Book Marketing Formula
Hello, my name is Amanda Greenslade and I'm a Creative Consultant at Greenslade Creations and Australian eBook Publisher. I own and manage these businesses and I'm self-employed, so I can pretty much call myself whatever I want. 'Creative Consultant' embodies the two overarching aspects of my services:
- Development of creative (used as a noun, not an adjective, this applies to pieces of writing, web/email items or graphic design work)
- Advice and consultation related to training, management and organisation of marketing, publishing and design projects
I am primarily a creative and managerial person. I have a degree in Communication majoring in writing and screen production and I am self-taught in the technical aspects of design, ebooks and the Internet. I offer copywriting, editing, graphic design, website maintenance, email marketing and social media marketing.
This broad range of communication methods is what you need to sell books. Selling books is hard. There is no magic formula, but I have attempted to come up with a simple formula in Excel that will give you some ideas and an overview of what it might take to make your book a sales success.
Obviously sales involves number crunching, something I'm not particularly skilled with. You've got to find the right balance between time and money spent VS incoming sales and, more importantly, profits. Perhaps if your book had general appeal and you had $30,000 to market it you would be able to make a decent profit without too much effort, but the reality is most authors and publishers do not have thousands of dollars to advertise in magazines, radio, tv and direct mail.
Thankfully I've never had to be a salesperson, but I do have a broad range of experience in business-to-customer communication and publishing. What I can help with in this article are some ideas, from a creative and technical viewpoint, of things you can do to market your book yourself.
Greenslade Creations Book Marketing Formula
| Book | + | Publisher | = | Getting started |
| + | Website | = | Minor step forward | |
| + | DIY SEO | = | Search engines + | |
| + | Blog | = | Search engines + | |
| + | Launch (or launches) | = | Make sales | |
| + | Events and Speaking | = | Make sales, build name | |
| + | Media Release | = | [Worth a shot] | |
| + | Author signings | = | Make sales, get subscribers | |
| + | SMM | = | Human eyeballs + | |
| + | Email newsletters | = | Sales, referrals, loyalty | |
| + | Advertising (online & offline) | = | Make sales, test keywords & creative | |
| + | PR | = | Growth | |
| + | Professional SEO | = | Search engines ++++ |
To see the full Excel spreadsheet I based the above table on, please contact me.
To find out more about any of the above terms please feel free to click the links or contact me.
