I love tuning words into books and I get such a buzz out of hitting the Publish button and seeing work go live online or accepting delivery of a batch of books for a client. If I experience this buzz and sense of thrill, it can be nothing compared with how an author must feel to actually see their work published and to hold their book for the first time. Most tell me, they can’t believe they actually did it! It can be an emotional experience and so fulfilling!
There can be a downside to this wonderfully euphoric experience and it is this:
After the initial flutter of sales as the author tells others about their work being published, and as the books hit the online stores for the first time, sales can settle or dwindle and this can be a shock.
This is more so the case for published works of fiction than non-fiction. Why? Because someone will always be searching for a certain term for non-fiction titles and if your book title, subtitle, description, keywords and metadata are targeted to searches then your book has a fighting chance. Also in the scheme of things there are less competing books for non-fiction.
For fiction books, you can use the same criteria to help your book stand out, but most book titles aren’t set up for easy finding and so can get lost amongst the thousands of other books competing for attention in the fiction categories.
Books that are free, promoted, are written by high profile authors and that have large numbers of positive reviews will dominate the front pages of Amazon.
Sure there are a few things an experienced publisher can do to help the book in its sales rank but the publishers work really ends in publishing the book unless marketing is part of the package.
Anything that happens after publishing is book marketing. It can be a add on service for many publishers but be careful as marketing really is a long term process and any short term marketing processes will bring short term gain.
Don’t be afraid to do some marketing of your own book. I give some marketing support but for the most effective marketing advice I can give is to get behind and in front of your book, get out there and show off what you did!
I have found that the clients that took an active role in their book once launched had the best success in spreading the word about their book than those who expected their book to be found by readers.
Competition can be fierce and marketing costs can be expensive and there are no guarantees. You can put your book in front of readers but the buying is up to them.
You can go with paid marketing or unpaid marketing where you trade your time for cost but even paid marketing requires performance reviews and testing and tweaking to see what can and needs to be changed and works best for any campaign run.
Even traditional publishers expect their clients to engage with their readers.
Book marketing is something I am taking an active interest in as an add on service for clients but my main priority is doing my research on optimizing the book for searches as much as possible, having a great book cover design and publishing the best book possible for every client.
Remember the hard work really starts not ends when you get your book published so keep this in mind when self publishing.