Online Book Marketing: How to Market Your Book Even if You are
Not a Salesperson
by Jeremy M. Hoover
Published on this site: June 30th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
What you do after you have written your book is as much, if not
more, important than the actual writing of it. You can take a great
book and poor marketing and have very poor results. Conversely,
I believe you can take a mediocre book, market it well, and make
very good sales from it. The only limiting factor is you. You probably
think, “I’m a writer, not a salesperson.” That’s
true, but there are some very simple things you can do to create
a website that sells your book.
- Create a direct-response sales page for your book.
This doesn’t need to be an extra site, your home page, or
anything extravagant. Devote your home page to information about
you or your most recent work and a subscription form for a newsletter
for your fans. Create a secondary page, linked to from your home
page, that sells your book. But instead of simply stating a few
sentences about your book, either put up a full book review or
a direct-response sales letter. Either way, at the end of the
review or the letter, you must ask your readers to buy your book.
Put a direct order link at the bottom of your page. Simply asking
for your readers to buy your book will increase your sales.
- Create a “fan list” you can send messages to.
On your home page, and on every page of your website, create a
newsletter subscription form for your readersto join. You don’t
need to send something out every day, or even every week. Once
a month, send out a new “flash fiction” or microfiction
story, or a new essay. Keep in touch with your readers. Send out
a special notice of a discount for your subscribers. But in each
communication with them, provide a link back to your sales page
and ask them to buy. Don’t worry they subscribed because
they like your work and are open to buying it!
- Write some articles or short stories and give them away.
You can give these away from your website as a gift for joining
your newsletter group, or you can give them away from other people’s
sites as a way to get more awareness of your work. Do a search
for “article sites” and you’ll find many sites
you can submit your work to. These are great for two reasons
- More people will be exposed to your writing (which means more
potential buyers); and
- Others may take your article or story and run it in their newsletter,
giving you even more exposure. Writing and distributing articles
or stories is a great way to build traffic to your site and confidence
in your writing.
Follow these three steps and you’ll notice an increase in
sales of your books.
If you have any questions about this article, please email me at
[email protected].
Go to Jeremy's site http://jhooverwebcopy.com/bookmarketing.htm
to see how he can help you.
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