Promoting Your Book When You Have No Time to Promote
Not having enough time to promote is one of the most common complaints I hear from authors. Yes, book promotion takes time, but you won’t sell many books without it. Here’s a trio of tips to make the process easier:
- Focus your time on the publicity efforts that generate the best results. You’ll soon know whether a mention on a blog or published article results in a surge in book sales. In addition, track your web statistics to see where your traffic is coming from and when. Google Analytics is a good tool for this. Drop the publicity efforts that aren’t paying off in favor of those that are.
- Create a calendar of book promotion activities. For example, you may want to publish one article a month, create a press release every quarter, update your blog twice a week, and comment on other blogs and discussion boards weekly. Factor time in your schedule for the promotional efforts that are working and it starts to become a habit.
- Outsource the tasks you don’t have time for. If you can afford it, consider hiring a virtual assistant or intern to handle some of the more routine promotional tasks. If your budget is tight, try the family approach. Skilled teens, retirees, or stay-at-home moms may have the time to help out the author in their family.
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Be Daring: Try Something New
Try one new publicity idea at a regular interval–either monthly or quarterly, depending on your available time. I know you’re busy, but unless your current promotions are resulting in thousands of new book sales, you need to keep trying new things to continue generating publicity, particularly for a book that’s been available for a while.
Some ideas could take considerable effort to implement, such as creating your own podcast, but others take only a few minutes of your time. This blog, my special reports, and my audio products provide plenty of inspiration for new things to try.
Tags: book marketing, book publicity, online book promotionRelated Posts
Focus on Your Audience
One of the most important rules of online book promotion — or any form of promotion for that matter — is to focus on your audience. Here are three tips for developing a reader-focused online book promotion campaign:
- Develop an audience profile. Knowing who might potentially buy your book and the sites they visit on the web is your key to success. Naturally, this is easier if your book is on a tightly targeted topic. But even if you’ve written a general interest book or novel, you can still develop some form of profile.
- Once you have that profile, focus your promotional efforts on the sites your audience frequents and the type of content to which they would most likely respond. For example, let’s say you wrote a book about skiing. Your audience could potentially visit websites devoted to skiing or to travel areas frequented by skiers. They could also respond favorably to your own site full of skiing advice and short ski-related video clips.
- Remember to focus on the interests of your audience, not your own personal interests. Many authors focus on online promotion techniques that interest them rather than their audience. Cool new technologies like video book trailers, multimedia, and podcasts work great for some books, but not so great for others. Pick the tools and techniques that will make your audience respond.
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About the Author
I'm a freelance writer and author specializing in business technology.
