BOOK MARKETING STARTS BY SETTING MARKETING GOALS:
Each writer or author will have slightly different goals. My blog post will speak directly to website bloggers and/or to fiction authors. However, if you publish low-content books or children’s books — or even coloring books, all of these techniques will be relevant to you because they are about basic marketing. Just change up whatever technique is mentioned and make it more fitting to whatever type of marketing you need to do.
ESTABLISH REALISTIC MARKETING GOALS:
Marketing is not something that you do. It’s something that you build. Everyone has a first day and sits behind a computer not knowing what to do first. So let’s start there.
BUILD A READERSHIP:
If you are self-publishing any kind of books or launching a blog from scratch, you will need to build a readership. Building a readership is also something you build over time. Everyone starts with no readers but their parents or spouses. However, once you establish a building process, the readers will accumulate slowly but surely.
One of the only things left that professional publishers can offer authors is an automatic reader list. They have gathered millions of names, addresses and emails over fifty years or more. So that is a valuable commodity and the one and only reason you should think about being with a professional publishing company.
However, some younger people who are social media savvy have been able to build millions of followers as an “influencer” so don’t count yourself out as someone who may have good luck with self-marketing.
If you are authoring fiction and selling books, your first order of business is to start collecting emails into a reader list. A reader list is referred to as a “newsletter list” in the industry, but when you are building a readership, I prefer “reader list”. Going forward, just know they are the same thing.
START COLLECTING EMAILS: Collecting emails to send to people about your book or books. I would recommend MailerLite as they are the least expensive but professional platform for a beginner. Everyone starts with a free account. They allow you to collect a couple of hundred emails before they want to get paid. And then they charge you per hundred or so. So your expenses keep steady with your marketing results.
JOIN 
GOODREADS: Establish a presence on GoodReads.com where the most avid and voracious readers hang out. Sign up for an account with them and you will get a chance to upload your book cover. It can be a little confusing at
Goodreads so I’ll post a video about joining and navigating around there.
The biggest tip I can give you is that Goodreads is a website about readers. When you log in, it recognizes you only as a reader until you go to your author dashboard. It took me a long, long time to figure this out. I was always looking for my book and I was disoriented within five minutes.
ESTABLISH LOCAL COMMUNITY CONTACT: Every library would be interested in who their local authors are. You can set up a talk and sell some books when you do a book launch.
I personally am too shy (and too old) to go this route, but if you happen to be a bit younger or extroverted, this can create a HUGE BUZZ. Local people become fans, they tell people they know you, they buy paperbacks and hardcovers — and many want you to sign them! So don’t underestimate the life of the buzz you can create by talking about your book in front of a few people at the local library.
KINDLE SELECT: Seriously consider entering your book into Kindle Select on Amazon so you can give away many books each quarter. This is the quickest way to get attention and reviews. The more readers you have, the better the odds of getting a review.
Many new authors get too hung up on how long it took them to write the book and they don’t like the idea of not getting paid for it. However, Amazon is the biggest search engine for books. That means that your competition is Steven King, Nora Roberts, Lee Childs, Agatha Christie, etc.
It’s important to understand that allowing people to read your book may create a fan, a repeat reader. That’s your realistic goal. Unless you have hundreds or thousands you can put into marketing each month, you will be building a readership one reader at a time.
LOW-BID AMAZON AD STRATEGY: And the last step for absolute beginners is to learn strategies for low-bid strategies (going for the low-hanging fruit) using Amazon Ads. This is where you bit .12 cents a click. You won’t rocket to the top of the best seller list, but this is a great strategy to begin to crawl your way out of oblivion. I’ll have a dedicated blog post about how to set up a low-bit strategy.
BUILD A SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE:
I personally don’t like social media — the whole thing. However, I also don’t really like marketing either! But in today’s world, if you want to self publish, you need to market your books or blog and there are lots of ways to market even if you are shy or introverted, like I am.
First establish Social Media Accounts in your professional Name. This could be your author name, pen name, website name, blogging handle, or some other name that is dedicated to your business. Don’t blend any personal social media with your professional social media presence.
So the first thing to do is to establish accounts at all of the following social media platforms:
FACEBOOK – Facebook is the biggest arena for Boomers, who are retired and have the most money and the most time to read. So you need to establish a presence on Facebook even if you are younger and don’t use it yourself. As stated above, create a Business Page in your author name, blog name, website name or pen name. This will be dedicated to subjects around your writing. If you don’t know how to do this, just search on YouTube for “How to start a Facebook Page”.
TWITTER-NOW-KNOWN-AS X: This website is growing quickly. It has the largest political group and finance group, both left and right, on the internet. This group too also tends to be economically comfortable and will buy what they want. If you don’t write about politics, it’s okay. You will be “posting to google analytics”. More on that below.
Posting to Google Analytics means that Google spider bots crawl the internet without stop. They are constantly cataloguing and making decisions about who is an authority on what subject all the time. So even if you don’t get a lot of views or reposts, the google bots are still absorbing what you are doing.
I don’t get that many reposts, but the most traffic that comes to my website is from Google. So it’s still working. It’s important to know this so you don’t feel like you’re being ignored or wasting your time.
LINKEDIN – If you write on business or off any type of service, anything business people would need or like, then you want to establish a presence on LinkedIn as well. Most people don’t look for their next book or interesting blogs on LinkedIn, but again, you are posting to the algorithms. In the next installment, I’ll be going over how to find complementary products and/or interests to post about, especially if you only have one book.
GAB – This website is a bit controversial because they had a big fight years ago with the ADL, but it is still a place that has a huge Christian presence. I’ve never seen anything anti-Jewish or antisemitic posted so I’m not sure what the big todo was about, but in any event, I thought I would mention this. It could have been just a big ego fight between two guys. But if you write Christian fiction, like I do, or write things that fellow Christians, patriots, or other spiritual people may be interested in, you will want to establish a presence on Gab. Just don’t let this be your own social media because it really specializes in Christian and Patriotic users and they are not the only readers out there.
INSTAGRAM: You also need to post to Instagram. This social media website has a much younger demographic that uses it, but they are also glued to their screens all the time. Instagram is very popular and has lots of graphic posts as well as videos.
PINTEREST – Establish a business page with Pinterest. Pinterest has millions of users and is probably the biggest search engine next to Google and Amazon. So this is a must. Again, don’t mix business with personal. Establish a page as an author, blogger, or writer.
There are ways to create many different pictorial posts representing one book, so be sure to join Pinterest right away.
TIKTOK: If you’re thirty-five and older, I would recommend holding off on TikTok, mainly because it is a platform for videos. Candid videos. There was a trend called “Booktok” that was pretty popular for awhile, but it got so competitive, I think it has blown over — unless you can post videos everyday.
Tiktok is also battling for survival with the US Courts. No one knows their fate at the time of this writing. However, like I said earlier, their platform is for video only. People under 35 have grown up videoing themselves all day long, so posting on Tiktok is easy for them. But for those of us over 35, making a video could be a half day or full day affair. So with that warning, I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether Tiktok is for you.
ESTABLISH A PLAN OF ACTION:
First: It’s only a plan of action if you do something about it all. So be sure to open your social media accounts in the next days if you haven’t established them already.
Second: Establish a mailing list on one of the many platforms out there. I would recommend MailerLite as the first email collection platform. There are others out there but the last time I did research — which was about six months previous to this blog post — they were the best deal for the monthly money. I was paying almost $135 a month to Mailchimp (I had about 3500 emails) and I got the same program for $35 a month at MailerLite.
Most programs start free, but don’t underestimate how soon you will build up a following.
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I use a four-part plot structure, so I break my character arc into four sections. This allows me to keep up with the character development and also don’t resolve the inner conflict too early.
When I self-published my first novel, I finished it and uploaded it and waited. That’s when I learned how important marketing the book is. I also learned through the next several books how important it is to take advantage of each tiny phase of a book launch for marketing. That’s what this blog post is about.
In the last installment, I described how to start your duties and obligations list with realistic times associated with each one. The list will prove itself over a week or so. Then you will be ready to expand on that list and make a series of workflows, templates, and procedure lists or diagrams. I have posted my own above to jog your memory as to where we left off.
veryone writes for a reason. Knowing why you write is important, especially as a beginner writer. Writing a book is not hard, but it can be a long process. If your purpose for writing is clear, this will give you the energy and inspiration to spur you on if and/or when the going gets a little tough.
I'm old enough to remember 'phone guys' that worked for Bell South or whatever the phone company was called back then. These men -- they didn't have phone women back then -- would show up with big toolbelts and gaffs or lineworker boots on. These boots had cleats or little metal spikes in them that was a safety feature. These men know everything about the phone system. They would climb the wooden telephone poles and they could fix phones outside on the pole or inside in the houses. They were familiar with the entire system. That is one group of technical workers that have fallen away.
Very often life dishes out some hard times to some of us. Did you experience, survive and prosper through some difficult times that you feel compelled to write a memoir about? You don't have to have been a famous celebrity or someone with a Moses-like mission. You may have fell on hard times and you want to share your experience, strength or faith that kept you going. People love inspirational stories.
A gun silencer, also known as a suppressor, is a muzzle device that reduces the sound of a gunshot. It does this by slowing down and cooling the expanding gases that are released from the barrel when the gun is fired. Silencers do not completely silence a gunshot, but they can reduce the sound level by 20 to 30 decibels. This can make a significant difference in the loudness of the gunshot, making it much less noticeable to people nearby.
A ballistic report is a record of the characteristics of a bullet, such as its caliber, weight, and velocity. Ballistic reports are used by law enforcement to identify the type of gun that was used in a crime. They can also be used to determine the range from which a shot was fired.
Here are some of the terms that are commonly used in the field of gun silencers and ballistics:
A silencer can leave markings on a bullet. These markings are called "tool marks" and they are caused by the rough interior surface of the silencer rubbing against the bullet as it passes through. The tool marks can be microscopic or macroscopic, depending on the type of silencer and the type of bullet.
Ballistics experts can use these tool marks to identify the silencer that was used in a shooting. They can also use the tool marks to determine the distance from which the shot was fired.
Although I follow a detailed outline of the story before I even start writing, each novel presents its own issues and/or problems. In this novel, I had several timelines I had to keep straight.
The second thing I do in Layer 5 is to fill out the Synopsis section. This section is in the upper right-hand side of the Scrivener platform.
Now, because I had to kind of abandon the full subplot in Layer 4, I will be finishing the subplot while I'm doing the descriptions and the synopsis box. Once I'm done with this layer, then I'll be back to discuss what happens in Layer 6!