The Ultimate Book Marketing Tool
For Authors
Today I’m going to answer a key question that I’m asked constantlyby authors:
“What is the most effective book-marketing tool for authors?”
Is it online advertising? Press releases? Facebook? Book blogger reviews? Radio ads? Amazon forums? Goodreads promos?
The answer is actually none of those things.
The Most Effective Book Marketing Tool By Far That Every Fiction Author Needs Is TheirOwn Email List Of Readers
Every aspiring writer who wants to succeedmust build a reader email list… no question. Why? Because it gives you the ability to talk to book buyers on demand.
I’m always astonished that hardly any writers do this. I suspect they think it’s either too hard to do, (it’s actually easy) or haven’t realized just how much book-promotion power even a small email list can wield.
Even more remarkable is that most book publishers (except Amazon) have never done it either, despite the endless billions of readers they have sold books to over the years.
They have missed an opportunity of unparalleled scale that’s now falling into the hands of authors savvy enough to grasp its extraordinary potential for book promotion. Furthermore, it’s perfectly feasible for any aspiring author to grow a substantial list of readers-in-waiting before their first bookis even published.
So, what makes email such a crucial part of any modern author’s marketing efforts?
An Email List Of People Who Love Your Books Enables You To Promote To Them All, Whenever You Like – Especially When Launching A New Book
For the first time in history, an author can keep a significant number of their reader-fans instantly available at their fingertips.
Most traditional marketing methods only allow you to communicate with a potential reader once. Run an advertisement, they see it, then they’re gone. Get a favorable review from a book blogger, they read it, then they’re gone.
The tragedy is that when you launch your next book, you’ll have to find your existing readersall over again. And frankly, who has the time or the inclination to do that?
An Email List Can Make Your Book A BestsellerOn Launch Day
During the weeks before you launch your book, you can begin to contact the people on your mailing list with (for example)a countdown, contests to choose the cover, and free offers for early birds.
By the time you launch, you will have a whole queue of buyers “waiting at the gate”, giving you the power to push your book up the Amazon rankings to highvisibility.
But it’s not just a book launch that makes an email list so effective. There’s a whole host of benefits:
An Email List Helps To Grow Your Career In 7 Ways
Here are some of the great things you can do when you’ve built even a moderate-sized email list:
1. Directly promote your books via attractive discount offers.
2. Launch subsequent books to a captive audience who already like your work.
3. Stay ‘top of mind’ so when people think about what to read next, they think of you.
4. Engage with your wider author community. (Fans, other authors, bloggers and other people who can help you to spread the word.)
5.Attract people to visit your blog, read your posts, andencourage people to share those posts with others.
6. Encourage people to contribute reviews on Amazon, Goodreads etc.
7. Ifyou’re looking for an agent or publisher, a mailing list is a powerful way to show them you have an existing fan base. (Becauseas you know, publishers nowadays usually only choose those writers who clearly demonstrate they can help with promotion.)
But What About Social Media?
This statistic may come as a shock to you, but in my experience, if you send a reader an email message, they’re over20 timesmore likely to see it than on social media.
So why use social media AT ALL?
Social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, is extremely useful for finding the readers you need and making your first contact with them.
Your social media strategy is to then bring them across to your blogas soon as possible where they can join your email list.
The Marketing-Communication Power Of An Email List
1. Your emails reach virtually everybody on your mailing list
Facebook will only show your posts to a small percentage of your fans. The same with Twitter – a Tweet will quickly become buried beneath other people’s tweets within a matter of hours. But an email will sit, unmissable, in a reader’s inbox, waiting until they’re ready to read it.
2. People check their email every day
Some people are on social media 24/7, but many use it more sporadically than that.
But most of the world check their email every day. It’s the first thing they do when they start work in the morning.
3. Your mailing list will never disappear
Remember MySpace? There’s no guarantee that a social network will be around in the future. Accounts can be suspended, rules can change.
But your email list isn’t going anywhere. It’syours. You can keep sending what you like, when you like, forever.
And when you use social media, your blog, and your mailing list together in a coordinated manner, that’s when the magic really happens.
How Do You Get Started If You Don’t Know Anything About Email Book Marketing?
It’s not hard at all to build an email list to promote your books, even if you’re just starting out as a writer.
“But… how do I find all the readers?”
It’s a fair question, but it’s easier than you imagine. It all comes down to:
(1) Using social media the right way to locate readers, and…
(2) Having an author blogwhere they can join your list.
But the problem is that most writers go about this completely the wrong way, and never find the readers.
If you’d like to learn how to grow an email list the right way, my ‘Blogging For Authors’ Mini-Courseshows exactly what to do.
For example, here’s some of the things I reveal:
· How to find readers on Social Media.
· The fastest way to build a mailing list of readers.
· How to incentivize visitors to your blog so that they feel compelled to sign up for your mailing list.
· A step-by-step walk through showing you the easy way to put a mailing list opt-in form on your blog.
· What kinds of emails to send to your mailing list, and when to send them.
· What to write as the subject lines of your emails so that people actually open them.
· The best email list companies to use, including one that is free.
And of course, the information in ‘Blogging For Authors‘ will also show you how to use a blog to attract new readers, sell more books, get positive reviews, impress agents and publishers, and more.
The course is split into 7 easy-to-followmodules, and provides information that actually works. To find out more about how blogging can substantially increase sales of your books, click on this link:
Click Here For The ‘Blogging For Authors’ Mini Course
P.S. The course shows how to build a list even before your first book is published.
P.P.S. If you don’t have a blog yet, it’s no problem; I’ve included a bonus e-book that shows to build an author blog at virtually no cost, in less than 30 minutes.
Click Here For My ‘Blogging for Authors’ Mini-Course