First Steps in Marketing
As many of my regular visitors probably know, I run a Book Promotion Group on Facebook for Science Fiction and Fantasy authors. This group is aimed at helping new authors of fantasy and science fiction as well as sub genres promote their new book. I have been running this group for a few years now and I wanted to share some tips that help to make me stop and look at a new book. Before I get into the specifics for fantasy and science fiction in particular, I wanted to get the basics out of the way.
1.) Identify your target audience. I know this sounds like a no brainer, but the better you can target your audience, the better your overall marketing will be. Lets say for example that you have completed a fantasy novel. Some questions you may ask is what type of fantasy? Dark Fantasy? High Fantasy? Young adult fantasy? Do you know your audience demographics such as age, gender, even location and other basic demographic information?
2.) Have a marketing plan ready. So, for this I mean you may want to spend a deal of time writing down your actual plan, budget, and overall strategy. In marketing classes, we learned about Product, Price, Place, and Promotion or the four P’s of marketing. How will you deal with competing books, websites and other materials all competing for your books attention.
Get Visual Material
3.) Get visual material
Specifically this one is for authors, your book is something that you have went to great lengths to write. It is, of course, the greatest book ever written, but how do you convey that to your potential audience? First big thing is having a great cover. So, what makes for a great cover? This is of course subjective. It completely depends on your audience, you, your opinion and the ability of the artist to come up with something that you really like. Where would you be able to find a great artist? Offhand, unless you have a better place or a website with great artists, I may be tempted to go to a place called Upwork. Upwork has many indie artists skilled in making great book covers. While this step is up to you, and totally subjective on your tastes, I hope I have provided a starting point to help you with getting this part out of the way.
Synopsis and Back Cover
Having a great synopsis is another selling point. A great synopsis can go a long way in helping you sell your new novel. Problem is, once again, you are in competition with so many books, how do you stand out? Make sure you draw the reader in with something intriguing.
Tip: After scrolling through thousands of new books, which ones do I remember?? Well, I remember the ones not just with an exciting synopsis, but very creative and imaginative names. I would recommend putting your creatively named characters in the synopsis and show the world what you are capable of.
On that note, I thought I’d share an example of a well done book promotion from my book promotional group:
If you like this book by the way you can purchase it here as the above is a picture of what was posted on the book promotional group:
As you can see, it has a great cover, and you can see the creative names on the synopsis along with a link to directly purchase it below the picture and synopsis.
I hope that helps as far as what I feel has caught my eye when scrolling through the many books on the promotional group for new and indie authors.
Sell Yourself
4.) Sell yourself
This may come off as a bit odd, especially for new and indie authors wanting to sell a book, so why would selling yourself be included in this article???
Well, the reason is because after scrolling through many many books, there are so many equally good books, everyone it seems has a great cover, so being an interesting person yourself gives you another unique selling point. Would you like to read a book by someone anonymous or someone who is absolutely passionate about fantasy or science fiction??? Case in point…..after scrolling through hundreds of books on my group, I came across a post by an author Kaitlin Bellamy.
Lets analyze why I clicked on this……so I thought the cover was good. That caught my eye, but I tend to favor fantasy so you will have to excuse me on that over science fiction. The cover looks well done, and the title itself seems to be creative. No synopsis beforehand, but I was intrigued also because the author has a profile image of something other than herself, which tells me she is passionate about her work. Once I clicked her profile I see she has a website, so intrigued I came across:
https://www.kaitlinbellamy.com/
Her website is well done and you can see from the front page she is passionate about fantasy and writing. She has a youtube video giving an audio example of her book.
So, taken everything together if I were looking for a new author I would definitely give her a try. This is what I mean by selling yourself. I know this means a lot of things and is very subjective but I hope this insight is a bit different, but helpful in helping to sell your new book.
Get Just a Bit Tech Savvy
5.) Get just a bit tech savvy
Oh, I know….your not a tech person, your a writer and you just want to write. Open word, or whatever program you have and just write, you don’t want to deal with all of that tech stuff, like websites, social media, videos, audio recordings and things like that, but……..I just don’t think you can escape it, but as for this section, I think I’ll just end it for now and revisit this topic in a later article. For now, I hope you have enjoyed some of my helpful hints, tricks, and tips to make your marketing just a bit more useful in selling your new book.
Conclusion
To conclude this short article on the basics of selling your first novel, I hope you have enjoyed learning of some small but useful tricks to help you sell that novel. I know you have worked hard for it, but keep at it, and remember the key points in this article:
1.) Know your audience
2.) Get a marketing plan and strategy
3.) A great cover and a synopsis with your creative names in the synopsis
4.) Sell yourself
5.) Learn to be a just a bit tech savvy
In case you liked this article you may like some other articles here on Celthric.
Creating Fantasy Names: https://celthric.com/a-guide-to-naming-fantasy-characters/
To purchase either of the books listed above it would be greatly appreciated if you clicked on the link to take you to Amazon, and I get a click credit which helps keep small sites like this going:
Leave a Reply