Angela's Desk

BOOK MARKETING E-SERIAL PART 1 – Your Book Is Ready to Sell…But DON’T Make This Common Mistake! by Angela Hoy

July 21, 2017

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EXCERPTED FROM: 90+ Days of Promoting Your Book Online

Glory day! Your new book is finally published! You’re excited that your baby has hit the streets (or the Internet) and you can’t wait to start pounding that virtual pavement, and collecting the royalties. I know what you’re thinking. You’re an author, not a marketer. Not to worry! We have more than a decade of online book selling experience under our belts and we’re going to teach you how to promote your book effectively online. And almost all of our techniques are FREE!

WHAT’S THE BIGGEST MISTAKE AUTHORS MAKE WHEN THEY LAUNCH THEIR BOOK?

If you really want to sell books, don’t do what most authors do: dump your book at a few websites and walk away, hoping it’ll catch on some day. That just doesn’t happen in the real world. Promoting your book online should be considered at least a part-time job. Highly successful authors spend more time promoting a book than they do writing it—a lot more.

FACT: Dumping your book at a few websites and waking away pretty much guarantees your book will fail. 

Online book promotion is not only simple but, if you have a step-by-step, day-to-day marketing plan, it can also be a very artistic endeavor, which makes it fun for creative folks like authors (you!).

Here are some little-known, depressing factoids about the traditional publishing industry:

Traditional publishers use the profits from low- to mid-selling books to promote their best sellers. Many publish books by unknown authors, and then do nothing more than send out a couple dozen review copies in the hopes that one or two books by those unknowns might catch the eye of the public and media.

Even if you are lucky enough or talented enough to land a traditional contract, if your name isn’t as well known as Stephen King or Tom Clancy, you will be responsible for the majority, if not all, of the marketing activities for your book.

If you come up with some marketing ideas that were not offered in your contract, like a unique book tour, magazine ads, etc., you’ll have to pay for them out of your own pocket.

If you ask your publisher to help you pay for those items, they’ll probably refuse to do so. If you wanted them to help pay for your book promotion, you should have gotten that in writing in your contract. Problem is, troublesome new and unknown authors who demand those perks up front usually don’t get traditional publishing contracts. Why should the publisher offer to pay money they know you are eventually going to spend for them later out of sheer desperation for sales?

None of the marketing activities you conduct and pay for when promoting your traditionally published book will entitle you to one penny more of the profits that you’re already giving your traditional publisher (around 88%–94% for them vs. 6%–12% for you). Note: Self-published books generally earn a far higher royalty percentage.

Okay, now that we have the depressing part over with, let’s move on.

The book you’re reading right now is Angela’s 12th non-fiction title (she has since authored 7 more). She has written books for freelance writers and authors, for mothers wanting to attempt a vaginal birth after having a prior cesarean, for women who are facing an imminent divorce, a how-to craft book on reborning dolls(which has done very well on eBay, by the way—more on that later), and more. In the ’90s, she published one of the very first electronic books (ebooks)—before “ebook” was a household word—and long before Stephen King ever thought of it. She simply started selling the MSWord file of one of her books online, and it was instantly successful. Why? 1. it was available for immediate delivery; 2. it was less expensive than the print version, and; 3. the customer didn’t have to pay shipping. After spending so much time having booklets printed up at Kinko’s, creating mailing labels, stuffing large envelopes, and taking daily trips to the post office, we sure wish we’d thought of selling books as electronic files sooner!

Angela then wrote the ebook How to Write, Publish & Sell Ebooks, which brought in more than $700 in sales on the first day she put it on her website! Nowadays, the more books she writes, the more money she makes. When you write multiple books targeting the same audience, you can expend the same amount of marketing effort as you would for one book, but you naturally sell more books.

The more successful authors are those who promote multiple titles to the same audience. Yes, it really is that simple.

I know this is starting to sound like we’re on the pep-squad so we’ll stop. We just want you to know that we know what we’re talking about and what we do isn’t that difficult, or even expensive, despite what some people and companies would like you to believe. Those people and companies are the ones selling high-priced marketing products and services for authors… and often coercing authors into spending more money than they will ever earn in any resulting book sales. The tips in this book can lead to far more book sales than spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on promotional coffee mugs, book fairs, or expensive magazine or newspaper ads.

Think about it. If you paid someone to publish your book, your publisher is profiting from book sales. So why would they charge an author thousands of dollars for a marketing product or service designed to sell books? If a fee-based publishing company had complete confidence in a product or service designed to sell their own books, wouldn’t they be giving it away free? They don’t and here’s why. They know they’re going to make far more money from authors paying for those services than they will from any resulting book sales.

For the purposes of this book, we’re assuming you, like us, have a real job and that you don’t have eight hours a day to spend promoting your own book. Some of the daily tasks might take an hour or less but others will take longer. We suggest setting aside a specific period of time each day to do the steps in this book. Angela’s best time for writing and marketing is the first hour or two of each morning, depending on her planned tasks for that day. That enables her to accomplish her priorities before the rest of the day railroads her down different paths (like answering email, formatting books for other authors, homeschooling our two youngest children, etc.).

There are also “ongoing” marketing tasks that are noted in some chapters with this symbol: +

Those ongoing tasks are summarized near the end of this book (see “AFTER 90 DAYS: YOUR BOOK’S DAILY MARKETING PLAN”). Those marketing activities can and should be conducted on a continuing basis. So if you do everything this book recommends, you’ll be promoting your book far longer than just 90 days!

Don’t stop here! Keep reading:

BOOK MARKETING ESERIAL PART 2 – Before Day 1: You MUST Have a Website that YOU Control

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2 Responses to "BOOK MARKETING E-SERIAL PART 1 – Your Book Is Ready to Sell…But DON’T Make This Common Mistake! by Angela Hoy"

  1. pamelaallegretto  July 22, 2017 at 1:26 pm

    I consider Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” as the bible for writers and “90 Days of Promoting Your Book Online” as the bible for self-published authors. Enough said.

  2. joe sixpak  July 21, 2017 at 2:03 pm

    if your name isnt rowling or patterson you have to do all the marketing for your book.
    they only really do serious marketing for the best selling authors.
    you might get lucky and get ‘something’ in the way of marketing assistance but chances are fat slim and none.

    if you do all the work you should make all the profit. self publish or use an honest service like booklocker