These days, whether you’re self-published or traditionally published, a lot of your book promotion will be done online. I thought I’d go over some of the things that have worked for me (or that I’ve seen work for others) and some of the things that haven’t worked for me (or that I’ve seen not work for others). I’m sure there will be lots of folks who can think of exceptions, so this is just meant as a ground guide to get you thinking. If you have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments section.

Online Book Promotion: What Doesn’t Work

Spamming, or otherwise annoying, people

You’d think, “well, duh,” but I get a direct message every day from someone on Twitter that, as soon as I followed them back, sent me a check-out-my-site or buy-my-book-at-Amazon link. Depending on my mood, I might promptly un-follow someone who does that. Though it’s online, it feels like the sort of in-your-face marketing that we all hate.

Likewise, I get people who visit my blog for the first time, say the equivalent of “nice site,” and devote the rest of their comment to posting links to their blog and blurbs about their book.  I mind that less if they’ve made a thoughtful comment first, but even so, someone else’s blog is not the place for you to pimp your book.

Nobody wants email spam either. You shouldn’t send book announcements to someone that hasn’t signed up for your newsletter. It’s not appropriate to mass email everyone in your address book about your book, especially if you got their email address for another reason (when I was first experimenting with advertising, I bought a sponsored post on an author’s book blog, and, now, almost a year later, I still get to hear about it when he has something new out. Gee. Just because someone else is self-publishing, too, doesn’t mean he or she is interested in your genre or your type of book).

Proper internet etiquette is only to send promotional mail to people who have signed up for your mailing list, one that includes a “how to unsubscribe” button at the bottom of each message.

Signing up for book promotion services

This is one of those ones where people will probably chime in and say such-and-such program did work for them. That’s fine. I believe you, if that’s the case, though my guess is that you’ve got a great cover and a blurb that appeals to a wide range of readers (i.e. you would have “made it” even if you’d just promoted on your own).

I’ve seen more cases like this:

  • Author signs up for a book promotion service for $10 a month.
  • Author gets a widget to put on his/her site that, when clicked, takes an interested party to read an excerpt at the service’s site (when we’re talking ebooks, it probably would have been better to send the reader straight to Amazon, B&N, etc. where they could have downloaded a sample for their e-reader – not many people want to read chapters on their computer screen)
  • Author spends lots of time on Twitter, Facebook, etc. promoting the link to their author page at such-and-such service.

Ultimately, the book promotion service wins at every turn. It makes money from the author (when it comes to business, there’s nothing better than signing someone up for a recurring monthly fee!) and it has authors helping promote it through the links and widgets.

Does the author win, though? Enh. I think you can do as well, if not better, on your own. At $10 a month, it’s not like someone is actually putting effort into helping you sell your books. They’re just providing you tools that put more steps in between the reader and a book sale (instead of sending a reader to Amazon to download a sample, you’re making them click, click, click to read pages on this widget, a widget that’s branded with the business’s name…).

I say, put a sample up on your site, and then promote that. (Here’s one of my excerpts – you can see that I have a couple thousand words from the book on the page and links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords (where readers can grab any ebook format) at the top and the bottom.  You’ll see that there are no widgets there, or anywhere else on the site, and the layout is simple (i.e. what people are used to… They scroll down if they want to read more, the same as on every other website out there). And I know it works too, because I use affiliate links to monitor sales that come from my site.

It’s always going to be better for you to send someone to your site where they can surf around, maybe find your blog, see if you’re an interesting person, bookmark your site, subscribe to your RSS feed, etc.

Participating in forums

I debated over which section to put this into. I’ve used forums now and then, and if you read my How to Get Book Reviews post, you know it’s how I got my first reviews when I was starting out.

I think forums can be helpful, the ones that are communities where readers hang out, but there’s a limited audience of forum regulars that will be exposed to you and your work. Also, do to the nature of forums, your posts get buried by everyone else’s posts, and it’ll be rare for them to have any lasting value (i.e. good luck finding something you wrote about two weeks ago). Compare this to a blog post where your words are front-and-center and other people’s comments are way down at the bottom. It takes a lot of time to become a known entity on a forum, and that’s frankly time that would be better spent elsewhere.

Even if you’re only on a forum for fifteen or twenty minutes a day, think about how many hours that is each month. You could have written your own blog posts in that time, or, in a year, you could have written an entire novel. Ultimately promoting through a forum is a bit like promoting through a book promote service. You’re spending as much time building up the forum (adding fresh content that the search engines will love) as you are selling your own work. Just think about how much money some of the popular ebook forums are making in advertising. That’s all made possible by the hours you and others spend there, writing content for free.

Advertising

Here’s another one I debated on. I have found advertising useful in rare cases. I haven’t had much luck buying sponsored posts, even on big, general-audience ebook sites (perhaps because I write fantasy, and that’s a fairly niche genre), but I’ve done decently at Goodreads (I have a post on advertising at Goodreads on my author blog, and, though it’s outdated in terms of my sales numbers, it’s still relevant for those looking to advertise there).

Most advertising, however, doesn’t pan out. Authors don’t break even, and most of the time they don’t even come close. Some people will argue that it’s okay to lose money on advertising, because at least you’re getting exposure that helps you “build a brand.” I’m skeptical about how well branding works when it comes to promoting books online (there are any number of charts out there from polls on how readers find new books, and word-of-mouth usually has the biggest slice of the pie with advertising being minor to non-existent). Even if it does work, we indie authors can’t really afford that kind of marketing anyway. Books don’t have a high enough profit margin to allow us to burn through money just to try and acquire new readers.

Video Book Trailers

It ought to be clear from the evidence that these don’t work (when was the last time you saw someone with more than a couple dozen views of a video book trailer on Youtube), but authors persist in doing them. If you want to do one because you like video editing, and it looks like fun, then by all means do so, but please don’t think you have to have a book trailer.

Yes, it’s true that videos occasionally go viral, because they’re darned funny or entertaining, but those weren’t set up as book trailers (they’re about something funny or cute, rather than being a preview for a book). Even if your book trailer does go viral because something strikes a cord, the odds are that most of the viewers aren’t going to be in your target readership. I suspect that if you did one of those Venn Diagrams with circles for “people who spend time surfing for funny videos on YouTube” and “people who read a lot of books” there wouldn’t be that large of an overlap in the middle.

The problem, too, is that nobody knows your book exists, so nobody’s looking it up on YouTube (or anywhere else). You’d have to work the social media angle and drive a lot of people to your book promotion trailers. Sure, you can do that, but why not just send them to your free stories or excerpts if you’re going to go through that much effort? The proof is in the writing, and most readers know that.

All right, that’s a fairly negative post, but it gets better. Check out the second half, Online Book Promotion Basics Pt 2, where we’ll talk about what does work.

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