Part II of Jody’s weekly series on promoting your self-published book

So you’ve self-published your book… now what do you do to promote the book and generate sales?
There are lots of promotional activities an author can do, but as for sales, there’s no magic formula – unfortunately! However, the internet has made the life of self-published authors so much easier. Just imagine what self-publishing was like before e-books, before websites, before social media! Yes, promoting still takes a lot of time, but we now literally have the world at our fingertips.

Because there are so many sites and platforms, though, it can be confusing knowing where to put your time. So the first thing to do is come up with a plan.

A quick run-down of how an author should plan their promotion
You need to make a list of all of your promotional activities, put a time estimate to each one, then take a good look at your schedule and figure out exactly what you’re going to do each week. Promoting is time consuming, so I suggest trying to clear your schedule for at least two weeks before/during your book’s release, if you can. (Those of us who work full-time jobs, I seriously suggest taking a ‘staycation’ around the time of your book’s release, because the initial steps can take a pretty big chunk of time.) Also, put your promotional activities in an order of priority, because you may find some take longer than expected, so it’s important that you hit the big targets first.

There are a few things you need to set up initially (updating your website, joining social media / discussion sites if you haven’t already, setting up author pages on your sales sites)  – you can do these while you’re waiting for your proofreader to proof your book, or while it’s in the publishing works. Make sure these are all set up before your book is released … you want to have all your ducks in a row so that you can start promoting as soon as your book is available.

Once those are set up, you can start on your promotional activities; again, I recommend taking a look at how many hours you have to spend on this per week, and divide up accordingly, making sure the most important ones are first in your plan.

Here are the biggies:

1. Website
First, you MUST have a website. Make it easy for your readers to find out about you and about your books, especially where they can buy them! Provide synopses, reviews if you have them, and post a sample chapter or two. Yes, people can preview all these on Amazon, but remember the three-click rule: no more than three clicks for a person to find what they want. Remember, make it EASY on them; don’t make them have to go hunting.

2. Social Media
Next, you should be active on (at minimum) Facebook or Twitter, and I’d recommend Goodreads or Shelfari, too. But I recommend limiting your time on all of these, whether it’s one hour a day or one hour a week, because it’s easy for your time to run away with you, leaving none for other promotional activities.
Now, a couple notes on social media: don’t spam people about your books. You need to engage people, and that means joining in discussions and getting to know people. All social media are two-way streets! If you’re just one-way broadcasting, you can turn people away.

Secondly, find your audience. It’s easy to find groups of authors, and while chatting with other indie authors can be helpful, make sure you don’t spend all your time there; you need to go find potential readers.
If you write sci-fi, you want to find the sci-fi forums. And again, don’t just wade in there and start spamming about your book; I can pretty much guarantee that any place you go online, other authors have gone there before you, which means that other members are already tired of drive-by authors who come in, post about their book, and then leave. You need to join in conversations and get to know people; then you can start mentioning your books.

3. Book Reviews
It’s all very well talking about your own books, but a better use of time is to have other people talking about your books! I can’t emphasize enough the importance of reviews. If you can get books reviewers (and there are hundreds of book review blogs) to review your book, great! – but remember, if they blog every day, your review will get ‘buried’ fast. More important is to get those reviews on the sales sites: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Smashwords, etc. If you don’t know any bloggers, give the books to your friends and have them review! And this is where your time on social media sites pays off: if you offer free e-books to people who will review, you’ll be sure to get some reviews. (Side note: many review bloggers will also post their review on Amazon etc.; if they don’t go ahead and do this themselves, it doesn’t hurt to ask.)
Of course, you can’t control the quality of the reviews, so that’s where the ‘more is better’ theory comes in: if you have two reviews and one happens to be bad, you might end up with a 2.5 star rating. But if you have 10 positive reviews, that one bad one won’t count for as much.
(In Part III of my self-promotion series, I’ll talk about blog tours)

4. Contests and giveaways
Giveaways can be a great way of generating interest in your book. The idea is to generate enough buzz that the non-winners will want to buy the book. Now, one thing to beware of is contest vultures: people who trawl the internet for the word ‘giveaway’ and enter pretty much every contest, even if they don’t read your genre. These people are NOT likely to buy (or for that matter, remember) the book if they don’t win. But broadcasting your contest will still get your name out there, and giving away copies is going to generate more reviews for you. One thing you can do to weed out the ‘vultures’ is make the entrants answer some kind of question. It can be as simple as why they want the book, and you can pick the winners based on the best answers. Remember, contests don’t HAVE to randomly select the winners. Also, after the contest, you can consider offering the book half-price to all the other entrants; your profit margin may be lower, but you are still building sales.

5. Book Trailers
A few people have asked me if book trailers are worth doing. These can take quite a lot of time and effort, and it’s unclear whether that time ‘pays off’, because we can’t track where our book sales come from. I’d say if you have the time and WANT to make one, it doesn’t hurt, but I’d put this quite far down your to-do list, because the reviews are way more important. However, if you can come up with a trailer with a great hook, it’s a nice way to offer a visual preview to people who don’t often read book reviews.

There are lots of other promotional activities, but these are the main ones, so I’m going to stop here for this post… more to come in Part III!

Part III will look at blog tours, and more details about finding your audience.