Here are three more book marketing books I’ve read and found to be useful in the making sense of book marketing and thinking up specific strategies.
The Weekend Book Marketing Makeover
This is another offering from Duolit, and it is an excellent little guide. In fact, it’s probably now my favorite marketing resource.
This guide gives a step-by-step plan for overhauling your marketing efforts. While I’ve read the whole book, I haven’t finished doing what they suggest. But it is obvious to me that this will work.
By following some of their tips for poking around on Facebook, I found some of my friends who like the kind of book I’m writing, and I had no idea about this taste in fiction they all shared. (Maybe that’s why they are my friends!) This book gave me ideas on how to reach out to them and my “ideal reader.”
The marketing makeover is perfect for introverted authors who don’t like the get-out-there push of most marketing plans. This approach helps authors target a group of people with common interests, and to cultivate relationships with them. It gives direction to the use of social media, and gets rid of a lot of the confusion about just how twitter and facebook can actually help sell books.
This book also helped me pull together the fragments of my marketing ideas and to decide which ones to focus on and which ones to forget. The idea is to only pursue strategies that will produce results, and save most of your time for writing. This one I recommend highly. It doesn’t seem to be available on amazon, but you can find it at selfpublishingteam.com.
John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Book
This was the first book marketing resource I came across, and it’s a great one. I had worked in health care marketing but had no idea how to go about marketing a book. 1001 Ways to Market Your Books (1001 Ways to Market Your Books: For Authors and Publishers) gave me lots of specific strategies I could attach to my marketing goals. It also discusses marketing, and covers promotions, internet marketing, publicity, and more. Almost encyclopedic, it never fails me when I’m trying to think up a new marketing angle. There’s so much in this book it can be overwhelming. It is a little dated, as it was written and updated before Facebook and Twitter became the powers that they are. But there are so many tips and suggestions that there is still much to be learned from this book. Some of the websites listed in the book no longer function, but as the author mentions, his website Bookmarket.com has updated information. I’m grateful to John Kremer for providing such an excellent resource.
Promote Your Book by Patricia Fry
Promote Your Book: Over 250 Proven, Low-Cost Tips and Techniques for the Enterprising Author only has 250 tips, but as advertised, they are low-cost. There isn’t a lot of detail on how to implement the tips, but this guide delivers on what it promises: lots of ideas for promoting your book. She explains what needs to be done before and after your book is out. She also goes into a lot of promotional strategies that don’t involve the internet, which are often overlooked but can yield great results.
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