This page is a blog dedicated to book marketing posts and articles.
Book marketing mantra and equation
Book Marketing Mantras
Copy these mantras to sticky notes and paste them near your computer screen.
No one buys a book they never heard of.
Marketing first: Royalties second
No Marketing = No royalties
Book Marketing Equation
You may be surprised to learn that successful book marketing can be mathematically represented by an equation. It doesn’t make the marketing easier, but it does simplify the concept. The equation looks like this:
SBM = ((QBP+ ∑R + Esub(lp) + ∑(A + P)+ EsubM + ∑SM))L
where
QBP means Quality Book Package∑
∑r is the summation of all book reviews
Esub(lp) stands for the effectiveness of book’s Landing Page
P is for Promotions
A is for Ads
(A + P) means the summation of all results for ads and promotions
EsubM is for email
∑SM means the accumulation of all your social media effectiveness
L stands for the Luck Factor (note: Luck can be a negative number)
This equation is one of the more useless pieces of information you’ll ever come across but it rather nicely illustrates the complexity of the situation. Simply put, book marketing is a complex project involving a lot of disparate moving parts. Once you accumulate all these components in the equation and mix in a bit of luck, you’re on your way to a successful marketing campaign.
Prioritize your book marketing tactics
The book marketing possibilities are endless.
What if you can’t work on all the marketing tasks you’ve read about? After all, life has a way of butting into one’s writing and publishing work. Obviously, not all marketing tasks are created equal, so the question comes down to this: What marketing tasks should you concentrate on? This article provides such list and it’s based on my years of experience
If you have limited time and or money to spend on marketing, make sure you do the following:
- Identify the customers for the book and where they can be found online
- Start a webpage
- Develop a set of keywords
- Write a book blurb
- Join Goodreads and Bookbub
- Request book reviews in a few of the groups on the Goodreads site
- Join LinkedIn
- Request book reviews in a few of the groups on the LinkedIn site
- Write a short synopsis
(Note: a book blurb and a short synopsis are not the same thing: they are two very different animals. See this article to learn more: https://hanque99.medium.com/book-blurbs-a-marketing-opportunity-46d6586ee44b)
A neat thing about this list is that, with the exception of the webpage, all these tasks are free. All they require is the investment of your time.
Here is another question. If you have a limited marketing budget which marketing tasks should be on the bottom of the list?
- Commission a trailer
- Do a blog tour
- Hire a promotion company
These three tactics are expensive and, with a limited budget, other, cheaper tactics will be more cost-effective.
This material is extracted from my book How to Self-publish and Market a Book.
