Book marketing tips

Making a DreamBoard.

/ lizziechantree / 16 Comments

Happy Monday everyone. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I like to have inspiring things around me while I work. In front of my desk is a board with important information and some of my favourite things, like messages from my children, or notices of a few of my past achievements. I read once that its’ good to be able to glance up when you are feeling under pressure and realise what you have done so far. Some of the items I have pinned up are drawings from family, or inspirational quotes or notes from friends. I also have a few certificates or invitations.

Next to my desk is what I call my DreamBoard. It is a huge canvas which is hanging on my wall. On the front of the canvas are pictures of things I’d like to achieve. Gradually I add new dreams and cover old ones with pictures of my own fulfilled dreams, like pictures of my book covers, or work i’ve done to reach towards those dreams. This can be a great way to motivate yourself to keep moving forward towards your goals and a daily reminder that you are doing your best and trying hard.

Tips for creating an inspiration board that's actually inspirational| Studio McGee ||
Example of an Inspiration Board from Pinterest.
I call mine a DreamBoard as it’s ever-changing and is about fulfilling my dreams.

 

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.

Lizzie Chantree blog 3

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.

 

How to use keywords for authors.

/ lizziechantree / 14 Comments

I have been reading new ways to use meta tags or keywords as a powerful marketing tool. I have been blogging for a little while now and have finally started adding tags to my posts!  There are pages and pages of advice on how best to implement keywords in your book marketing strategy, so I tried a few of them this week.

What is not advisable, is the use of other authors names in keywords, in the hope of enticing the fans of this genre to your own work. I haven’t tried this, but have heard it’s not the way forward. Some other advice I read was to add the word kindle to your keywords as Kindle ebook is a popular search term. Again, this is not advisable as it is too broad a search term, with millions of variations which confuses everyone and probably won’t help your book’s rankings. A good idea is to use keywords in your actual work if you can. Putting these words into your book title, subtitle, and naming photos what they actually are, all helps. My book cover for Babe Driven uses the keywords: Babe Driven by Lizzie Chantree. Romantic Fiction. Only use tags that are relevant to your work, or you have wasted a keyword and your book may end up in a category that is unrelated to your work.

My subtitle is: Driving straight out of trouble and into paradise! A laugh out loud, contemporary romance read.

My first book, Babe Driven, is a funny, romantic romp, but is also about a woman in business and how someone is determined to destroy all her hard work.

babe-driven-twitterad-quote

I started out using keywords like Romance, Comedy, Beach (It’s set in a sexy beach resort), Funny, Women’s Literature, Cars!!! (What was I thinking). You get the idea! All of these categories are flooded with so many books, it’s tricky to be seen. This book often ranges in the #16-#500 top books in Women’s Literature and Romance, which is wonderful, but I want to try and make my keywords work even harder for me. I recently tried a few other keywords and the book slightly dropped in the rankings straight away. I rapidly swopped them back!

Portable e-book reader with two clipping path for book and scree

Click to buy a fun filled beach read, Babe Driven!

I have just changed the keywords again to see if I can make them work harder for me and my genre. I’ve used, Love, sex & marriage, Humour & Satire and a few more like this. I now know you can use more than one keyword at a time and the fact that you can could help your book too.

The top tips I found, were to search your category genre on Amazon and see what keywords come up in the drop down search list, as there are usually about ten other suggestions here. Next, click on one of these links and find a book with a similar audience. Look at the bottom of that books landing page and see the keywords they are using. The first on the list is a collection of the most popular keywords for that book. It may be that you have a romance book, but romance is a very popular keyword, therefore you could try humour, love, sex & marriage, or families and marriage, if these words apply to your work. They might not be the first word that comes to mind when you think of your work, but with thousands of searches being made for books every day, your book might have a helping hand if you use a search term that isn’t as widely used. Obviously if your keyword is too obscure, you may have a #1 ranking in that category, but no-one may find you anyway, so use your choices wisely.

Reviews of Babe Driven:

5 stars! I was recommended this book by a friend… Initially I was a little unsure as I am very loyal to Freya North & Lisa Jewell… I’m a bit of chick lit fan!!!
By the end of the first chapter I was completely gripped…
This is a really compulsive read and not easy to put down; but quite light hearted.
The characters are really fun, engaging and believable.
I am really looking forward to the authors next Novel… Give it a go!!!!

5 stars!  Not something I would usually read but intrigued by the title and thought I would give it a go. A real hoot all the way through and very entertaining. Love the authors style of writing and the characters she creates, read it over two days and would have read another one. Really rather good!

Here are some great resources on the topic of keywords for authors:

Complete guide to keyword selection: Click here. 

Keyword search software: Click here.

Article about keywords: Click here.