 You’ve heard the term content creation and content marketing. But what is it and why is it? The what of it all is exactly what it sounds like. You create content, blogs or otherwise, and put it out into the world to be consumed. But why? As you know already, email lists are king in the book world. But how do you grow your list? You create content as mentioned before, share it in your newsletter and then ask them to share it.
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 You need money to market or your book wont ever be seen.
I hate this myth in particular. I talk about Tim Grahl, Joanna Penn, and Nick Stephenson a lot on here. The reason for that is they’ve done it. They are more successful than I even want to be. Tim is so successful that he had to find twenty people he could train so he’d have reliable coaches to send the people he can’t help to. When he started out though, he had to ask his parents for money to get by. The full story is in his new book, coming out in July and he mentions it on The Story Grid Podcast and possibly Book Launch Podcast. The reason I bring this up though isn’t to share Tim’s painful past it’s to show you how people with drive and a desire to make it in this industry can and do. Nick Stephenson also started out with nothing and now makes more money than I would know what to do with. Joanna Penn saved up enough for her to go six months and she had to make it or go back to work. That’s pretty motivating. And she was looking at going back when she started to make money. I’m on my way up using these techniques, following these people, and I’ll share my own story soon enough (hopefully real soon if you know what I mean). I’ve made such small simple changes and already my business is growing! Readers are finding me and I actually know what to do to keep them engaged and looking forward to my new books. And all this without spending a penny on ads or promotions.  When you first start out hiring a personal or virtual assistant might not be in the cards for you. I understand. Before you even think about paying an employee, make sure you have systems and automation in place. With the proper systems and automated tools, your platform can act as virtual assistant and be bringing in new readers as you write your next book.
Here’s what you should be doing:  What is your main goal as an author? Whether your answer is to make money or reach readers with your work, the tool that can help you achieve those goals is an email list. In Your First 1000 Copies, book marketer Tim Grahl gives several examples of how email lists are more effective in selling books than social media (Read Social Media for Authors: What Does the Data Say? and get the facts). There are ways to use social media but we’ll talk about that later. For today I’m going to focus on email lists. I wrote a post about how to set up your email list and a post about using giveaways to build grow that list so I’m going to focus on how to use your list today.
 My posts on Platform have a bit scattered so I’ve decided to redo them with Book Marketing 101 titles that will allow you to follow along easily.
What is your author platform? It’s literally anything you will use to sell books. Your website, email list, social media etc, all live under the platform umbrella. In a previous post I spoke about what pieces can make up your platform so today I want to talk about what your main goal needs to be.  Social media is thrown around a lot as a powerful marketing tool. And it absolutely is. It is not however, all there is to marketing your work. Tim Grahl defines Marketing as building long term relationships with people and then being relentlessly helpful.". That’s all it is. If you walk up to someone and shout, “Buy my book!” chances are, they’re going to walk (if not run) away from you. So why do so many authors do this on Twitter and Facebook? Because they don't know how to market their work on social media. If you're not sure where to begin or are guilty of shouting at people, there's no reason to be ashamed. You're here and that shows initiative. When you told someone you were going to publish a book or even just writing it, they likely asked if you were on social media and you rushed out to create your profile. But what kind of content should you share? I can’t answer that specifically. It will be different for each author based on their fans wants and needs. For example, if you write a book about healthy living, then recipes and exercise routines would compliment your book nicely. Fiction writers tend to struggle with this because they feel like they don’t have a way to be helpful. But you do. Most fiction readers consume multiple books a month. When was the last time you published multiple books a month for more than one month at a time (there is a marketing tactic where you publish a whole trilogy at once but unless you can do that 12 months a year, it doesn't count)? Never? Me either. So I share my new releases and when I have sales in my books as well as other authors in my genere. While you’re at it be sure to tag the author. Most will return the favor. The whole point of having your author profile on social media is to connect with fans right? So don’t be afraid to reply to comments and interact with people. Most fans want that. And if you come across a troll, block and move on. When you sit down to find content to share think about what you like. Chances are you enjoy the genre you write whether its non-fiction or fiction, so use yourself as a guide and see what people respond to. You can also look at what you're favorite authors are sharing. As far as creating content, I'll talk about that in a future post. Now that we’ve covered how to be helpful and talk to fans let’s talk about consistency and links real quick. There really isn’t much point in being active and helpful on social media if you don’t have it connected to your website, to where people can buy your books, and sign up for your email list. Social media is useless if you don’t connect it to the rest of your platform. Also Make sure you use the same name as the rest of your platform (Sounds obvious I know). And there is no bigger waste of time than social media. So connect it all. Make it easy to find you, reply to all the comments, and for goodness sake put links in the description of your book covers and if you have an image of all your books in a banner, link it to where people can read more and buy! One of the main objectives of marketing is overcoming objections. If people can find a reason not to spend money on your book, they won’t. Even something as simple as there’s not link. **Something got a bit Lost in this post. Social media is a way to connect with people and build your email list. You can increase your sales but the effort for the amount of return isn't worth it. What social media can be used for though, is getting people onto your email list. Email list subscribers are much more likely to buy your book then social media followers.** 
Marissa Frosch is the head of marketing at Amphibian Press and all writes under the pseudonym Cameron J Quinn. She is the author of The Starsboro Chronicles. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, blog and her website.  Giveaways, raffles, and contests are a great way to gain exposure and find new readers. BUT, as with everything in the publishing world you'll want to make sure to it the right way. It's tempting to add five bucks to a pot towards an Amazon gift card with fifty other authors and collect those email addresses but at the end of the day, this is a really bad idea. I know how tempting it can be when you're new and desperate to build your list but it's not worth the cost. Trust me, I know. I'm in an author group on Facebook and despite a bad feeling in my gut, I signed up for just such an event. Several other authors (who were experiencing a lot more success at the time than I was) had done it and they loved it. So it couldn't be that bad right? Wrong. After the contest I had about 1k new subscribers and since the authors participating were in all genres I figured I'd send out an email introducing myself and my work and reminding them how I got their email and if they weren't interested to simply unsubscribe. At this point I have made no less than three mistakes. I signed up for a promo that I had a really bad feeling about, I told the people to unsubscribe instead of offering a subscribe link, and the giveaway was not reader or genre specific. The result? I grew my email list by about 600 people who don't interact with me at all or buy my books and I got my account suspended because of the high unsubscribe rate. Ouch. This post hurts to write. And that was about a year ago. So, here are my tips for a successful giveaway and lessons learned from my biggest mistake as an author.
Marissa Frosch is the head of marketing at Amphibian Press and all writes under the pseudonym Cameron J Quinn. She is the author of The Starsboro Chronicles. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, blog and her website.  Possibly the coolest thing about being an author is that you have no real competition. Sure your book needs to stand out among other titles but other authors in your genre are not the enemy. They’re your best friends and business contacts. Unlike other businesses, many of our customers read multiple books per month, some read multiple books a week. There is no way we can write enough books to keep up with that. So what do you do? You help readers find more books by networking with other authors. The best part? Every time you share their books, they can share yours as well. And since we’re all working to grow our email lists we can swap newsletters with different authors yearly. It’s good to read at least a sample of the book before sharing it with your readers. Even though an author may be a nice person or have the best intentions, you need to look out for your readers or they’ll unsubscribe from your list. You also need to pay attention to why they’re on your list. If you write in multiple genres you should keep seperate lists and only send out recommendations for books that are similar to yours in themes and genre. If you’re anything like me, you’re starting to panic just thinking about trying to interact with people. The best advice I have ever received about how to network and connect with people in general was from Tim Grahl’s book Your First 1000 Copies. Fairly early on in the book, he says “Be relentlessly helpful”. How do you go about it? By embracing the fact that there is no way I can keep up with the average readers book consumption, I started asking other authors for links to their books. Not just any authors but authors with books similar to mine. Ones my readers are likely to enjoy. I get to give them a boost, my readers get new books, and hopefully the other authors remember me and return the favor. Obviously, not all of them will but honestly, it’s more about my readers than anything else. 
Marissa Frosch is the head of marketing at Amphibian Press and all writes under the pseudonym Cameron J Quinn. She is the author of The Starsboro Chronicles. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, blog and her website.  Ethics is one of those topics you need to be thinking about as you market your books. The American Marketing Association has a statement of ethics that is definitely worth a read as you move forward. A lot of Marketing ethics are common sense. Like don't lie about what your product can do. But some of them you might not have thought about before. Like ensuring you're presenting your product, your book, in a fair and truthful way. You might think saying your paranormal romance is thrilling is an exciting way to find readers but when they read it and find it less than thrilling you'll end up with bad reviews from readers who feel cheated. Not spamming your customers with constant emails about your books and respecting their privacy by not selling their information are other things that some authors seem to think are OK that really aren't. If you get a lot of spam complaints your email list site will likely disable your account. These things are so important as you move your business forward. If you mistreat your email list and customers, not only could you ruin future sales, but you could find yourself in serious trouble. Anti-spamming laws are no joke. 
Marissa Frosch is the head of marketing at Amphibian Press and all writes under the pseudonym Cameron J Quinn. She is the author of The Starsboro Chronicles. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, blog and her website. |
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