Hey I’m Talking to You! My Book Is Published!

The best thing to happen to a writer is to have their book published.  

The next best thing is to have that book sold.  The only problem is that you have to make people — your potential readers — care a little.  They have to pull out that wallet and make the purchase, or you are going nowhere in the direction of being a full time writer.  Money talks, as does effort and time.  You’re not going anywhere if people won’t spend money on you.

Not so much fun to read that?  

That book has to be sold, and you have to justify writing it to a lot of people no matter how you published that book. (Self-published or traditionally published — you still have people to answer to.) You have to make some money somehow.

So let’s bring marketing your book into the conversation.  I don’t mean the sort of marketing that makes you wish you could create a Spam box in the mind, rather the sort that makes other people talk about your book.  There are many ways to do that, and this month we will be talking about marketing; from using social networking sites to paying for marketing services.

After all, you want to make money with your book, and how you do this is just as important as how you get people talking about you and your book.  Take a couple of famous books.  Both Fifty Shades of Grey and Harry Potter had a market that they targeted to, but then people started talking about them.  You can find both books everywhere on the web; you simply have to read a blog or hear someone mention them to know about them.  Their authors have made a lot of money with those books because of one thing:

People cared, and the ones who didn’t read the books because they had to see what the fuss was about.

However, to get to that point there was a process. The authors needed to sell that book, they needed to get reviews and they needed people to talk about it.  You can argue now whether it is good writing or not, but you can’t argue that you haven’t heard of these books.

The same holds true for classic books. There was marketing involved to get them to their readers, and the writers understood this as well.  This is why you rarely hear of authors who have only written one book, since marketing creates a domino effect.  The more you tell people, the more likely you are to have readers.

Now, there are more ways to market your book for free, and this month we will be talking about them and how you can market your book as well.

Just don’t over promote yourself, make a connection first.

One of the best ways to start marketing is by writing a blog and mentioning your book.  The important thing is to get your readers there and make them want to pull out that wallet and buy a book.  That will get people talking.

However, the same can be said about promotion when it’s not a good thing.  People are smart, and as much as a newly published author wants to hear how great their book is, it’s also refreshing to hear about it from others.  The first step is creating and building something people want to read.

That’s when the magic happens.