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How to Market Your Book Online

How To Market Your Book Online

Many authors dream of the day their book will be published. What they don’t often realize is the amount of work it takes to market a book. Thanks to the internet, however, marketing has become easier than ever before when you know how to market your book online.

The key to marketing your book online is to start early. Get going with the marketing work before your book is even published. You can do this by starting a blog about your book, contributing to forums, and establishing social media pages that can build a following.

Once you’ve done this and get your book published, then you’ll be ready to take advantage of these additional marketing methods.

#1. Find your community.

You need to know who is going to want to read your book. Not everyone in the world will want to pick up your book, no matter what you might “suspect” to be true. Focus on your core community. You’ll want to segment your audience with as many specifics as possible.

Look at it this way: if you wrote a book about trends in book marketing, would it make more sense to target authors and book marketers? Or would you want to target IT, professionals?

#2. Know what your readers like to do online.

Different people enjoy doing different things online. You’ve got your social gamers. You’ve got folks who are on Instagram 24/7. There are also demographics who might be interested in your book but are only online maybe 30 minutes per week.

You’ve got to be able to connect to your community on their terms instead of yours. If your reader segments are primarily on Facebook, then you’ve got to create a Facebook page for your book and then promote it to your core groups.

The same is true for online conversations. Forums are great places for a conversation thread, but so is Reddit. So is Twitter. Go where your community meets, lives, and thrives. That’s where you’ll have the best chance to promote your book to them.

#3. Embrace your inner extrovert.

Many authors tend to be introverted, either naturally or through adaptation. Let’s face it: spending hours in front of a computer screen every day by yourself doesn’t really create friendships. You become comfortable with more of a solitary life, which means you become shy in social situations – even when they happen to be through the computer.

Knowing how to market your book online means knowing how to talk effectively to each reader segment you’ve identified. You can send out messages all the time or choose to respond to message from others that come in. Some people prefer to be the loudest person in the online room. Others prefer to be the wisest. Combine the two together and you’ll likely see good results.

#4. Apply the fundamentals of supply and demand.

The goal of marketing today has changed from overall sales to specifically timed sales. If you can get everyone to purchase your book at relatively the same time on a single website, then you have a chance to create a best-seller… for at least one day. That gives you bragging rights, however, and a good marketing message that can be sent out in the future.

People also purchase items based on a combination of value and scarcity. We all want the best possible item we can get at a price we can afford. If you can create urgency around your book-buying experience, then you’ll be more likely to get some sales momentum going.

#5. Keep promoting your book.

There’s always a new angle that you can take in the marketing process. Interest will always wane in a book, but you can keep it fresh. After all – we’re still reading Charles Dickens. Edgar Allen Poe. There’s this fellow named Shakespeare as well.

Now, will your book be famous in 400 years? The odds aren’t in your favor, for sure. But it helps to treat your marketing efforts as a marathon instead of a 100-meter sprint. Find new reasons why certain groups of people would be interested in your book and you could breathe new life into something that is more than a decade old.

When marketing a book online, the process is very similar to the in-person marketing efforts that authors have used for years. You must connect with people. You must create value with your book. You must create a sense of urgency. When you can do this, then your reader segments will be more likely to want to see what it is that you have to say.

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