Online Marketing & Sales Tips for Authors and Books
So you have the book, you finally got it published and you even have a web site. Where to go from there? How do you make sure your book reaches a critical mass online? How do you generate interest and reach out to the prospective audience? In this article I cover a few points of interest that one should ponder and ask questions about when considering the process of online marketing for a book as the "author" and "sales person" of it.
Well-Coded and Usable Website
So you have a website, but how well is it actually created? Slapping a design together in iWeb or gettting some "just out of design school" kid to throw a few pages together might create decent looking site but you have to ask yourself: how useable is the site actually? Does it follow basic accepted conventions in web design that would ultimately make the site easier to navigate? On top of that, is it optimised for search engines? SEO is a never ending topic of discussion but the principles of a well-coded web site still stand. The following is a list of tips direct from the Google Adsense optimisation FAQ:
- Use a METATITLE, that defines what each page is about.
- Use METATAGS, to define the keywords that match your page content.
- If possible, register a domain name that has your top keyword in it.
- On the first line of the page, give a descriptive title of your page in <h1> tags.
- Try to avoid using top navigation, use left navigation instead.
- Always create a robots.txt file.
- Remember to create a sitemap file.
- Do a search on Google for "SEO" and gather more information.
Leverage Unique Content
What in essence is going to draw potential buyers of your book to your web site is the unique nature of what you have to sell. What do you have that no one else does? If it is an encyclopedia of people, make sure your site includes an index of those people. If it is a self-help book for batchelors, make sure you have that angle covered in some way, shape or form. It is not by replicating content that already exists elsewhere, and competing on a level playing field, that you are going to make your site stand out from the crowd in the search engine index. That level playing field is in fact another mountain for you to climb when competing with incumbent books in the online arena.
Give Away FREE Content
This might seem like anathema to the older generation but in a virtual and digital age, electronic information and data is cheap. The concept that you can give away goods and still make a bucket full of money is slowly gaining influence. As an author, you might think that you are unable to give away one thing in order to market another, but don’t forget, some people still have moral values and will ultimately pay for an eBook, even if they download it first, or that actually, they will go ahead and buy the book in print to keep themselves, or to give as a present. When was the last time you received an eBook as a present from someone as something they themselves loved? That being said, lengthy samples alone will give your potential readership plenty of food for thought. Consider that even if you book was available through pirate networks online, some people are still willing to pay for convenience. How else would have iTunes Music Store sold over 4 billion tracks?
Create a Buzz with a Blog and Backlinks
Part of how search engines work is by calculating the relative importance of your site, this is done by working out the quantity and kind of links to your site. The more interest you can drum up for the book, through reviews on blogs, forums or elsewhere, with links back to your own site, the better. If you provide talks at book clubs, or signings at book shops, ensure that they provide a link to your home page from any page they have that mentions you or your book. In addition, start your own blog, get writing, create 
a buzz around topics that interest you and relate to the book, when people read the blog, they will respond, not just in comments on the blog itself, but also by writing their own blog posts that will link back to your site and raise the page rank and therefore the importance of your site in the search engine results.
Avoid allowing people to lift entire pages or sections of text from your site and creating their own sites and pages. Don’t allow stock plagiarism. This demeans the principle of "unique content" mentioned above. And, in deed, if they do, or insist on doing so, ensure that they link back to your site. That being said links back from academic domains, e.g. mit.edu, cam.org.uk, or sites such as wikipedia, can be very fruitful in raising your online profile and page rank in search engines, as they themselves are highly regarded. Put your thinking cap on. Foster good back links , find plagiarisers by searching for whole sentences, and don’t use questionable methods (i.e. link farms) to increase the number of links to your site.
Make Buying Easy & Keep People Up-To-Date
Given that the website is designed as a honey trap, enticing readers in so that you can flog the idea of the book to them and thus create a perfect sale opportunity, you need to ensure you close the deal by providing a very obvious way for buyers make a purchase, in all possible markets, not just in the US or Europe. As an aside, consider signing up to affiliate programmes such as those at Amazon, to get a rake back of between 4 and 8.5% from any sale you refer to them.
If, by the chance, you are ahead of the curve and are creating a site prior to the publish and release date then consider setting up a mailing list so that interested buyers can be informed of forthcoming and relevant events and dates by email along with the appropriate links of information or for easy purchase opportunities.
Reach Out To Your Audience
People love to shout about things they are upto, to show off and to validate themselves by doing so. We live in the attention-grabbing society. Whether you are offay with this or not, you should reach out to people and make it easy for them to beat the drum about how much they love your book in the places they know best, be it MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Shelfari, LibraryThing, BookTribes, Amazon or anywhere else. Join up with them, create profiles on social networks and let them become your fans. Word-of-mouth advertising is the kind of dream advertising you just can’t "buy".
Having done this be sure to keep every profile up-to-date rather than letting it become stagnant. Keep the profile current by posting the same news entries from your own blog to the journals on respective social networks. In turn don’t make the mistake of using social networks to ram your book down a potential reader’s throat, a classic example would be repeated recommendation day-after-day to the same groups, places, forums etcetera. As easy and free as it is to find users, it is also as simple to annoy them.
Targeted Advertising and Pay-Per-Click
Frankly speaking, you shouldn’t haven’t to advertise the book much, if at all, via online adserving networks, but if you must then Google AdWords is a good place to start given that 80% of search traffic, in the US at least, is via Google. That’s an inordinate amount of potential readers and buyers that you can tap into on a daily basis, for a small fee, if you work it right. For social networks you might want to use FaceBook’s Social Ads if age and location specific targetting are important to your book.
Think about your niche and see about the best way to reach out to that market. The great thing about the online world is that people of particular persuasions, congregate in the same places, and are therefore easier to target. But with advertising be circumspect, typically you might see only as much as 0.5-1% click through conversion rate on adverts served whilst in an ideal world and targeted environment as much as 8-10% is a typical figure. Get a mention on some outlet, be it on a radio or tv station book club, along with your site address and such click-to-sale conversion might be as much as 30-40%.
Conclusion: A Few Ways …
These are just a few of the ways you can help promote your book online, and though technology can make life a lot easier, it is also extraordinarily complex to the non-tech-savvy. Finding the right person to help you navigate the choppy waters of the internet is key. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because a person knows how to turn on a computer that that makes them a qualified online marketeer. That being said, making some wise choices in the online sphere can certainly pay some serious dividends for the sales of your book.
