Source: http://www.newsletterjournal.com/information/book-marketing/7-vital-book-promotion-tips.html

As a literary publicist I often am asked about publicity tips, tricks, and the magic behind my work. It’s not magic. All you need to know are the basics and from there you will be able to create an effective book promotion. Below I’ve listed the most vital and basic tips to a successful book publicity campaign.

1. ALWAYS Take ‘No’ for an answer

It can be frustrating when the media isn’t interested in your book or story idea, but always thank them for their time and move on. If you try and persuade or argue with them you will leave a bad impression of yourself and your chances of working with this particular media in the future are slim. Try back in a couple months if it’s a show or publication that you’re particularly interested. The media changes with the seasons, and trends, so they may love your show or feature idea then, rather then now.

2. Don’t Hound Your Publicist

The more time you take up with your book publicist the less time they have to talk with the media. When you first begin your book publicity campaign ask your book publicist when an appropriate time would be to have a weekly chat, and see if they have a number to call in case of a publicity emergency. This will be well received by your book publicist and their efforts will be more successful!

3. Start NOW

A book publicity campaign is the most successful within the first 6 months from your book’s publication date (differs for traditionally published authors). This is because the media wants the latest products and they want to be the first to tell their audience about them. It’s best to start publicizing your story to mainstream and industry media prior to your book’s release and reach out to consumers once your book is available to order.

4. Don’t Pitch Your Book

Make sure that you’re pitching a concept, show idea, or solution when you begin promoting your book. If you sound more like?. “Hello, I am an author who just published my women’s interest novel…..” rather then, “Hello, is this a good time for you? Great. I’m a relationship expert who has proven that love novels bring couples closer in bed?” The second pitch is more intriguing and will most likely get a few minutes from the person on the receiving end. Your goal with every pitch should be to get their attention, a few minutes of their time and booked or featured as a guest, depending on the type of media.

5. Create a Press Kit

Before you begin promoting your book you should have a press kit ready to go. The essentials in most literary kits are a cover letter, press release, author bio, Q&A page, sample interview questions, and articles that make your topic relevant today. You’re publisher should supply you with these materials and if you’re self-published you’ll most likely need to create these materials from scratch and on your own. This can be a daunting task to some, but the internet or library can be helpful when researching the proper formats of these products. Or, find a publicist to create a press kit for you!

6. Know Your Target Audience

Who will buy your book? ‘Everybody’ is not the correct answer to this question, although it is a common answer. The more focused you can get with your efforts the better your results will be. If your book is more main stream rather then specialized, then try beginning with a smaller audience and broadening your focus after you’ve saturated this first audience. Just a tip: Authors should always start with their local media, then regional (surrounding areas and states), and finally saturate national media.

7. Have fun!

Your enthusiasm, humor, and smile should shine through in every phone pitch, letter, and e-mail. If you’re not excited about getting your work out there, then why should a producer or editor be excited to give you time on their program or space in their publication.

I truly believe that any author can publicize their own book if they have the drive, energy, and time to see it through from beginning to end. Publicity is the most vital within the first six months from its publication date, so authors should hit the ground running. If you need more guidance or would rather hire a professional to handle your book’s publicity then start looking now. There are many publicity companies out there, but you need to find the one that’s right for you and that is as excited about your book as you are.

Please visit us for more information on our book promotion services: Book Promotion and Book Marketing Services

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You would always want the best to market your book. Book events are the times when authors expect much for their book’s exposure. Preparing for these events can be tough considering that there is a list of things that need to be checked and finalized. Book events like make every author dreamy and anxious about long customer lines and stuffed cash boxes.

Regardless of the amount of money that you are going to invest on a book event, it should turn out successful. As self-published authors, you have to wear the event coordinator’s hat. This basically means that you have to spearhead every event and look at everything down to the tiniest details.

This article features a smart checklist on how to improve conducting 5-star promotional events for your book.

1. Brainstorm. This is the stage where you squeeze in everything that’s possible. Jot down all your ideas that best suit your event. These ideas should answer the question: What do I want my readers to think about me and my book? Aside from generating ideas, you should also consider the following elements: relevance, consistency, creativity, and strategy.

1. Sit down and plan out. Think of ways and means that’ll help your ideas come to fruition. Think of practical but highly effective strategies. Your strategies will most likely cover: venue, logistics, promotions, and publicity.

1. Budget. This can be very challenging. Money can easily run out when you’re having fun. That’s why you should optimize the use of your budget for every book event.  Consider what things are necessary. Hold off on the fancy things that can wait when there’s more than enough money. Stay loyal to your budget.

1. Advance publicity. Content, medium, and timing make advance publicity effective. For content, you should be creative and relevant to attract attendees. What can your readers learn from reading your book? What makes your event worth the time? Create a simple yet persuasive strategy statement. State a call to action. Mediums can be attractive invitation cards, bookmarks, flyers, posters, button pins, print ads, press releases, websites or video trailers. Timing can be very crucial. It’s best to launch your advance publicity 30 to 60 days prior to your book event.

1. Crowdsourcing. When you let your readers get involve, you don’t only get attention, but you get the opportunity to generate ideas from them. Crowdsourcing can be in many forms. Get the public involve by letting them help you out on creating a video trailer for your book. Offer appealing rewards to entice a lot of participants. You’d be surprised to see how much ideas can be generated to your advantage.

1. Give away good attitude at all times. Criticism, whether you agree or not, is part of success. Always have a polite and courteous attitude especially when facing impossible-to-deal-with customers.Success doesn’t come overnight.

1. Express gratitude in tangible ways. At the end of every book event, it’s always best when you reward the people who took time to attend. If it’s possible, send out personalized ‘thank you’ cards. By doing this, they will most likely look forward to your next book event.

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Source: http://blog.marketingtipsforauthors.com/2010/08/clone-yourself-marketing-tips-that-help.html

By Tony Eldridge, creator of Marketing Tips For Authors

Do you ever wish you had 26 hours in a day or that you could be in two places at once? One way to handle this conundrum is to hire people to do some of the things you just don’t have time to do. But in some cases, the answer to your time-crunch dilemma may be a simple, free solution that you can set up today. I’m talking about automated services that help you get your marketing messages out for you so you can focus on other marketing activities.

In the near past, I would have provided a list of services that you can use to accomplish this. While I will mention a few services that I use, this post will focus simply on educating you on the types of activities that you have available. Why? Because these time-saving services are so widespread and similar in features that a simple Google search will return a virtual smorgasbord of results for you to feast on.

1. Automatically Announce Your New Blog Posts- You could spend an hour each day manually adding your new post to your social sites or you could hire someone to do this for you. But in today’s world, you can set up a service to automatically detect and post the title and link to your social sites. Most of these services will even shorten your URL for micro sites like Twitter.

Before you get all excited and start to sign up for these services, I have a some advice.

• Check out the free services before you pay for this. You may eventually decide to pay for services that offer unique benefits you find desirable, but you may also find that the free services do exactly what you need.
• Be careful not to sign up for multiple services that do the same thing. You may find two cool services that offer unique benefits but they both also post your new blog title to your accounts. You don’t want to flood your social followers with the same announcements over and over.
• Remember that you can set these services up coming or going. What I mean by that is that you can have sites like Twitter pull in your new blog posts or you can even have your blog send out your new posts to sites like Twitter. And there are a host of third party applications that will act as the go-between between services like your blog and Twitter.
• Many applications will post to multiple spots like Twitter and Facebook at the same time, so you may want to look at managing one application rather than managing multiple applications that all do the same thing.

2. Automatically Schedule Your Messages- I love services like Social Oomph. Their free version will allow you to create a tweet that you might want to send out multiple times, save it, and schedule it to run whenever you wish with a few clicks of your mouse. I have hundreds of blog titles going back a couple of years that are still relevant today as they were when I first posted them. Now, once a week or once every two weeks, I can schedule old posts to tweet out to new followers. This can keep great content out of the morgue and help them continue to give benefits to your followers.

3. Have Your Mail Client Sort Your Incoming Mail- Rather than spend your day prioritizing your e-mail or hiring an assistant to do it for you, you can set up folders for incoming e-mails and then set up rules to have incoming mail automatically move messages to these folders. Then, all you have to do is glance through your folders to visually see priority messages.

For example, I never want to miss an e-mail from my wife, Emily. I have a folder in Outlook called, creatively enough, “Emily.” Anytime she sends me an e-mail, it goes straight to that folder and the folder turns bold to let me know an unread message is there. I have folders set up for blogs I follow, incoming bills, Twitter alerts and about 25 other folders. TechTrax has a great written tutorial on setting up rules or for those who learn better by watching, VideoTrainingPro has a video tutorial that will help you set up rules.

4. Make It Easy For Your Followers To Share Through Automation- You love it when people tweet about your post or share it with their Facebook friends, right? Well, people are more likely to do just that if you make it quick and easy for them. Early on, I actually changed the HTML template of this blog to add the TweetMeMe button on all my posts. Now, Blogger has a tool that will add it for you with a click or two of the mouse. Regardless of what tool you use, or where you get it, if you give your readers a simple button to click in order to share your posts, it will increase the chances that they will follow through.

I hope these ideas help you find ways you can automate your daily tasks and free up time to do the other marketing tasks that need to be done. If so, you will be surprised at how productive you will become.

About the Author

Tony Eldridge is the author of the award winning action/adventure novel, The Samson Effect, which Clive Cussler calls a “first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure.” He is also the creator of Marketing Tips for Authors, a site that publishes free tips and videos to help authors learn marketing techniques for their books. You can read the serial release of The Samson Effect at http://samsoneffect.marketingtipsforauthors.com/

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As an author, the most important person in your career is you. Self-publishing takes writing into a higher level since it’s you who will spearhead every single detail that makes up your book marketing campaign. However, you should learn to choose a number of allies who will help you all the way to your book’s launching. You don’t know everything. Going solo in doing your marketing campaign will leave you drained and frustrated. You need people who will help you cut through the competitive market.

The future of your writing career basically depends on these elements: (1) you as an author, (2) your book/s, (3) marketing and promotions, (4) and networking.

You as an Author
Just like establishing brands, you need to standout among all the other authors. It is not a question of talent or skill since appreciation in writing is diverse and subjective. This boils down to your creativity; letting readers understand and appreciate what you are writing about. When people can relate to your writing, you become successful in being a part of their lives.

Your Book/s
How can your book possibly compete against bestsellers? It’s equally important to plan out your writing career. State your goal and enumerate your objectives. In that way, you won’t have a difficult time establishing your niche. It takes much consistency for you to be known for something.

Marketing and Promotions
Your books won’t sell unless you do extensive marketing campaigns. Competition is fierce in the market. Doing your best means picking the right marketing tools to help in your book’s marketing campaign. Take time to evaluate on the book marketing product or service and always consider their prices.

Networking
Networking is cost-free. But it takes time and social investment for you to succeed in this aspect. You won’t be able to attract readers if you just talk pure business. Networking also takes a lot of creativity and out of the box ideas to draw in sustainable interest and attention. The more promotions you do, the more opportunities you create.

But above everything else, remember that you are the most powerful marketing weapon. You are your book’s advantage.

Here’s a checklist to help you in your career:

1. Don’t stop learning. Endlessly practice and polish your ability to write.
2. Fuel your passion and promotion by learning from other book marketing campaigns. Success stories will inspire and keep you going.
3. Be resilient at all times. Stay committed to your career.
4. Don’t let creativity run out. Take risks and try out new things.
5. Continuously establish your identity through presenting authentic and new ideas.
6. Keep your communication open. Build and maintain relationships with your growing network of readers, fans, the media, and the rest of your allies.
7. Be willing to go an extra mile in promoting your work. Seize speaking opportunities even if it doesn’t earn you a dime.
8. Take every problem as a challenge.
9. Lastly, use your time and any existing talent as productively as you can.

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By: Patrick Schwerdtfeger

Hi!

BookWhirl.com is stretching out its coverage to bring you the latest articles, news, and tidbits about the self-publishing industry.

For this week, BookWhirl.com features winning reasons why self-published authors should have and maintain a blog.

Blog for the Win: Why Blogging is a Must-do for Self-published Authors

Blogging is a necessary strategy for an effective book marketing campaign. In fact, blogging has changed the way ideas and opinions are shared. It provides a multi-channel of information dissemination. Sharing of information has never been as easy as blogging. It is something that should be professionally utilized.

A survey published in the 2009 State of the Blogosphere by Technorati showed the significance of blogging towards building relationships between writers and readers. Here are some interesting figures: 77% of Internet users read blogs, 56% say that their blog has helped their company establish a positioning as a thought leader within the industry, 58% say that they are better-known in their industry because of their blog.

Now, here’s a list of winning reasons why self-published authors should have and maintain a blog.

Read the succeeding paragraphs at this link: http://www.bookwhirl.com/Marketing-Tips/1.html

Do you want to share your articles?

Send us an email at contributions@bookwhirl.com and we’ll publish your articles to all of our social media sites.

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source: http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/104738/publishing/the_challenges_with_ebook_publishing.html

For the month of August, we bring you features on how to do wise financial investments and the importance of constant education and learning.

Featured Book

A Common Sense Approach to Successful Investing by Marvin H. Doniger helps readers decide on wise investments. It encourages both new and experienced investors to make use the power of Stratamentical Analysis as an essential tool to succeed. A Common Sense Approach to Successful Investing contains comprehensive outlines of every relevant subject, from the simplest to the most complex. For individuals who need and seek guidance on how to do wise investments, A Common Sense Approach to Successful Investing might just hold the answers.

Read more about A Common Sense Approach to Successful Investing by Marvin H. Doniger at this link: http://www.bookwhirl.com/bookshelf/1.html

Featured Author

Get to know Dr. Donald Martin, who holds a doctorate in Higher Education Administration who desire to help students accomplish education goals and dreams. His book, Road Map for Graduate Study, covers research on graduate programs and institutions, the application process, evaluation questions, checklists, and tips on how to succeed in graduate school. Dr. Donald Martin generously shares his rich experiences in higher education administration.

Read more about Dr. Donald Martin and his passion on education at this link: http://www.bookwhirl.com/Authors-Corner.html

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by Irene Watson

source: http://www.sellingbooks.com/tips-to-pre-sell-before-you-publish-your-book

Pre-selling books is a great marketing strategy to build anticipation for books and to get paid while you work rather than after the work is completed. By pre-selling, I mean two things:

1. Making readers want to buy your book before it has been printed.
2. Selling copies of the book before it is printed.

Authors can start selling their books as soon as they have the idea for one. While that may be extreme in some cases, many authors have done so by keeping journals or blogs on their website about the evolution of their book, ideas, drafts, stumbling blocks, all of which may interest readers and keep them coming back for more information including to find out the date the book will go on sale. For an already established author, this strategy of pre-selling as soon as the book idea originates may work very well. For other authors, it may be better to wait until you at least have a complete draft or until you are ready to send the book to be printed, since even if you are just waiting for the printing, it may give you a full month or two to market your book before it is printed.

Effective marketing will pre-sell your book. If a reader says to himself, “I’m going to buy that book when it comes out,” then the book is as good as sold, provided you remind the reader now and then about the book. When we go to a bookstore to buy a specific book, haven’t we already bought that book in our minds-isn’t it pre-sold then?

Besides building buzz for your book before it is printed, pre-selling can also mean collecting the money before it is printed.

Henry Ford was the master of pre-selling and we can all benefit from his example. Ford wanted to mass-produce his automobiles, but first he needed to find the money to pay for the cost of building them. When Ford shared his dilemma with friends, Harvey Firestone suggested he pre-sell his automobiles and use the money from the pre-sales to create the first mass production assembly line, which then produced the automobiles Ford delivered to the customers who had already paid for them. Today, authors can capitalize on Firestone’s brilliant idea and Ford’s execution of it by pre-selling their books to pay for part or all of the printing costs.

If you have the money to print your book, you might not think pre-selling is necessary, but consider that if you plan to print 500 copies and you can pre-sell several hundred, you may find you have the money to print 1,000 copies, thus reducing your cost per unit price so you can ultimately make more money off your books. You’ll also get some idea of how popular your book will be and how many copies you may need to print. And the sooner you let people know about your book, the sooner they can spread the word, and the sooner you get a return on your investment. What author doesn’t want to earn back his or her printing costs as soon as possible?

Pre-selling is not simple, however. You do need to work at building the buzz about your book. You can advertise on your website and elsewhere that the book is being pre-sold, but you have to get people interested in the book so they will buy it, and you also must get past the hurdle in their minds of “I’ll wait until the book actually comes out.”

Tips for Effective Pre-Selling:

1. Advertise Pre-Sales on Your Website: Post the book for sale on your website with a date for the printing that gives you wiggle room. For example, if your book should be printed by October 1, you may want to post the release date as December 1. In this case, people will realize they can still get the book in time to give as Christmas gifts, you have extra time in case you run into any last minute printing problems, and you will wow your customers by delivering the book early if everything runs smoothly. It also will give you extra time to mail or deliver all those pre-sold orders before your proposed release date so you’re not frantically trying to do so on December 1^st. Furthermore, an October 1 release date may not suggest Christmas to people’s minds, but December 1 will give them the idea that the book could be a Christmas present.
2. Offer a Special Pre-Sale Price: As soon as you have a reasonable idea of what your book’s retail price will be and your printing costs, start pre-selling with a special pre-sale price. Customers will be more willing to buy before a book is printed if they think they can get a deal. For example, if your books are going to cost $10 each to print and you’re selling them at $29.95, you might offer a special of $17.95 for presale copies. As long as you make a profit, you might even go lower. I suggest $17.95 because it’s a 40% discount. Most bookstores will want 40% so why not sell to customers direct rather than through the bookstores and still get as much profit? If you’re using a book distributor, the cut is closer to 55% in which case you’ll make more profit selling directly to customers than through a distributor. Make sure on your website you advertise that the price is $29.95 but the pre-sale is $17.95. You might also put a deadline date on it, such as $17.95 only until October 1. Then on October 1, if your book is still not out, you might raise the price to $19.95 and continue to pre-sell until that December 1 date.
3. Blogging and Serializing: People aren’t going to buy the book, if they don’t know what it is about. Beyond just a paragraph or two of content, you can post to your website or blog a chapter every few days to build interest in the book. If it’s a novel with 20 chapters and you have 16 weeks until the book’s release, post a chapter a week. If it’s a non-fiction book, you can do the same or just post favorite parts. You can give away over half the content and people will still want to buy the book.
4. Marketing Pieces: It’s never too early to start telling people about your book. As soon as you have a cover design, start including your book’s image and information about your book on all your marketing pieces-brochures, business cards, bookmarkers, bumper stickers, and anything else you can imagine. Take every opportunity to advertise the book’s upcoming release.
5. Talk About Your Book: If you’re already an established author and you’re doing book signings, give away flyers or bookmarkers to your customers advertising the next book. Bring posters with you. Tell everyone about your book every chance you get. Without being obnoxious, turn the conversation around to something that relates to your book. “When I was researching my book…” is a great lead in.
6. Reviews: Ask your printer for review copies-send out copies to get reviews before the book is printed, so as soon as it is released, reviews will appear that will spark interest in your book with readers. Remember that many book reviewers will only review books not yet released.

Pre-selling is lucrative, builds buzz, and also helps authors and readers get excited about books. The more you pre-sell, the less work you’ll have to do later once the book is printed to make people aware of it. By then, the book should be selling itself!

Irene Watson is the Managing Editor of Reader Views, where avid readers can find reviews of recently published books as well as read interviews with authors. Her team also provides author publicity and a variety of other services specific to writing and publishing books.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Irene_Watson

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by Eric Gruber

source: http://www.sellingbooks.com/best-ways-to-overcome-writers-block-and-save-your-sanity-and-your-hair

Are you experiencing writer’s block?

Whether you are a new writer or an article writing and marketing expert like me, there comes a time when you just stare at the blank white screen with your hands ready at the keyboard – but they’re not typing. The dreadful writer’s block is stopping the words from flowing as they should.

It is frustrating to be stuck especially when you know when you write and submit articles online you will get more website traffic, prospects and profits. So, you start pulling your hair out and grinding your teeth.

See, I know exactly how you feel. There were many times that I wanted to throw my laptop and my desktop right out the window. I know what it is like to try to force yourself to “work through it”, and when you sit down to write you are numb and feel like your brain is composed of concrete.

I also know that the longer you stay in this state the more discouraged you get, which makes it even harder to write. That’s why I am going to help you get out of that dark, cold, gloomy corner and see the light so you can start writing articles faster.

7 Ways to Overcome Writer’s Block and Banish It Forever

1. Use instant article writing templates — You want to use article templates that literally guide you through the article writing process. For example, my 40+ Instant Article Writing Templates Kit, is filled with worksheets and ideas. All you have to do is enter the information that the template asks for – where it asks for it. Not only will you generate article ideas, but you’ll be able to organize your ideas in a way that gets your prospects to read your articles from top to bottom.

2. Host a teleseminar – Greg Ivers of Church Loan Services, an article marketing coaching client of mine, has the hardest time putting the information inside his head into words. No matter how much time I spent with him – he just wasn’t getting it like many small business owners. However, he has no problem speaking about his expertise. So, using Instant Teleseminars, I’m having him do a teleseminar recording that he can use as a lead generation device. He’s then going to use the recording to create a number of articles to promote his free audio program.

3. Keep a digital or analog notebook with you 24/7 — They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Coming up with compelling ideas to write about is sometimes the hardest challenge of all. But, if you have an “idea pad” with you at all times, you can build a reserve of good topics to draw upon as you need them. You’re working proactively to prevent writer’s block.

4. Start writing without constraints– Consider this: Have you ever been blocked while playing Frisbee? Eating doughnuts? Dancing naked in your living room? Those are joyful things and there’s nothing at stake. If you fail, who cares? Nobody. If there are no rules, and no judgment, psychological blocks are impossible. So, start writing without constraints. Deliberately write badly, but write.

5. Write about how it feels not to be able to write. It’s sneaky, but, it works. The voices in our heads are always saying something, so get it down. Imagine yourself as a recording device, writing down the radio broadcast of some other person who happens to live in your head. Eventually your mind will hit thoughts on the topic itself and, presto, you’re on your way.

6. Make Lists – List making is never as threatening as “writing”, so go there first! As far as I know, there is no shopping list block, is there? For example, when I created this list article, I kicked my list around for awhile. I made changes. I did lots of moving and shuffling. Then once it reached critical mass, I put in a document and created my article.

7. Keep writer’s block away by writing daily — Just like someone who is out of shape could not run a mile in a respectable amount of time, someone who doesn’t write frequently will not be able to write high quality articles fast. You have to train your body to run, just like you must train your brain to write. And, you become a faster runner and writer through repeated practice and perseverance.

So, pick up my article writing templates at StartWritingArticlesFaster.com and put these ideas to use. You’ll be amazed how fast ideas will start racing to your mind.

Article marketing expert Eric Gruber created online marketplace opportunities for authors, small business owners, speakers and internet marketers who want more website traffic, prospects and profits. Now you can get started with writing and marketing your business with articles, by getting 3 free article templates that will help you write articles faster. Get it now at: http://www.trymyfreearticletemplates.com

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