Book trading platform
To start marketing your book, you must first establish a platform for your book and for your author persona. If this is your first foray into book marketing, these tasks will take some time, but they are essential activities.
The main contents of its platform are listed below.
* Strategic Marketing Plan
* Web page
* Amazon center
* Social media accounts
* Media Kit
Some of these activities cannot be completed until your book is published or is on pre-order. In other words, after you have an internet presence. You will need the cover image and other information about the book before you can complete these activities. If you are a publisher, some activities may have already been done, but you should review them with a view to improving and strengthening them.
Let’s go through your platform content one element at a time.
Strategic Marketing Plan:
This is the document that anchors and directs all of your marketing activities. Perhaps the most important part is the identity of the client. Unless you know who your customers are and how to reach them, your marketing efforts will go to waste. For example, if you wrote a picture book for children, you may think of children as your customers. they are not Children do not have money or credit cards and do not surf the Internet looking for things to buy. The children’s parents and grandparents are their main clients.
Web page:
As a new author, you must face the fact that your book is being published in the 21st century. Readers search and find books on the Internet. The implication of the last statement is that you and your book need a website. The easiest way to establish a web presence is to use a program like WordPress, Blogger, or Weebly.
Websites like WordPress, Blogger, and Weebly have two essential types of content: pages and posts. Pages are static in the sense that they don’t change unless you deliberately change them. Once you set a page on the website, it stays there, it doesn’t move or change.
Posts are for blogs and are not static pages. A new blog post will appear at the top of the website once you publish it. When you write a second post, the initial will be moved down to make room for the new post.
So what do you do with a website once you have it up and running? You use it to improve your book. There should be a page dedicated to the book and it should be easy to find. Don’t make a visitor look for the book page.
Initially, that page should have a cover image, your book blurb, and purchase links. You can also put your short synopsis in it.
Amazon Center:
Once your book is available for sale or pre-order on Amazon, you can start an author page. If you have a publisher, they may have started this page for you. In this case, you should look at it to see if you can add content to it.
You will find Author Central at: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/home
After you sign in with your password, you can add your bio and other information to the page. One of the great features of the Author Page is that you can add a lot of information about the book that you weren’t able to add when you uploaded it to Kindle.
The book’s topics include Editorial Reviews. These are reviews that Amazon doesn’t allow to be posted on the book’s site because Amazon doesn’t allow paid reviews. If you get a review from a reputable site like Publishers Weekly, this is the place to post it.
Another topic is from the author. Here you tell readers why you wrote the book. Or the problems you encountered while writing it. Or anecdotes from the writing process.
You can also upload videos to the page (ie a trailer) and you can set up an RSS feed so that your blog posts appear on the author’s page.
Taken together, the author page is an excellent marketing tool.
To see what an author’s page looks like, go to mine: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002BM76IE
Social media accounts:
Social media is an essential part of your marketing plan and your brand. However, be careful. Social media is a huge waste of time and many sites are next to useless when it comes to marketing and selling your book. However, you must persist.
At a minimum, I recommend that you create and maintain accounts on the following platforms:
* Good reads
Feel free to use other accounts, but keep in mind that social media can be a huge waste of time and you want to advertise and market your book, not waste time.
Media kit:
The purpose of a media kit is to let media people and other interested parties know your writing credentials. If the book is your only writing project so far, there won’t be much material, but get started anyway. If you’ve published short stories, articles, or other content, please add it to complete your resume. The media kit is located on your website or blog and should be available to anyone who wishes to download it. For that reason, you may want to consider not including personal information like your home address or phone number.
So what does a media kit include? Here is a list of items that make up your kit:
* Organic.
* Press releases.
* Links to websites.
* Body of work.
* Book descriptions.
* Book reviews.
Make sure the media kit is a doc or pdf file so everyone can download and open it.