To get your beautiful book out to its readers, book marketing is necessary. While every self-published author tries their best to market their books to the best of their knowledge, they inadvertently make some mistakes that could damage their extensively planned book marketing strategies. A single mistake and all your hard work could go down the drain.
So to help authors to avoid such mistakes, here are some of the simple book marketing mistakes that should be avoided by the self-published authors.
Not Concentrating Sufficiently on Your Author Website
While you are putting in your all to employ well-defined online marketing strategies, you could have possibly ignored the one thing that is before your eyes – your website.
A poorly designed author website that is difficult to browse or author website that is not kept updated about the new releases and any new developments with regards to books is essential. Your author website doesn’t need anything complicated – just a simple main page with details about all your books and all links to buy the book or read a sample is sufficient. Having a contact page is a must with at least your email ID mentioned. If you are planning to have a blog on your author website, keep it updated and post constantly even if you have planned to post two blogs in a month.
If it is difficult to run and maintain an author website, you can easily get an author website on AllAuthor for free with the domain name as yourname.allauthor.com. You can add your books, buy links, your bio, contact information, links to your social media profiles, profile picture and a lot more to your author website on AllAuthor. Click here to become a member at AllAuthor to get your own author website.
Not Making Use of Social Media
You may be using any external book promotional services to promote your books but that’s no excuse to not promoting on your own profile! Having an inactive social media is just like having the readers in front of you but choosing to keep mum about your book.
Social media is one of the best ways to promote your book and find new readers. Therefore, it is important to keep your social media pages updated about new book releases, offers, discounts, giveaways and any other improvements even if you are making use of any external book marketing services. Have a good bio and a link to your author website across all the major social networking platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Also, make sure that you don’t keep your profiles private in any social media.
Click here to know how about promoting your books on Twitter.
Not Finding Out That Unique Factor about Your Book
There may be thousands of books like yours in the same genre. Don’t promote it like the thousand others. What makes your book stand out from the others? What is unique about your book should be your selling point.
Instead of pointless promotions, project that unique selling factor to your readers and see how well it is received. Use engaging images, videos and GIFs and bring out what’s best about your book in the simplest way.
Not Promoting to Your Target Audience
Before you start your promotions, think who your ideal audience is. A book reader does not read all kinds of books. So, find out the kind of readers who will love your book and market it to them. In this way, you will be able to get loyal readers who will actually enjoy not only your current book but could become a fan of your other works too.
When you are promoting through ads either in websites or social media platforms, you have the option to choose the target audience to project it to. Make use of it wisely. Don’t just choose the audience as people who read books. Instead make it specific with respect to the genres, the place and anything more that could further refine your promotions.
Promoting Yourself as An ‘Aspiring Author’ or ‘Debut Author’
Well, you may have just published a book or two, you may actually be starting your career as an author but it isn’t necessary to let everyone to know that. Adding the word ‘aspiring’, ‘debut’, ‘new’, ‘budding’ or any other similar synonyms to new to your promotions could make people think twice about buying your book.
It doesn’t mean that you want to lie and say ‘experienced’ or ‘award-winning’. Just promote yourself as a confident author who is super-confident that the readers will fall in love with the book.
Another technique you can use when you are just starting out as an author is to focus more on the book you are promoting rather than your credibility. Let the readers know how good and how compelling your book’s storyline is.
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