Whether you write because you have a passion for it or because you want to make a living at it, you are going to want to sell your books. The same goes for free books; you want people to read your work. That is why you have it available. One of the biggest challenges that author’s face is how can I promote my book? Now if you have a lot of money, book promotion is easy, just hire a professional book promoter and they will do the leg work for you. However if you are like most of us, you don’t have twenty five or thirty thousand dollars to spend on a major marketing campaign. Most new authors don’t have hardly anything to spend, making it even more difficult. It doesn’t have to be that way, though because there is a great resource for all of us that won’t cost a dime. That resource is each other.
Let me explain…
Some authors feel that they have to compete with each other for sales, for ranking, etc. This is the opposite of what we should be doing. The reason why is because a very large portion of book marketing is internet based. The keys to effectively using the internet are content and exposure. You are going to want to have a website or a blog, preferably both. This serves two purposes, a place to sell your books or at the very least offer links to your books. You also need a place to offer internet content to the world. This can be in the form of articles, news, information, media, the possibilities are endless, but you have to have fresh, original content that is frequently updated. This is what will drive traffic to your webpage and what will eventually turn into consistent sales for your books. Of course you can spend countless hours writing your own content and you should do this to an extent, after all you are a writer, but isn’t your time better spent working on your books? So the general alternative for any website is to hire someone to do articles here and there for you. Many of you know this because a lot of new writers start out doing this kind of work and getting paid between two and five dollars to make someone else money when they get nothing. This is not good for the person who wrote the article and it is not a great option for the website owner either because these articles are usually dry, sometimes plagiarized and almost never have any real passion or new information to offer readers. There is nothing exciting enough to keep people coming back to your webpage. What if you could have a continual stream of new and exciting content for your website or blog? What if it was written by someone who truly cared about what the topic? Wouldn’t this be better content for your webpage? Wouldn’t it entice people to subscribe, follow you or return to see what is new?
This is where authors can help each other and both authors will greatly benefit. If you invite another author to promote their book on your website or blog, they are going to do their best to write something great about their own work. Most will also write an article or two on the same topic as their book that you can use as content for your website. In exchange, you offer a link or an ad to their book from the article, thus giving you content and they get advertising. Now if you do the same thing for them, write an article or two for their website in exchange for a link and the chance to promote your book on their site or blog or social media, whatever. Then both of you can promote the new content by sharing it with your respective social media pages, forums, groups, etc. Connecting with just one author in this way provides new material for both of your web pages and it doubles the exposure for both of you elsewhere on the web. So if two authors make this kind of an exchange and both have say three of four hundred followers between their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and every other social media site, then both of you are automatically reaching six to eight hundred people. Every time a new author decides to participate, this exposure grows exponentially because now all three of you are promoting each other and the result is that everyone sees an increase in sales and web hits. So if just three or four authors working together can increase exposure to around 1,500 people, how many readers can you reach if you connect with ten other authors or twenty or a hundred? Simply put connecting with other authors and mutually supporting each other can take your sales from a few books, to a few hundred, to a few thousand and even more, and you didn’t have to spend thousands of dollars in the process. All it takes is the guts to reach out to other authors and say let’s do this together and then put in a real effort in what you write for them.
So the next step is how do you find and convince other authors to do this. Well you have to make contacts, reach out and explain how it works and offer them the chance to promote their work. Don’t feel like you are limited to just articles either, if you do a podcast or radio show, you can offer other authors a chance to participate or at least a mention of their work. If you do videos or have a Youtube channel, there is a whole other platform that you can use. If you sell your books online in your own ecommerce store, offer to add them to your inventory. They get a royalty and you get a commission, again it is win-win.
Now needless to say I do this personally and I am always looking for other authors to connect with. So if you want to write something for my blog and you would allow me to do the same, just contact me via my website or my social media pages and we can get started. Right now my lovely, smiling face is plastered over 50,000 websites worldwide. Let’s get yours there too! By all means reach out to other authors and support each other. Almost everyone wants to be “liked” or “followed” and we should do this too, but let’s take it a step further and offer everyone a real chance at success.
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