3QuickTips

Monday Marketing.

/ lizziechantree / 6 Comments

Tweet by Lizzie Chantree 15

Happy new week everyone. I’ve been working hard on my latest manuscript and it’s coming along nicely. I’m about to write about my main male character in the story, but suddenly another minor male character has stepped up and appeared far sooner that I’d originally imagined. He obviously wants to be a bigger part in the story! I love it when this happens and it makes writing the new book so much fun.

I often support other authors on my blog, but it’s now booked up until the middle of the year, so I thought I’d open up some marketing posts to top tips from authors who can share their experience with you and possibly give you some insight into their own writing journey. The first tips are from Awen Thornber, who is a mystery and romance author.

Awen’s top marketing tips:

1. If your book is much more than just a romance, don’t have ‘A Romance’ under the title on the cover. It gives the impression that it’s just a romance. Sometimes the publisher might add this – but being a novice you might find it difficult to object. Try and raise objections early if you are unhappy with something and be willing to listen to your publishers reasoning.

2. Give the back blurb a lot of thought. Don’t rush this stage. Don’t have something on the back that isn’t relevant to your readers or the story as this might cause confusion, even if you think it will put your book in better categories. Research what will work for your genre and see what other authors are doing to be more visible with keywords. My book has the words ‘let’s dance’ on the back as this fits with the story, but on reflection, this may deter readers who aren’t interested in dance and narrows my marketplace.

3. The ‘Foxtrot’ in my book’s title is a nod towards the police/crime/intrigue part of the novel but I think it was too subtle taking the top two points into consideration. So my top tip would be to seriously think and look at the cover and title and how it appears to would be readers. Get several opinions before settling for the final wording. You only have a matter of seconds to attract a reader to your book out of a page of similar books for sale on Amazon. The cover is the all important sales and marketing tool. It’s the make or break for your book being chosen out of a larger selection.

Some reviewers have commented that despite not liking dance they were surprised to find they enjoyed the book because it was much more than dance. Other reviewers who don’t usually read romance enjoyed the suspense with the crime aspect. Your title, cover and blurb needs to reel in a wider and diverse readership. The wrong choice of words narrows it right down to a few. I realised very quickly when it was too late that my cover obviously targeted a reader who solely liked dance and romance.

This has made it harder to market.

I hope this helps you all! From Awen. 

Foxtrot in FreshbyThreads of Awen

Book buy links for Awen’s books:

Foxtrot in Freshby

Threads of Awen

 

 

Waterstones tweet. Lizzie Chantree.jpg

Monday Marketing.

/ lizziechantree / 1 Comment

Hi everyone. Today’s Monday Marketing and 3 quick tips are about Giveaways. I am currently holding my first #giveaway on Twitter and Facebook for my book Ninja School Mum. The giveaways have only been running for a day or so and I will keep you updated on the progress, but here is what I’ve learnt so far. My book jumped up higher in the bestseller’s lists than it had been for the previous few days. What has also happened is that people downloaded Ninja School Mum when they found out about it after being tagged into the giveaway by friends, as they didn’t want to wait to read it, which is incredible and something I am very thankful for. To view the details of my giveaways click here for Twitter and here for Facebook. Below is the image I used for my Twitter giveaway.

NSM tweets

  1. Pin your giveaway to the top of your Twitter page as your pinned Tweet for the duration of the giveaway.
  2. Ask people to tag their friends in the comments section under the giveaway post. To do this they simply type in their friend’s Twitter/Facebook name, for example, @Lizzie_Chantree/ Lizzie Chantree as a comment. This expands the giveaway reach and is a great way for book lovers to share a read they like the look of, with their friends.
  3. Don’t forget to add a universal link to your book or product at the bottom of the Twitter or Facebook post as well as a clear image. You can create a universal link at places like BookLinker. A universal link is a link that works for all Amazon stores and takes the viewer to the correct site for the country they live in.

 

Effective social media management.

/ lizziechantree / 11 Comments

Hello everyone! How are you all today? It’s Marketing and 3 Quick Tips Monday. This post is about ways to help manage your social media. Here are 3 great tools to help you improve work flow and stay on top of time management.

Lizzie Chantree blog 3

ManageFlitter: ManageFlitter link, click here.

ManageFlitter is very easy to use. The free option works well, but it depends on your requirements. This platform helps you to work faster and has lots of great features.

You can sort your followers/following lists by criteria.

Find new people to follow.

Find out when your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately.

Unfollow people. Some people follow Twitter accounts to grow their numbers, then unfollow as soon as they get a follow back. ManageFlitter helps you unfollow them too.

You can manage multiple accounts easily here.

Track keywords.

SocialOomph: SocialOOmph link, click here.

SocialOomph is a great way to boost your productivity on social media as you can schedule posts, add photos, and access multiple accounts across Twitter, Facebook, blogs LinkedIn, Tumblr, RSS feeds and more for a basic fee. The free option is good, but the cheapest paid option works for me.

Updates are easy to schedule and it has features to save posts for use later, copy old posts, make posts run on a recurring timeline and more.

Hootsuite: Hootsuite link, click here.

About Hootsuite: This is a great platform for managing multiple accounts from a single dashboard. You can schedule your own posts to go out at certain times of the day or you can RT or auto schedule from your own social media streams or lists. The downside is that it can be a bit sluggish and I tend to use it as a back up. It’s easy to use, but I wish it worked faster. It has to update information regularly, so this slows it down. It can be very useful and has a free option, which is suitable for most small businesses and creatives.

You can use Hootsuite for real time analytics and it has a trend spotting feature, which can be helpful if you want to see what’s popular on Social media and follow trends.

What time saving platforms for social media do you use? 

 

Babe Driven TwitterAd 20

Click photo to go straight to Amazon and grab your copy of Babe Driven for £0.99!

Monday Marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 8 Comments

This week I’m going to tell you about visibility and loading times for a WordPress website. Most of my Monday Marketing tips are ones I’ve discovered on my journey as an author, but I have been in the retail and wholesale business for over 20 years and studied design, marketing and advertising at college and university, so the #3QuickTips may be helpful to other businesses too.

Lizzie Chantree blog. WordPress

 

1.  Some wordpress themes contain code that slows them down. Some of the content you add can also slow the site down. By visiting a site called GTMetrix.com and typing in your site address, you will be shown a report on how well your site is loading for users.  Ideally you want an A or B rating.

2.  You will be shown Page speed, YSlow, Timeline and History tabs. Click on these to be shown elements of your site and how they preform. Here you can check if the theme of your site is slowing it down. If the theme is causing problems, then you might want to think about changing the theme.

3. Creating fresh content for your blog or website is a great way to make it load quicker. If text is copied from the internet, it can have hidden links and code inside from the originator which shows search engines that it’s not new and should be ignored.

 

Monday marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 21 Comments

Today’s marketing tips are about finding new categories to place your books in if the current ones aren’t working for you.

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1.   Go to Amazon.com and type Kindle store into the search box.

Click on the Kindle Ebook tab under the search bar.

Click on the genre for your book (for example Romance) and look at the sub categories.

Click on a sub genre for your book (for example Contemporary).

Underneath are sections to refine by. If you choose one from the top and one from the bottom section, or two from a section, it will tell you along the top how many books are in this category. The lower the number, the less books there are in that category to compete with. For example in Contemporary Romance, with sub categories Wealthy and Beaches, there are 898 other books. If your chosen category for your book was Contemporary Romance, you could use the keywords, Wealthy and Beaches for a romantic book about an exotic wedding on a beach with gorgeous men. Alternatively, for the same book, Wealthy and Wedding as keywords would result in 1,450 competing titles.

Try lots of combinations and see which are the best selection of keywords for your work.

If you chose Cowboys and Amnesia in this genre, you would only have 38 competing titles! Remember you need a strong main category or no one will find you anyway, unless you are well promoted or well known. Don’t pick random categories, as they must fit within the context of your book.

2.  Pick your two book categories very carefully, but if they don’t work, change them!

3.  You have up to seven optional extra keywords. These keywords can be more than one word. For a book about Book marketing, you could use: Books on marketing, Marketing & Promotion, Making more sales, PR & sales, How to sell books, Books on marketing, Publishing success. These would be one keyword each. Check out possible combinations first and see how many competing titles there are. 

I’ve just changed all of the categories for my own books, so I’ll let you know how I get on in the coming months.

 

 

Monday marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 18 Comments

Working together.

Finding Gina. Twitter Ad 10

A powerful marketing tool is YOU! You are the best voice for your writing, but working together with other authors can help ease the pressures of constant marketing and it can also be great fun! Here are 3 top tips to help raise your book’s influence.

1. Share the work load: Work on joint promotions. Assign different jobs to each author in a clear and concise manor, explaining in full how you will all benefit from each task.

2. Combine talents: Think about finding other authors who bring something different into the mix. One may have a great Facebook page, one a fantastic Twitter following, one may have contacts in the press and another might have a key relationship with wonderful book bloggers.

3. Participation: Don’t just sit back and let others in the group do all the work. Contribute and network. Many best selling authors run promotions together and they often work in the same market, not opposing ones. Although they are trying to attract the similar readers, they are helping to broaden their market by having a further reach.

Monday marketing. #3QuickTips

/ lizziechantree / 5 Comments

Here are today’s 3 quick marketing tips for authors.

 

Babe Driven Twitter Ad

 

Most authors struggle to find high numbers of reviews for their work, but things always seemed a little easier to me when you can gift a book to a reviewer in America, but this is not yet available in the UK via Amazon. This is what I’ve discovered about gifting books:

1. When you gift someone a book, they might not download it. They can use the price of the book to buy something else.

2. Most authors drop the price of their book before gifting it, so that the gifting process costs them less.

3. You can’t gift a book during a freebie run. There would be no point anyway, as the reviewer could download it for nothing as long as you had the book free in every country. Free book promotions are often planned months ahead so you would have to plan both events together.