Before You Start Spending Money on Marketing
Marketing can be expensive! Even Facebook charges a minimum of five dollars a day for limited ads. There are lots of things you can do on your own that don’t cost a penny. For starters, you need to be on social media it’s usually free.
That being said, no amount of advertising or events or money can get people to buy your work if it isn’t professional and complete.
Here are the three most important things to do before you spend a penny on marketing.
- Edit Your Book: Readers, the ones that follow authors and come back to buy their second book, know what quality looks like. If your book doesn’t meet their expectations, you could not only have a bad review, but you have a reader who will never purchase a book with your name on it again.
- Get a Professional Cover: Whether you are artistically inclined or good with photo editing software or not, your cover needs to look professional. That means money, or a lot of your time. If you elect to create your own, which we do not recommend, you need to make sure it can compete with the other books in your market.
- Get on Social Media: I know some people struggle with interacting on the web but the thing is, readers who want your next novel want to have that connection to you. Engaging your readers with information on how your writing is going, as well as upcoming titles and cover releases, are just a few ways to us this connection. It’s also helpful when an issue arises with your books. A fellow author on Facebook, recently had an odd technical issue. The cover for her third book ended up on her second book on the retailer’s webpage. Her readers alerted her to the issue. Without that connection she may not have known about the issue until bad reviews started rolling in.
These things are all very important before you try marketing in anyway. There are different things that work for different people and there are lots of classes out there to help. I will be posting more about different ways to Market with a budget at another time but for now, make sure your book is edited by a professional and has an amazing cover.