If you are an author who is just getting ready to launch your first book, you need to have a good grasp on how to actually market it. If you don’t know what you need to do to successfully market your book and get it in front of your ideal readers, then you are here at the right place.
Read on to learn more.
Start with the Key Components
Before you start incorporating the much-needed marketing strategies, you should figure out the essential key components that most newbie authors ignore. The first key component is to identify your ideal reader so that you know exactly who you are speaking to.
Establish Your Ideal Reader
By knowing your ideal reader, you will have a much clearer perspective on the marketing copy that you will be crafting to connect with people. Also, it will save your sanity as in today’s digital world; you cannot be general with your content or marketing copy.
The thing is that when you are general, and you just try to talk to everyone, you are going to blend into all of the extra noise that is happening in the digital landscape.
If you do have an ideal reader, it doesn’t mean that they are the only person that you are going to reach. Having an ideal reader is actually for you as you are the author. So, what you are going to do is to run everything through the lens of your ideal reader.
Walk Everything Through the Lens of Your Ideal Reader
If you do this, then what will happen is that every time you publish a blog, create a video, create a social media post, or post a short, you run it through the lens of whether or not it would be relevant to your ideal reader. Would they find it interesting, funny, or helpful?
You will be thinking about whether what you are posting reflects a problem that your ideal reader is struggling with. If you write fantasy, you will think about whether your ideal reader will like and identify with the characters and whether they will follow and be interested in the story.
Speaking of fantasy, you should hire a fantasy book cover designer as the cover of your book will be just another market tool that will establish the tone of your fantasy novel and also grab the attention of your ideal reader, who will be attracted to pick up or click on the book to get a better idea of what is in it.
You get the point – when you can identify a single person and really use that as a filter for everything that you do within your marketing – it is going to be so much more specific and so much more powerful.
Choose One vs. One Thousand People
Think about marketing in the following way: if you were to stand in front of ten thousand people and try to connect with each and every one of them, it would be impossible to connect with all of them. On the other hand, if you were to be standing in front of one person whom you knew and that you knew certain traits about and that you knew what they wanted out of your talk – you could speak directly to them and have a great impact.
This is the process of identifying your ideal reader so you can be specific and very clear with your messaging.
Set Your Goals
The second thing that you need to be absolutely clear about before jumping into your marketing strategy is setting your goals. Goals are so important because they give you something to aim for. For instance, using OKR software to set and track your objectives, you might decide to sell a thousand copies of your book over the next four months.
So, when you have a specific number that you can aim at, you can then break it down and say that you need to sell a certain number of books every month, a certain number of books every week, and a certain number of books every day.
By having such kinds of goals, you can effectively break things down into more manageable chunks, and soon, you will be able to craft a plan on how to actually reach those manageable milestones. Creating goals will give you something to aim at, and when you don’t have goals, you are just wandering around.
Plan for Reviews
Now that you know who your ideal reader is and what your goals are, you can focus on a super-powerful marketing strategy for your book. We are talking about reviews. You should figure out how to get reader reviews on Amazon, Barnes-Noble, or any other outlet.
Reviews are going to be key. Why, you might ask? The answer is that peer reviews are going to tell your readers who are interested in the gene what they thought of the book. Book reviews are really different from having a magazine review by an editor.
Why do Peer Reviews Matter?
Peer reviews are the reviews that people leave on Amazon or any other outlet, which is why they are going to be honest about what they think of the book. Peer reviews are critical within the buying process as they are seen as social proof. When you have proof that people loved your book, then the people who meet the criteria of your ideal reader are more likely to buy your book.
The trick here is that reviews can be difficult to obtain. It can be an ongoing process, so you want to break the entire process of getting reviews into a few sections. In the first section, you will want to focus on getting reviews the week that your book is released.
Focus on the Follow-Up Phase
Craft a strategy of friends, family, and your beta readers and get them to release a review on Amazon or Goodreads. This is going to be the key to getting excitement going about your new release. So, getting a plan in place to actually know how to get these reviews started within the book launch is going to be incredibly crucial.
The follow-up phase will be where the planning will continue right after the initial book release. You have to continue to prompt your readers to leave a review that could be on your social media or within your newsletter so that the momentum keeps going.
