Strictly Internet Marketing for Fiction

Publishing more books is just one tool you can and should use in ‘getting your name out there’ or in book marketing parlance, ‘creating and using a platform.’ Once you have some books, submit them to any legitimate contest you can find that offers an award, even if the award is not monetary. Writer’s Digest (April ’08 issue) just published the list of their contest winners and runners-up for self-published books. From that contest alone, ten writers now have the right to append “award winning author” to their name.

Be careful of contests, there are a lot of scam artists around. Good places to check the latest frauds, schemes and pitfalls are Writer Beware and Preditors & Editors. Some contests collect reading fees and often a large portion of these fees goes toward prizes. I recommend extreme caution when the reading fees are exorbitant, say more than ten or twenty bucks.

And don’t think just hardcopy books either when you go looking for contests to enter. E-books and podcast books have many contests you can enter as well.

Labels: book awards, contests

# posted by Gene Curtis @ 3:21 PM 0 Comments

Non-Fiction as a Marketing Tool for Fiction

Last week I talked about publishing a non-fiction book to help promote your fiction. There are many routes to do that, so the question becomes what to write. Everyone has passions, things they really enjoy. These topics are great places to start, and figuring out the angle to approach it from isn’t that hard. Just use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool or the iWebtools Keyword Lookup Tool. Enter your topic in the form, click the button and up will pop a list of key words and phrases being searched on the internet along with the popularity for the phrase. (You’ll want to use these tools for other things too, so it might be a good idea to bookmark this page. If you don’t, you’ll likely forget the web addresses and have to go looking for them, a time consuming process.)

The book doesn’t have to be great; it just has to be good. It should be helpful, easy to understand and fill a niche or have a unique take on solving a problem. I could write about growing tomatoes, but that niche is pretty well filled. (I know about tomatoes since there’s nothing better than a nice mutton, lettuce & tomato sandwich for lunch and the best tomatoes are home grown.) To find a niche that matches your interests, use the web-tools above and find out what people are searching for.

Another way to get ideas on what to write about is to identify a “crying need.” Have you ever looked for information on how to do something and couldn’t find much about it or tried to do something only to find yourself saying something like, “I wish I had…” or “There has to be a better way?” These are “crying needs” and a perfect catalyst to inspire a subject for you to write about.

It shouldn’t take you more that 2 or 3 months to write a how-to book on something you love, but don’t publish your book until it has been edited by someone else. Preferably, your editor should be someone that takes great delight in telling you you’re wrong, someone that thoroughly enjoys pointing out your mistakes. (If you don’t know anyone like that, you need teenaged children.) This is the person you want, someone that will take great pains to find your mistakes and point them out so you can fix them before the whole world sees them. What you don’t need is someone reluctant to point something out for fear of hurting your feelings. Get a proofer that can be truly eviscerating, (figuratively speaking of course.)

Once your book is finished, get blurbs for the cover and your webpage about the book from fellow authors and advance readers and reviewers. Blurbs build trust, and to quote Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Editor-and-Chief of WIRED magazine, "Money was the currency of the old economy; Trust is the currency of the new, global economy."

I also recommend two websites and three additional books for the indie non-fiction author:

www.FonerBooks.com provides a wealth of information about self publishing. The site's owner, Morris Rosenthal makes a living selling his self published books. If you don’t know about it already, I think you’ll find his chart on Amazon sales rank rather interesting and informative. His book, Print-on-Demand Book Publishing: A New Approach To Printing And Marketing Books For Publishers And Self-Publishing Authors is a great primer on using LSI as your printer, which has the benefit of making Ingram your distributor.

Aaron Shepard is another indie author that makes a living selling self published books. His website has a ton of information the indie author needs to know. I recommend his books, Perfect Pages: Self Publishing with Microsoft Word, or How to Avoid High-Priced Page Layout Programs or Book Design Fees and Produce Fine Books in MS Word for Desktop Publishing and Print on Demand for designing your book-block, the pages between the covers and Aiming at Amazon: The NEW Business of Self Publishing, or How to Publish Books for Less, Sell Without Hassle, and Double Your Profit (or More) With Print on Demand and Book Marketing on Amazon.com.

Amazon is important for several reasons. It is the by far the largest online bookstore, so much so that brick and mortar bookstores often complain about the competition. (Amazon has more than an estimated 20% market share for books sold.) It is difficult even for large publishers to get shelf space for a book in physical bookstores and virtually impossible for small publishers and indie authors. It would take more than 50 miles of shelf space for a bookstore to carry one copy of every title in print, and that doesn’t include school textbooks. Another reason is Amazon has an amazing array of tools publishers and authors can use to promote their works. The biggest reason Amazon is important is the fact that most people use Amazon to make book buying decisions, regardless of where they buy. The top things that are looked at the most for making a buying decision are, in order: price, star rating & reviews, sales rank and sales copy (publisher description and professional reviews.)

Labels: fiction marketing, novel marketing

# posted by Gene Curtis @ 8:10 AM 0 Comments