Book Marketing in Nutshell - Part 1

By Misty M Beller @MistyMBeller

Free Workshop in Progress: This summer on our ACFW-SC chapter blog we are happy to welcome one of our members, Misty M. Beller, for a special 12-week workshop on Marketing. Misty has experienced great success marketing her first novel and later ones, consistently selling 10,000 books a month. Join this free workshop and be blessed. Be sure to leave a comment and tweet the blogs to your friends. 

Elva Cobb Martin, President, ACFW-SC Chapter  www.elvamartin.com

As we wrap up the marketing workshop over these last two weeks, let's go back through and highlight some of the takeaways from the course. Sort of the "Cliff's Notes" version. :)

No marketing approach will be very successful unless you have solid prerequisites in place:

•      Book cover that sparks emotion in target reader
•      Product description (back cover blurb) that hooks
•      Good reviews to validate book quality

As you develop your strategy:

•      Identify your most available resources (time, money, and sometimes specific abilities)
•      Set goals for book sales, and establish how important it is for your marketing efforts to include reader connection
•      Go through the lists of marketing approaches and identify which activities are low-hanging fruits for you.

Dictionary.com definition:

low-hanging fruit:  noun 

"a course of action that can be undertaken quickly and easily as part of a wider range of changes or solutions to a problem"

Keep in mind, pricing is an important part of any strategy. The lower the price, the higher quantity of books you’ll sell.

The basic categories of marketing efforts are:

• Advertising: Direct sales
• Unpaid
• Facebook reader groups
• Goodreads reader groups
• Goodreads or Amazon giveaways
• Sites devoted to readers
• Paid
• Targeted Email Distribution: Bookbub and Ereader News Today are the current most successful
• Amazon, Goodreads, and Google Adwords pay-per-click
• Sidebar Advertising
• Facebook post boosting
• Many others! I regularly discuss new paid advertising opportunities on my marketing blog. 
• Best practice is to develop network of author friends who are also marketing to discover best practices (and learn from each other's mistakes).
• Keep list of all possible sites, and keep records of which advertising methods have proven successful.

To be continued next week...

Until then, leave a comment sharing which of these marketing approaches you've tried. What has worked for you?

Misty M. Beller writes Christian historical romance, and is author of the bestselling novels The Lady and the Mountain Man and The Lady and the Mountain Doctor.

Misty was raised on a farm in South Carolina, so her Southern roots run deep. About ten years ago, she made a career change from farm life into the business world, where she now works as a Senior Manager and Director of Process & Training. Her husband and two daughters are gifts from God, keeping her both grounded and crazy.

You can find her on her website, reader blog, marketing blog for authors, Goodreads,Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.