Book Promotion Services Can Help Boost Sales
With thousands of new titles released each year, promoting books today is a tough challenge. That’s why it is so important to develop highly creative and unique strategies tailored to each title and individual author in order to stand out among the competition. At Smith Publicity, our team understands how to reach both readers and media, focusing on making sure they discover your work. We strive to provide the best promotion campaigns by taking the time to get to know your book and create tailored strategies that will appeal to readers facing a sea of choices. Our top priority is to make sure your book gets noticed.
Successfully Promoting Books Requires a Variety of Tactics:
- Visibility on social media – posting content that entices readers and provides a platform for communicating with them is invaluable; it generates word-of-mouth promotion for your book
- Media outreach – whenever the media covers your work in stories and broadcasts, it adds credibility and encourages readers to explore more of what you have to offer
- Cultivating author brand – people are often drawn to authors and their works due to the presence of the author themselves; when an author succeeds in public engagements, such as interviews and appearances, you create relationships that garner interest and sales
- Events, appearances, signings – telling your story is a powerful way to get noticed. When you have the chance to make a full presentation, it can be even more effective. Holding events at relevant places ensures that they are both memorable and draw attention from the media
- Goodreads visibility–being visible and present on platforms like Goodreads can help you reach readers and increase the chances of people discovering your work. While it requires dedication to maintain pages and profiles, however, the results are always worth your investment
- Video promotion– authors can take the promotion of their work to the next level by creating videos and posting them to a YouTube channel. This is an effective way to reach readers interested in the author’s topic
- Paid reviews for your book – reviews can be an essential factor in driving potential readers’ interest, so it’s important to ensure that you have people sharing their positive thoughts about your work to help boost its visibility
- Expos and trade shows –going out and socializing with people in person is an excellent way to cultivate relationships and garner interest. People tend to read more from those they are familiar with
Marketing and Promotion Need to Work Together
Highly effective book promotional services include other marketing elements of critical importance, such as outreach to media. A campaign for book publicity can begin several months before your release date with the use of Advance Review Copies (ARCS). These are sent to long-lead media (magazines) that need significant advance notice for their articles. For example, during August, some magazines are working on stories that will appear at holiday time. As the release date approaches, the media outreach is refocused to short-lead media – outlets such as radio and TV shows and newspapers that work more in real-time. A radio show producer, for example, can receive a pitch and want to set up an author interview for the next day.
Campaigns with media outreach are typically three months long, although, at Smith Publicity, we do offer shorter-duration services for some books. Authors should understand that all media opportunities should be considered valuable. Even interviews on small shows or stories in local newspapers or niche newsletters can result in sales and lead to more significant opportunities. The fact is you can never know who is listening, watching, or reading something at any given time.
Effectively Using Social Media as a Promotional Tool
An author’s social media channels are excellent for a means of developing and maintaining a reader base. It’s essential to not overdue promotional posts and tweets; you need to have authentic engagement with people and offer interesting information. When these are provided, readers will be more likely to be drawn to an author’s website, free chapter downloads, etc.
The days of the classic author book signing as a promotional vehicle are mostly over unless an author is a household name. To be well-attended and useful today, signings need to be actual events. It means authors give presentations, answer audience questions, and make the event as interactive as possible.
Importance of Author Branding to Market Books
Author brand cultivation, known also as personality cultivation and expert elevation, positions an author as an expert related to the topic of their work. Typically, the author is using media coverage to spark promotional opportunities for books. These include:
- Lead generation
- Speaking engagement inquiries
- Consulting opportunities
- Workshop and presentation invitations
Videos are another excellent way for authors to connect with fans; seeing someone rather than merely reading about them is compelling and persuasive. Therefore, video-sharing sites like YouTube can be especially useful tools to reach readers. It’s not hard for authors to produce relatively high-quality videos with little investment. Each one should be no more than two minutes in length and cover topics related to the book. They should be informational, not overly oriented on sales. It may take time to build up views and channel subscribers, but the videos also make popular content for social media.
The Promotional Nature of Book-Related Websites
Last on Our List, Paid Book Reviews
If you’re looking for the best book promotion services, let Smith Publicity develop a promotional campaign for your book. We’ll explore and present all of the options, and help you achieve more book sales and author exposure. Contact us today and let Smith Publicity provide help with one of our unique promotional campaigns for books.