Source: http://www.bookbuzzr.com/blog/book-marketing/how-to-use-twitter-to-sell-more-books/

Expert: Gary Smailes

I am yet to meet a writer who has not been told that social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook hold the magic key to publishing success. However, this bold statement is often followed by wishy washy feel good advice, the kind of advice Dan Zarrella would refer to as. ‘unicorns and rainbows’. In this post I will give you realistic and pragmatic guidance on how you can use Twitter to build a following and sell more books. This advice is based on hard learned lessons, which has seen the @bubblecow following build to about 8000 followers.

Over the years of experimenting with Twitter and testing ideas, I have come to just one important conclusion: people are lazy and selfish. That’s you and me and anyone else out there in the ether. We are time pressed and goal focused. The simple fact is that we will only pay attention to people who are making are lives better and helping us to reach our goals. If you are to be successful on Twitter, then you must do just that – add value to people’s lives!

Define Your Market

The first step in establishing a solid Twitter following is to define your market. It is impossible to add value to your follower’s lives, if you don’t understand the drives and motivations of your followers.

Let’s use BubbleCow as an example. Our business is to provide copy editing and mentoring to writers. This means that our target market is writers. However, this is a big market and we can further refine our audience. We know that the vast majority of writers who use our service are either unpublished writers or writers planning to self-publish. This means we are able to define our market to be writers who are either unpublished or are planning to self-publish.

You may argue that this is fine for a business but, as a writer, you are not selling a product. If you believe this then you are wrong. Your book is your product and your potential readers are your market. This means that you must sit down and define the type of person who will read your book.

To do this you must ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your book’s genre?
• What other books will the reader of your book have also read?
• Who is your ideal reader (age, sex, education etc.)?

You can use the answers to these questions to define your target market.

Speak To Your Market

Having decided your market, and formed a picture of the perfect follower/reader/client, you must now position yourself to appeal to that market. The first place to start is with your Twitter profile.

our profile is one of the first places potential followers will look when trying to decide if you are worthy of their follow. The first place to start is with your bio pic. My advice is to go for a picture that is easily identifiable and will be non-threatening to your followers. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy (we use a cow licking!) but it does need to be clear. If you are unsure, then go for a casual picture of yourself. A non-professional head and shoulders shot is best. I would suggest that you rarely change this picture. It is your Twitter brand and makes you easily recognisable when you show up in a Twitter stream. We often have followers saying they love it when the licking cow pops up.

The second aspect of your profile you should be considering is your blurb. This is your first chance to position yourself in the minds of followers. The key is to be very clear about who you are and why someone should follow you. Let’s return to the BubbleCow profile.

Our blurb says the following:

Publishing experts tweeting links to help you get published and sell more books. BubbleCow provides professional copy editing and book proposal advice.

You can see here that the wording is aimed firmly at writers looking to get published or sell more books. We make it clear who we are, what we do and what you will get if you follow us. We don’t want followers who are not writers, after all they are not going to be buying our services. We are only interested in writers. Plus, it is only writers who will receive any kind of value from our tweets. If you are not a writer then 100% of what we tweet out will be boring and pointless.

A trap many writers fall into is trying to appeal too broadly. If you are a Sci Fi writer, then you only want potential readers of Sci Fi novels to be following you. The key is to refer back to the questions you answered regarding your ideal follower and write a profile blurb that will appeal directly to them, and only them.

Building A Following

There is only one way to build an effective following on Twitter and that is to send out tweets that add value to followers… and to do it consistently.

Adding value is the hardest part of building a following. The temptation will be to use Twitter in the way it was designed, as a tool to connect with friends. This is great for keeping in touch but it will not allow you to build a following beyond a couple of hundred followers. If you are to build a big following then you need to reach a wider audience. The key to doing this is to add value.

There I go again with that phrase, ‘adding value.’ What does it mean? Well, adding value is providing something that will make your follower’s lives that little bit better. It might be a piece of news, a link to a good website or a joke (or anything you can fit in 140 characters). At BubbleCow, we add value by tweeting out ten or so links each day to websites and blogs that we are sure writers will love. Each morning I spend about thirty minutes crawling hundreds of blogs to find links that writers will love. I track the click through rates and continually refine my choices to match our follower’s tastes.

So am I telling you to tweet out links? The answer is no. Links work for us. It fits our profile and business model. It means I am free from Twitter most of the day, whilst still giving our followers what they want. It is essential that you find something that your followers want (need) and that you can provide on a consistent basis. It might take you weeks or months to find the one thing you can do to add value to your followers. Don’t be afraid to experiment, use tools like Hootsuite to track click rates and retweets, even ask your followers what they need.

My final nugget of advice is to be consistent. Showing up every day, tweeting out consistently and engaging where possible will build trust and recognition. Over time this will build a following of fans. Then when you have a book to promote, they will be that little bit more ready to pay you back and push your work.

BubbleCow provides copy editing, mentoring and book proposal advice to writers from across the globe. You can follow them on twitter at @bubblecow.

Gary Smailes has wide experience of the publishing industry and over the past ten years has worked as a freelance writer, historian and researcher. Gary has written a number of history books for children including the Brave Scot and Modern Hero series. His four books from the BattleBooks series have been published by Hachette in 2010. He also worked with the successful author Terry Deary as the researcher for the ever popular Horrible Histories books. Gary has collaborated with a number of independent publishers providing editorial support and advice for fiction and non-fiction titles.

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source: http://www.bookbuzzr.com/blog/book-marketing/drumroll-please-the-next-generation-of-facebook-marketing-is-here/

written by: Vikram Narayan

The problem with today’s Facebook fan pages
So you’re an author with a Facebook fan page. You’ve got book trailers, polls, quizzes, photo and writing contests running on your page. You’ve even got a few hundred “Facebook Likes” for your page. And yet your book sales are not going up. You then compare yourself to popular authors with tens of thousands of Fans on their Facebook fan pages. And you wonder what they are doing that you’re not doing.

Here’s what’s happening.

If you are a popular mainstream author, the people becoming fans of your page are people who already read your books or have heard enough about you that they are likely to soon become readers.

If you are not yet a literary superstar, then the people who are “Liking” your page are doing so because of some other inducement that you may be providing (“get entered into a prize drawing if you Like my page”). They are unlikely to think about you or notice your book even if they “Like” your Facebook fan page. And they are unlikely to return to your Facebook page or tell their friends about it.

Thus, while a Facebook fan page (and associated bells and whistles such as the BookBuzzr Facebook Fan Page Widget) is a necessary condition for entry into the book marketing game, it is not sufficient.

So how do you actually find some readers for your book?

John Locke’s Principle of Transfer of Loyalty
A few months ago, best-selling author – John Locke – wrote a book – “How I Sold a Million Books”. In this book John comes up with the concept of “Transfer of Loyalty”. The idea is simple and fairly well-known. It is best illustrated by an example.

Let us say that you’ve written a vampire romance book and your target audience is the set of people who liked the Twilight movie series. You write a blog post on the Twilight movie series and promote the blog post on Twitter to Twilight movie fans. Some of these folks will read your blog post and get exposed to your book. Some of your blog post readers may now “transfer their loyalty” to give your book a try.

While this is a fantastic, proven concept, we at BookBuzzr, believe that the principle can be extended to find readers on Facebook.

Characteristics of Facebook users
Some of the characteristics of Facebook users are:
1. They don’t like reading lengthy blog posts while on Facebook.
2. They like playing trivia games
3. They like sharing fun stuff with their friends
4. They are usually thinking WIIFM (What’s in it for me?)

Announcing QuizBuzzr – a revolution in book marketing on Facebook

Melding John Locke’s loyalty transfer principle with our insight about Facebook users, we’ve come up with QuizBuzzr.

QuizBuzzr is a quiz that you, the author, create. There are ten questions in each quiz. The quiz would ideally appeal to your target audience. For example, if you think that fans of the Oprah Winfrey show would enjoy your book, you would create a quiz featuring 10 questions about Oprah Winfrey.

QuizBuzzr also features “Lifelines”. Clicking on these will offer you clues to the correct answer with one twist – some of them require you to share the game with your Facebook friends.

QuizBuzzr is also made interesting by the fact that at each point during the game, you can “Walk Away” from the game thereby saving the points earned till that point or risk it all by trying to answer the next question.

And we’ve built in several ‘viral hooks’ which cause users to share information about the specific quiz and about your book with their Facebook friends.

And winning points in the game allows users to use those points on Freado.com where they can win real prizes including Kindles and best-selling books.

Why is this useful for you?

To summarize, this technology is particularly useful because:

1. You can create several quizzes that are likely to appeal to your readers.
2. It shows up your book at strategic points in the game alongside the questions.
3. As described earlier, it appeals to the average Facebook user.
4. Because of the in-built viral hooks at various points in the game, your book will be surely be marketed.

How can you use QuizBuzzr to market your book on Facebook?
QuizBuzzr will soon be released as a test beta product. It comes bundled with a BookBuzzr Author Pro subscription. To use it to market your book, simply sign-up for a BookBuzzr Author Pro account.

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Source: http://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-goal/build-a-platform-start-blogging/a-writers-guide-to-social-networking

For once, hopping on the bandwagon can actually help you stand out. There have never been more people participating in social networks. While there’s a personal dimension to nearly all such networks (and users can limit access to their profiles to whomever they choose), clever writers can also use them as arms of their platforms. But merely joining isn’t the way to do it.

Social networking to enhance your platform requires a consistent investment of time. The key? Authenticity plus generosity. If you approach these sites simply as places to shill your book or service and never give back to the communities, you’ll find yourself losing “friends” faster than you add them. As with all types of marketing, what you do on social networks depends on what your audience will respond to and what your goals are.

FACEBOOK

Using Facebook (facebook.com), one of the most popular social networks, can be as simple or complex as you like, ranging from simply telling your friends what you’re doing and uploading photos to using thousands of applications (e.g., playing online Scrabble with a Facebook friend). Social media experts generally consider Facebook one of many online outposts for marketing—not something that warrants heavy use, but an important tool for developing a following if you find your audience actively uses the site. To maximize what Facebook can do for you:

NETWORK. Facebook can help you find others interested in the subjects you’re most passionate about, including writing—and your favorite things to write about.

JOIN GROUPS RELATED TO YOUR SUBJECT. If you write horror, join groups that celebrate it. If you write parenting articles, join groups for parents. Befriend other members.

CREATE YOUR OWN GROUP. If you have a book, you can create a group centered on your book. But an even better strategy is to create one around your personal brand/identity or blog, because that can remain relevant even as your writing career progresses. Once you have a group, you can send messages to its members. Limit them in number and be sure to include only content with genuine value.

POST EVENTS. This feature allows you to invite all your friends or all the members of your groups to bookstore appearances, readings, book releases, etc.

UPDATE YOUR STATUS AND PROFILE IMAGE REGULARLY. It may seem silly, but keeping your profile current can make a huge difference in how well people feel they know you—even if you don’t reveal too much about your personal life. Frequent updates will keep you at the top of your friends’ lists—and fresh in their minds. For status updates, mention places you’ve been, articles or books you’re reading and goals you’re setting. Every update has the potential to strengthen a relationship with someone in your network.

AVOID GETTING ADDICTED. You’ll be tempted to spend lots of time making friends and playing around with the applications. Budget how much time you spend on Facebook each day. While it can be a valuable tool, your efforts to write, get published and get visible take precedence.

TWITTER

Twitter (twitter.com) is a micro-blogging platform that allows people to follow one another and post messages of 140 characters or less. “Tweeting” is like updating your Facebook status, minus everything else on Facebook. Some say Twitter is the new Facebook (but Facebook is the new MySpace, which was the new Friendster, and so on). To get the most out of Twitter:

FOLLOW PEOPLE OR COMPANIES THAT CAN OFFER YOU SOMETHING. That can include entertainment, information, promotion advice, inspiration, news, etc. Agents, editors, publishers, authors, publicists, marketing gurus, celebrities and others are tweeting. Google “book trade on Twitter” and you’ll find an ever-growing list of publishing professionals.

FOLLOW OTHERS TO GET FOLLOWERS. It’s unwritten Twitter etiquette that when you follow someone, they generally respond in kind. This is true whether you’re following your sister or the Los Angeles Times. You can’t send a direct (nonpublic) message to a fellow tweeter if you’re not following him.

DEFINE YOUR GOALS AND POST ACCORDINGLY. Are you tweeting for fun, just to engage potential readership? To drive people to your website? To spread the word about a giveaway? Your goal could be one or all of these and more.

USE TINYURL.COM TO ADD LINKS TO YOUR TWEETS. This site turns unwieldy URLs into more manageable ones, helping you fit links into the 140-character limit.

VISIT SEARCH.TWITTER.COM TO TRACK DOWN TWEETING TOPICS. You can search for anything, and the site will pull up recent tweets containing the words you chose.

CHECK YOUR TWITTER SCORE AT TWITTER.GRADER.COM. This site calculates “the reach and authority of a Twitter user” based on the number of her followers, the power of her network, the pace of her updates and the completeness of her profile. Use it to help maximize Twitter.

DIVERSIFY. Tweet on your Web browser, through mobile phones, via blog and website widgets and more. Check out twitter.com/downloads to view the possibilities.

LINKEDIN

LinkedIn (linkedin.com) is a social network of professionals. It can be invaluable when seeking freelance opportunities or industry contacts, but only if you start investing time in it long before you need results. Look at it as part of your professional life and marketing arsenal—not as a back door to an agent or editor.

As with other social networking sites, you have a profile page and a network of connections. You can also join groups, pose questions to your network/groups, post events and add widgets, such as your blog feed, to your profile.

LinkedIn creates visibility for what you do and offer. Your profile will appear in search engines and can be accessed by the public if you allow it to. The site also allows people to publicly recommend your professional work. Used wisely, it’s an effective and dynamic way to network and spur new ideas for promoting your writing. To get off to a good start:

CREATE A COMPELLING PROFILE. Don’t just post your résumé. Rather than describing your experience, show the concrete results you have achieved—fast turnaround, exemplary research or writing, etc.

ASK YOUR PROFESSIONAL CONTACTS TO RECOMMEND YOU. Then display the recommendations on your profile to help confirm the quality and nature of your work.

ADD VALUE TO YOUR NETWORK. Answer questions, post helpful articles or tips, and participate in a way that reflects your personality, energy and expertise. The more you give, the more you get. If you impress people here, it opens doors.

LINK TO YOUR OWN WEBSITES AND BLOGS, AS WELL AS TO OTHER PLACES YOUR WORK CAN BE FOUND ONLINE. Also post information about any upcoming events you’re attending, books or articles you’re reading, etc.

A final word of advice: Don’t substitute any social networking site for in-person or event networking. It might help get the ball rolling with introductions, but nothing can take the place of getting out there and being part of the writing and publishing scene, whether on a local or national level. When those people see you online later, they’ll take notice.

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Bringing Great Authors To the Literary Realm

Guest Author: Amy Lignor

In 2007, as we all know, Amazon came out and launched an ‘e-reader.’ Many thought this was a joke, but I can honestly say that there is no one laughing now.

Digital publishing and branding have become the ultimate ways to get ahead, or even recognized, in the cutthroat recession-wary publishing world as it stands today. Publishers are looking at the bottom line. Are they poor? Are publishing houses becoming dinosaurs? No. Make no mistake, people, not matter what the agencies and publishers tell you total book sales in the United States last year came in at 13.9 billion dollars. Random House, the top rung of the so-called “Big Six Publishers” reported profits of 2.5 billion. However, a large percentage of revenue is now being recorded as digital downloads. And this area is growing bigger every year.

There will always be those out in the world who want that paper copy – that copy that they can hold in their hands. In fact, this writer feels about books as deeply as a hockey player feels about the ‘smell of the ice.’ I love the smell of a new book, and e-readers take that particular enjoyment away. BUT, there are a great deal of authors out there right now who are truly magnificent, yet they are not getting the opportunities to be published. There are barely any agents or publishers out there right now that would’ve told you twenty years ago that YA would ever be a big market. What they didn’t see coming was J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, and the like who took the world by storm. One of the most ironic issues about new authors who do hit the market full force, is that most of them were taken on by interns or new hires in literary agency; people who just stepped in and felt as if they had to prove themselves to their bosses. Why is that? Because those new interns still knew what it felt like to read a good book. They were, and are, not yet caught up in the muck and mire of the bottom line. They take a chance and they score – simple as that.

In mid-2010, Amazon announced that they were selling MORE e-books than hardcover’s, which caused a division in the literary society. The division and arguments still abound about the digital world becoming ‘King’ one day, but whether or not anyone likes it, the internet IS the ‘King’ of the 21st Century. Many young adults (and some adults, I have to say) are learning their grammar and penmanship through text messaging – “How are you?” has now become “How r u?” Everyone is on the go, and their e-readers, Kindles, etc. make life a whole lot easier than having to trudge to the library, or spend a greater amount of money in the bookstore. Readers can simply call up Amazon, call up the book they want, and ‘boom,’ there it is on the device that they have grown to love as much as their cell phones.

One of the biggest moments for digital publishing, in my mind, was when the New York Times suddenly realized this growing phenomenon and – whether they liked it or not, and most did not – they began a digital bestseller list; an e-book ‘Top Ten.’ Not only that, although the New York Times Book Review is still a monolith in the publishing world, they are quickly being set aside for the ultimate reviewers – the actual fans and readers who are constantly on Facebook and Twitter.

With the world of social networking, an author can reach millions of people with their synopsis, book trailers on YouTube, announcements, events, downloadable book sites, reviews, interviews, and more. Whereas authors once had to depend on marketing giants, agents, and the publishing company to do the work for them, they now can take matters into their own hands and get the exposure they need for their title. And, let’s face it, the one person who has the most passion for a book – the optimal salesperson for their title – is themselves. With publishers and agents, the author is one of many being served. Exposure is the key element to selling a book right now. Yes, the old names such as King, Koontz, Rowling, etc. will sell no matter what – simply because their name is on the cover and they have spent years gathering millions of fans. But the new authors who are truly writing fantastic fiction but being completely overlooked by agencies and publishers who don’t wish to take a chance on a new name, are building their fan list through social networking; branding themselves through radio programs, websites, the constant Twittering, reaching all their readers out there who simply don’t have time, inclination, or the energy to go to the library or spend hard-earned money at the bookstore. Even well-known authors are now reporting that 20%-to sometimes 40% of their sales are coming from Kindle and e-reader downloads. With the odd part being that if things keep progressing this way, the ‘Big Six’ is going to drop down to the ‘Big Three’ one of these days.

Another issue? Literary agencies. People are stunned at times that agencies are replying with rejection letters that don’t match up with the book the author even sent in the first place. Giving you a personal example, I was sent a rejection letter once saying that my character, Susan, was outstanding but the locations were a little too eerie for them. My main character’s name was Leah – not even a close resemblance to Susan. When I replied to said agent, there was a nice answer of ‘whoops,’ and I was actually told that sometimes they are so busy, they don’t read what is sent.

I put this in so that I can stop one thing from happening. Writers can NOT give up on their books or their dreams because of rejection letters. Sometimes, trust me, they’re not even being read. The rejection letter is mostly now just a ‘form response;’ it is automatic and is simply sent because A) they’re too busy, or B), they want to make sure they don’t make a mistake in their reply causing the author to realize that their query wasn’t even looked at. I shudder to think that if Rowling hadn’t had the courage to continue after receiving rejection letter after rejection letter – and she had placed our beloved ‘Harry’ in a drawer – the entire generation would’ve been the poorer for it.

Is writing skill and talent? Yes. However, it is also 99.9% pure and utter luck. As we all know, there are titles that come out every year (many) where the author received an advance (big) and the plots of these stories are the most depressing things on the face of the planet. AND, they don’t sell. All of this has to do with taste, yet most publishing companies have been proving, as of the last decade, that they need to move their eyes toward more ‘commercial’ fiction – action adventure, GOOD romances, historicals – genres that DO, and have proven, to bring in the big bucks.

The upside for the authors out there is this digital world. The comments and sales the author receives come directly from the readers. THEY are the ones who make the ultimate decision on a book, bypassing a great many people who may have lost that spark of pure enthusiasm when it comes to fiction. Branding is the key, and the billions of people who reside on the internet every single day are finding their favorite new authors who don’t have an agent – don’t have a mainstream publisher – but still have the courage, determination, and passion to achieve greatness by using what the world of technology has provided.

Yes, the dream will always be there.  The call from a huge agent that says, “I’ll take it.”  The call coming in the next day saying, “Here’s the $250,000 contract from Random House,” etc.  But that dream, in the 21^st Century, can be realized elsewhere.  There’s just a whole heck of a lot more work involved.  Keep in mind that Kindle sales are projected to reach 1.6 billion by 2012.  This number is startling.  Facebook has 750 million active users and grows by the minute.  Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users (2010), with new users signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.  Nielsen published stats that the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. This equates to 22% of ‘all time’ being spent online.  For the first time ever, social network and/or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers.  MySpace:  57 million U.S. unique users and growing.  LinkedIn: 60 million users, “As of last December, the network had 55 million members, so its grown by 5 million in less than two months.  And the list goes on…

Agencies and publishers are necessary but, in the end, the author putting it out and the reader buying it and bringing in the revenues are the two most important people in the publishing world. That is one fact that has stayed the same since the beginning of time.  And all authors are now becoming quite aware that those readers are out there in full-force on the internet – not in the library or the bookstore.

A new door has been opened for the author who KNOWS they have a great book, but can’t seem to find an ‘in’ with the names that count (or, used to).  Branding is key!

(statistics taken from)
www.web-strategist.com/
www.huffingtonpost.com/
www.facebook.com/

Amy is the author of historical fiction. Presently, her adventure series – Tallent & Lowery – is the newest ‘hot’ book climbing the charts. She’s also working on a YA series, The Angel Chronicles. An avid traveler, Amy considers herself fortunate to have journeyed across the USA, where she’s met the most amazing people who truly bring life and soul to her stories. She is the Owner/Operator of The Write Companion, and Precious Gems Publishing, as well as a contributor to many literary magazines and websites.

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source: http://www.bookbuzzr.com/blog/book-marketing/readers-who-like-you-or-readers-who-friend-you-which-is-better/

Guest Expert: Laurel Marshfield

This year, Facebook topped 550 million members. If it were a country, Facebook would be the third largest in the world (ahead of the United States, in fourth place with a mere 309 million).

Impressive numbers, but why should that interest authors – interest you as an author? Here’s why.

If only a tenth of a relatively small percentage of all “Facebookians” became your loyal readers, you could easily attain the Ultimate Author Dream: Writing the books you most want to, while netting the royalties associated with authors who are mega famous.

Maybe you’d like to know, right about now, what the basic guidelines for attracting readers on the biggest social networking site in the world are?

You Have to Play to Play

If you don’t already have one, set up a “profile page” – a basic Facebook account. Simply go to www.facebook.com and fill in the requested information (realize that you must christen your profile page with your real name – a Facebook rule; if you need to differentiate your page from all the other Jane or John Smiths on the site, use a middle name or middle initial).

Once you have a profile account, you’ve earned the right to create a “fan page.” That’s where you’ll stage the serious book promotion designed to attract your new readers. (Quick aside: you can create as many fan pages as you want, but you only get one profile page — in the same way that you only get one name.) Go tohttp://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php to set up your fan page, or pages.

Profile Page, Fan Page, What’s the Difference?

Your profile page is for friends — for fun. But only 5,000 people can “Friend” you, or join your page and get your status updates in their Facebook feed. Your fanpage is for fans, readers, clients — for business. An unlimited number of people can “Like” you, with the same result as above. There are, however, some areas of overlap, and your profile page can and will draw potential readers, too.

To see how the differences play out, let’s explore the Facebook world of author and attraction coach, Eva Gregory. Esteemed in her field, she’s written two books, one of them with Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup for the Soul fame. (Another quick aside: the Facebook pages of famous authors aren’t particularly helpful, as they’re either maintained by their publishers – see Dan Brown, or they only contain a Wikipedia profile – see Jodi Picoult. But Gregory’s pages are instructive.) Here’s her profile page: http://www.facebook.com/evagregory ; and here’s her fan page:http://www.facebook.com/evagregoryfan (notice how she finds a way to use her name for both pages while making the difference clear; yet she’s still playing by Facebook’s rules).

If you go to the Info tab on Gregory’s Profile page, you’ll see a multi-paragraph description of her background, her service offerings, her books and programs, and her several businesses. You would not be amiss to wonder what all that has to do with “fun” and “friends.” But this is where that aforementioned overlap between the two pages resides. (Also note that, like everyone else with a Facebook profile page, Gregory’s nearly 5,000 “Friends” are most likely not friends in the usual sense, but in the social networking sense.)

Now, if you click over to Gregory’s fan page, you’ll see an immediate difference in both design and approach. A first-time visitor will enter through a Welcome page, and will be greeted with a pitch video, an ezine signup form, and a big, bold logo. You know right away that this page is about business – a friendly sort of business – but still, those profile page lists of interests and favorite movies are gone. In their place, you get a guided tour of Gregory’s many, many offerings.

Why Bother with Facebook When You’ve Got a Site?

It may seem odd that Gregory has established her presence so solidly on Facebook when — as you may remember from the Info tab of her profile page — she has three websites. Well, here’s why it’s not redundant, why it’s actually new territory. Facebook is where the people are. More people, in fact, than the entire population of the United States. Optimistically speaking, up to half of them could be readers. Being able to access that many potential book buyers in one place offers a huge advantage to any author — one that has never been available before. How can you make the most of it?

Finding Readers on Facebook

Scroll up to the top of any Facebook screen and you’ll see a Search box. To find potential readers, type in keywords like “Self-Help Author,” “Mystery Author,” and “YA Author” — based on your book genre or niche. Then try the plural and singular variations of other author- and book-related words. The results may appear erratic, at first, following as they do some arcane algorithm beyond the interest level of most bookish types. But you’ll eventually find authors who interest you. When you do, “Like” their fan pages and send them a friendly message about anything you may have in common. They may or may not “Like” you back, but keep at it.

Next, search for like-minded groups on Facebook — using such keywords as “Author Groups,” “Mystery Book Groups,” “Children’s Book Groups,” and a nearly infinite number of others. Join the conversation in the groups that attract you, make some connections, and you’ll begin building your potential-reader base. True, it won’t happen overnight, unless you’re already well-known. But, gradually, you’ll accumulate a following on Facebook – especially if you add new, interesting content to your fan page each week, while participating in the groups you’ve joined.

So, we’re back to our original question. Is it better to have readers who “Like” you, or readers who “Friend” you?

Readers may be readers, but it’s still better to encourage those for whom you are primarily an author to join your fan page. You can have an unlimited number of fans there, and you can promote your work in a way that’s not at all “indirect.”

Before you do, though, study the fan pages of other authors, and Google on “Facebook promotions” to be sure you violate none of the site’s ever-changing guidelines and terms of use. Once a page has been banned, for whatever reason, it’s impossible to get it restored (everything is automated; there are no customer service people to intervene). And that would be a shame, since – despite its many flaws – Facebook is the biggest social networking site on the planet. So it’s an ideal place to meet people who could become your loyal readers, and enable you to live the Ultimate Author Dream.

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Laurel Marshfield is a professional writer, developmental editor, and ghostwriter who helps authors shape, develop, and refine their book manuscripts for publication. She offers manuscript evaluation, developmental editing, co-writing, collaboration, ghostwriting, book coaching, and consultation for authors.
Her blogsite publishes inspiration and advice for the author’s journey: Blue Horizon Communications And her free eBook, available for newsletter signup (see the upper right-hand corner of her homepage) is titled: I Need to Be a Bestselling Author – Is That True?: The Five-Destination Roadmap to Authorship.

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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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source: http://www.millermosaicllc.com/book-author-profile-pages/

If you find this article informative, check out WeTeachWebMarketing.com.

If you are a book author who wants potential readers to find you on the internet, you want to be as visible as possible in places that those readers might be.

And in almost every social media place that you sign up for – such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – you are given the opportunity to write a profile about yourself.

What should these profiles say to effectively attract potential readers?

Twitter Has Only 160 Characters for Your Bio Info

Let’s start with Twitter with 160 characters max for your bio. Obviously you are going to put that you are a book author (perhaps fiction or nonfiction) and presumably you will have a book website URL for the “more info URL” field in your profile. What else are you going to say in those 160 characters? That depends.

Do you have a business besides being a book author? If so, you may want to put info about that business in your bio. Or is there a particular hook about your book that you want to get across in your bio? Perhaps your book is a novel based on a true story.

Your goal in the brief Twitter bio is to make yourself interesting enough (although all true) that people can find “connections” to you and want to follow you.

This means that you must not leave this bio blank. If you want people to follow you on Twitter, you have to be willing to share about yourself.

And remember that you can change this info easily. For example, if your book wins an award, you should consider changing your Twitter bio to reflect that award. Revisit your bio every couple of months to ensure that it presents the most up-to-date version of yourself.

Facebook Has Much More Space for Bio Info

Now let’s move on to Facebook, which has a longer bio section under info on your profile page with the ability to include as many of your own website URLs as you want.

Now here’s the often-overlooked extra of Facebook:

You can have a very brief bio section under your photo that people can see when visiting your wall page as well as your info page. This is a golden opportunity to get the most important points across in a very short space. Because, honestly, how many people are going to read all those long entries on your info page? (And for the long entries, do use lists instead of long, dense paragraphs.)

Take advantage of this brief, easy-to-read bio with the info you most want to share with your Facebook friends. Note that this may not necessarily be the same as the info you choose to share with your Twitter followers, even though in both cases you want to emphasize that you are a book author. And, again, update this brief Facebook bio every couple of months.

LinkedIn Has Its Own Peculiarities

Now for the third social networking site – LinkedIn. This site gives you a very brief space to put a few words under your photo along with the opportunity to provide a brief summary of your business. Book authors should take advantage of both places to convey their most important information. Then the rest of the profile info on LinkedIn is more job and career-oriented.

There is one important “trick”:

LinkedIn only allows three website links. But don’t click on “My Company” or “My Website” or “My Blog” before putting in the links. Click on “Other” in each case. Then to the right of “Other” put descriptive words such as “Book Blog” or “Book Site.” You want potential readers to know they can find out about your book(s) at your sites.

As with your other social media profiles, revisit your LinkedIn profile info every so often to ensure that the info is up to date.

In conclusion, don’t make the mistake of thinking that these profiles are unimportant and thus you dash off writing the info. These profiles provide the information that helps make you interesting to potential readers.

Spend as much time writing and revising these social media profiles as you would spend writing and revising any paragraph or page in your novel or nonfiction book. – P.Z.M.

___

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is a National Internet Business Examiner at http://www.InternetBizBlogger.com as well as a book author, and her power marketing company http://www.MillerMosaicLLC.com combines traditional marketing principles and Internet marketing strategies to put power in your hands.

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by: Tony Eldridge

source: http://blog.marketingtipsforauthors.com/2010/07/importance-of-social-networking-to.html

With a title like The Importance Of Social Networking To Authors And Professionals, you could expect to have a book, or volumes written to cover all the ways social media has become an indispensable tool for marketing your business. Well, I am not going to write a book here, but I am going to share one unexpected benefit of having a presence on social media sites that I learned over the last few weeks.

As many of you know, this is the first post for me in a few weeks. I had a string of illnesses hit the family and the death of my uncle in Indiana. Every now and then, circumstances arise that cause you to put all nonessential activities on hold so you can devote full attention to those circumstances.

That’s what I did for the last few weeks. Yet because I had a presence grounded in social networking, I was able to take care of some important personal needs without falling off the face of the earth. I received warm wishes on a number of sites and followers were able to know I would be away from blogging for a while.

While I was “away”, things happened that I expected. My traffic slowed down considerably. When you pause your posts, then this is a logical expectation. In fact, one thing you can do to grow your traffic and presence over the long haul is to continue to give good content.

But some unexpected things happened as well:

1. I continued to get followers on Facebook, Twitter, and on my blog which are the three main areas of internet presence that I personally focus on. These followers came at a steady clip. I believe that if the time I was away continued, the frequency of new followers would go down. But still, I was surprised at the robust activity of followers for me being away as long as I was away.
2. Not only that, comments on past blog posts continued to come. With hundreds of posts that give advice to people about marketing their book, my blog is starting to become a searchable resource that has rich relevant content for people. The search engines are also constantly delivering results with my past blog posts for people looking for the content I have.
3. My mailing lists continue to grow. People are still signing up for my free mailing lists, even though I have not sent out an update in a few weeks. Because I have built in some automated interaction, my absence has not hurt me for the few weeks I have been away. In my free Conducting Twitter Contest mailing lists, I have set it up to deliver a series of 10 lessons to people who want to learn how to conduct a twitter contest. In my free Video Tips Newsletter, I instantly give away 7 free video tips when people sign up for the list. This means that they have content to go through for a while as a reward for signing up even before the next video gets to them.

In the last few weeks, I learned the importance of cultivating a great social networking presence while I was able. I also realized the value in consistently creating good content over time. In doing so, it has rewarded me when I needed to step away and focus on personal issues. And the great thing about it is that it was all waiting for me when I was ready to return.

If you are just starting to build your social networking presence, take heart. What you are doing now is investing for the long term. That’s something that buying an ad can never do for you. If you are not seeing the results that you want immediately, don’t worry, they’ll be there soon. You just need to be committed to building your presence for the long haul.

—-

I have one request of you. I have entered a video contest that honors our men and women in the military. Regardless of how you feel about our wars, I know that most of you separate that issue with the people who serve. Take a look at my video entitled, “Compassionate Strength.” It’s a video that shows our soldiers interacting with Iraqi children.

The videos do not have a link directly to them, so you may have to do a little searching to find mine. Also, you will quickly see that someone has gone to great lengths to try to rate all videos as a 1 star. Please don’t let that throw you. My guess is that it’s someone who has entered the contest and thinks that this will help his/her video. It seems that if someone starts to get some good ratings, it’s not long before a bunch of 1 stars lowers the rating on the video.

C’est la vie

Tony Eldridge

Forney, TX, United States

Tony Eldridge author of the action/adventure book, The Samson Effect, that Clive Cussler calls a “first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure.” He also share his book marketing tips with fellow authors through his blog and through his free weekly video marketing tips for authors. You can follow him on Twitter @TonyEldridge

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by: Tony Eldridge
source: http://blog.marketingtipsforauthors.com/2009/12/4-tips-on-making-your-book-available-to.html

Book clubs are wonderful reader organizations that get together, usually once a month, to discuss a book that every member has read. The discussion is usually deeper than the kind you would find two friends having over a latte.

For fiction, members may discuss what role setting plays in the story, themes that run through the book, how characters evolve through the story or maybe what societal challenges presented themselves in the story.

For nonfiction, the members may discuss questions about how the information was presented: was is biased or fair, did the author adequately present the information in the book or were there unanswered questions, did the book change the readers opinion on the book’s subject.

As an author, there are few opportunities better than getting your book before a book club. Not only will members of the club read the book, but they are usually great “word-of-mouth” marketers for books they enjoy. Here are some tips at making your book “club friendly.”

• Prepare a list of discussion questions- By preparing a list of discussion questions and posting them on your website, you can help spark interest in your book while providing a resource specifically tailored to clubs.
• Offer to hold a Q&A for the club- What a wonderful time to be an author! You can literally visit book clubs around the world from the comfort of your home. Teleconferences and webinars are commonplace technologies that require almost no tech skills to use. It’s a real treat for book clubs to be able to speak to the actual author of the book they are reading.
• Get your publisher involved- Many publishers will set up a resource page for book clubs on their site that includes anything from PDF discussion questions to special discounts for club members. If your publisher does not currently offer that resource, bring it up to them. If they believe it will help sell books, you may be surprised what they will do for you.
• Contact book clubs directly- Prepare an e-mail to the club contact introducing yourself, including a link to your book club resource page, and your willingness to make yourself available to address the club or to hold a Q&A session. Start with Google to find a list of clubs or go to MeetUp.com for local groups. It returned over 10,000 results for the term Book Club.

Once you get in the book club scene, you can have a blast. It can be one of the most enjoyable ways to market your book. Be sure to check out Book-Clubs-Resource.com for more resources on book clubs. This site will help you prepare by learning how most clubs are organized.

Also, as you are checking things out, remember that “reading groups” are often used interchangeably for “book clubs”, but “book clubs” can also refer to the buyers clubs that people join where they purchase 6 books over 3 years (ie, Oprah’s Book Club, Double Day Book Club, etc…)

Tony Eldridge

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Social networking sites have drastically changed the face of advertisers and marketers in the past decade. The social media has directly affected consumer behavior. More and more people are exerting efforts to stay connected — whenever, wherever. This is a basic implication that a huge chunk of prospective consumers can be efficiently targeted through social media. It’s every marketer’s hot spot.

Here are 4 ways on how a book marketing campaign can get expansive benefits through participating on social networking sites:

Build strong and extensive connections. Participating on social networking sites involve putting up a personal profile and sharing information. The profile becomes accessible to the public. Thus, it is necessary to fill-in basic and interesting details that can attract prospective readers. By putting up a profile viewable to the public, it widens reader fan base.

Building strong connections means establishing author-reader relationship. Share information through links, photos, videos, or anything that you know can trigger interest and attention. Let your readers feel that you are a real person. Connections make good sources for reader referrals.

Effectively raise brand awareness. The primary goal of a book marketing campaigns is to let the target market know about your book. You can easily increase brand awareness through status updates or news feeds. Write new information or interesting updates about your book. Remember that every time you mention the book’s name you’re increasing your target’s awareness of it.

It’s a venue to offer free information. Social networking sites offer a lot of useful features to share information at no cost at all. People are easily attracted to information, especially when it’s free. By offering free information, you become an asset to your connections, and at the same time, you increase interactions between you and them.

Here’s are quick ways to share information with your connections: (1) Write brief book reviews, (2) Write movie reviews to films that were based on a book, (3) Write informative articles, post them on online article directories, and add the URL to your social networking site, (4) Initiate book discussions on forums and groups that are relevant to your book, (5) Utilize your site’s blog page by writing interesting articles or an inspiring journal entry, (6) Leave fair yet thoughtful comments on other people’s blog posts. (8) Feature a sample chapter on your blog page, (9) Suggest questions for book group discussion, (10) Share links to breaking news and advocacy related tidbits.

Generate free reviews. By giving the public a preview of your book, it allows prospective readers to comment and evaluate your book based on the sample chapters that you’ve posted. Moreover, it also creates a channel to read comments and feedbacks about your book, giving your career rooms for encouragement and growth.

Every self-published author knows that the success of a book involves a thoughtfully planned and carefully executed marketing strategy. But more than having a well-strategized book marketing campaign, sustainable reinforcement is an absolute necessity. Apart from author websites, email advertisements, online listings, and publicity for a book marketing campaign to virally work, it needs extended multiple channels. And this can be best achieved through the use of social media.

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