
3. Plot, Topic, or Theme
With so many books out there, others have become repetitive. It’s already a “been there, done that” scenario.
Granted, you wrote yours because you have a compelling story to tell, a new piece of critical information, or unique strategies to solve a problem. How do you make it your selling point then?
4. Design
The saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” doesn’t hold true with manuscripts, unfortunately. It’s a common instinct among consumers to go after what sounds fun, controversial, intriguing, and mind-boggling.
When you design your book, you have limited opportunities to correct a cover and only one chance to get your title right. The challenge now is how to make each of them count.
Marketing Strategies and Tactics to Use To Market Your First Book
If there’s a silver lining, it’s the fact that you can still do something to publish your book with a cost-effective marketing campaign.
These are the best ideas to rise above the challenges, get your planning rolling, and see your name among digital platforms and bookshelves:
- Publish in different formats and platforms. Besides publishing with crisp pages, you can convert your manuscript to epub, Kindle for Amazon, and even PDF.
- Give free content. This can be your book’s first chapter or an excerpt that runs a few pages. Another option is to provide a reading guide.
- Maximize your network. Now is the right time to reach out to your writer buddies or join reading clubs, organizations, and associations. You can meet people who can assist you in publishing and even provide you with (sometimes free) promotion.
- Use social media. Millions of people are out there, which means they are a rich source of leads. Be wary, though. To make sure you don’t waste time, know your market and find out which social media they frequent to.
- Create a video. Do you know that the average person spends at least five hours on YouTube? Videos appeal to Internet users since they are highly stimulating, and information is easier to understand. You can use it to your advantage by launching your own channel or publishing trailers and teasers of your book.
- Define Advert Online with SEO and PPC marketing. Pay-per-click advertising gives you the exposure you need fast. It’s a good way to introduce your work online and start your digital marketing campaign. Contact an expert today to find out how this works.
Write and Market Your First Book Today
With these ideas, you’re already taking small yet big steps toward reaching your dream.
Dallas Book Publishing Companies inspires the theme of this blog post. Do you want to write about a healthy lifestyle? Get some ideas from the Ardor SEO official website.
