Tips On Marketing Your Book And Making Money

You have finally finished the latest of your novel masterpieces and now its time to begin marketing it. You love to write books, but it is also a job and you rely on your books to produce an income of sorts. In that case, marketing is one of the most important part of the entire process. Here are some marketing pointers to help you market your book the best you can.

These days I'm a full time programmer and writer, but before that I worked in small business (retail and wholesale) for almost twenty years. Large companies have many divisions, and a weaker part of the company can be supported by the stronger ones. In small business you sell product or you close up shop.

Books are much the same. Sure, once you have a decent back list your earlier works can add a little income without a whole load of promotional efforts, but it's your latest and greatest that you're measured by.

Maybe it's my small business background, but I regard my books as products to be sold, rather than works of art people should be worshipping. I may treat them as works of art during the writing and editing process, but after that's done they're just widgets, and the aim of the game is to get people to buy my widget instead of someone else's.

(My publisher's sales manager calls me the one-man publicity machine, and she's the one in sales!)

Now, it's common knowledge that who you know has nothing to do with getting your book published. (Note that I'm talking about fiction writers here. Non-fiction is completely different.) Most novels are published because somebody thought they could make money off them, and because there are so many writers publishers will choose the books they think they'll make the most money from.

Who you know is important when it comes to making a success of your books. Word of mouth is the single most vital ingredient, the silver bullet and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow all rolled into one. To illustrate, imagine you receive two emails recommending different books. One is from an author, telling you their book is great and you should buy it. The other is from a co-worker, telling you about this great book they just read. Who do you trust? (If you hate your co-workers, just read 'family member' for 'co-worker', and if you hate all your family as much as the people you work with I really don't think any example I give is going to fly.)

Apart from being generous with copies of your book, you should also have accounts with LJ and Blogger. If you comment on other blogs you'll be leaving a link back to your profile (although commenting for the sake of it is frowned upon. You're commenting because you feel strongly enough to voice an opinion, not just saying something so you can push your link in everyone else's face.)

You should designate one of your blogs as your main point of contact and focus all your posts on that one, else search engines like Technorati won't rate any of your blogs. You can always link to your main blog from the others. You can also use each blog for different things - one for the books, one for personal stuff. That way people interested in your books won't have to wade through posts about your cat(s).

Okay, you have your blogs and you've filled out your profile. There are links to your book on Amazon, B&N and so on, but nobody is visiting. How do you advertise yourself?

You don't!

The world wide web works best as a linked collection of information, with huge visitor numbers for the sites with the most information. If you want people to visit you need to provide them with something of interest to read, and I don't mean cover shots and sample chapters from your books. Write about writing, declare a goal ("I will have a short story accepted by the end of this year") and blog about your hits and misses. Worried you won't have anything to say? You're supposed to be a writer.