The Key to Book Promotion Success: Have a Plan

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One of the great things about online book promotion is that there are so many options. Websites, reciprocal linking, SEO, virtual book tours, blogging, podcasting, feeds, social networking, multimedia–so many different ways to market your book, each with its own spin and variations. If you’re like me, you keep a list of all the different ideas you think of to promote your books. Sometimes, it’s a very long list. So long that it can be hard to get going or know where to start. And so the list sits idle, with maybe a checkmark here or there, but essentally uncompleted.

To avoid being overwhelmed with the many options for promoting your book online, it’s important to have a plan. Go through your list of ideas and prioritize them. Or, if you’re looking for new ideas and how to execute them, check out my book The Web-Savvy Writer. From your prioritized list, create a monthly plan for online book promotion (or an annual plan, if you’re really ambitious). Schedule in time to enter blog posts, update your website, create that podcast, and more. Break larger promotion projects into chunks that you can list separately.

By having a plan, you’ll get much farther in your online promotion efforts–and reach your profit goals that much faster.

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Comments

3 Responses to “The Key to Book Promotion Success: Have a Plan”

  1. Dawn

    I’d hadn’t heard about ‘virtual book tours’. How would that work with fiction? Enjoying your site, Patrice.

  2. Patrice-Anne Rutledge

    Hi Dawn –

    Virtual book tours can be a great promotional opportunity for both fiction and nonfiction authors. See my article on virtual book tours for more details: http://naww.blogspot.com/2006/09/naww-member-shares-virtual-book-tour.html.

    For fiction, look for the following “tour stops”:

    – Sites/blogs devoted to fiction books, particularly in your genre (there are lots of these out there!)
    – Sites/blogs of other authors in your genre — invite them to be a guest on your blog as well
    – Sites/blogs focusing on the topic or location of your book (for example, if you write food-related novels set in Paris, you should seek out sites focusing on food, cooking, France, etc.)

    Good luck!

  3. Dawn

    Thanks for a great idea, Patrice. I read your post over at naww and can see lots of things I can do when my first novel is published in a couple of months. I’ve read so many horror stories of even quite big name authors sitting in empty stores at book signings! A virtual tour sounds much more like me.

    JA Konrath is talking about a writer’s public persona over on his blog site at that moment and I think these topics relate. He suggests knowing your strengths and weaknesses and playing to your former. Writers are often rather retiring people. They want their words to do the talking for them and it seems to me that a virtual book tour allows that to happen.

    Thanks again.

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