branding

Monday Marketing. 3 Quick tips.

/ lizziechantree / 1 Comment

Lizzie Chantree book quote 7

Hello everyone. I’ve been travelling in Spain and around the U.K. for the last few weeks and have been writing a new book. When I write I am inspired by views and the hustle and bustle of people around me, but I also like quiet writing time in my own studio, where I don’t have any noise other than the tapping of the computer keys while I type.

I have been working on social media and branding too and am trying a new app, Visme. I was offered a professional account to try and see what I thought of the software and so far so good. The basic software is ok, but once you log into the premium settings, there is so much to explore. I will write a blog post about it when I have found out exactly what the best features are. For now, check out https://www.visme.co to decide for yourself.

Some tips on discovering your own author brand:

  1. Define your brand. What is your purpose? How do you communicate your message and make an impact? For me this is letting my readers know what my ethos is, my writing style and why they might like my books. Take a look through my blog page and social media sites. They all have the same branding and hopefully tell my readers that I write romance novels.
  2. Do you have a professional headshot that you use across all social media platforms. It’s worth getting a proper photos taken or asking a friend to take one for you.
  3. Do you have a digital media kit? This is a marketing package that states what genre your books are, prices, page length, release dates etc.  This makes it easy for journalists to upload relevant information without hours of research. Check out my media kit page here for some tips.

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Twitter Marketing.

/ lizziechantree / 9 Comments

Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

Today’s Marketing Post is about Twitter Marketing. I’ve noticed a lot of writers talking about how hard it is to promote their work lately and I have mentioned that supporting each other on Twitter is a good idea. Most writers will support others, but it is only fair to return the favour. Here are 3 tips for Twitter marketing.

  1. Join book groups on Twitter. They often have hashtags and will RT your book tweets with their hashtags in, as long as you do the same for other members of the group. Two of these groups are #RRBC and #ASMSG The members of Rave Reviews Book Club and ASMSG are very pro-active in retweeting book tweets with their hashtags. #RRBC have member of the month, and other prizes to be won for supportive members.
  2. Tweet support. Find some authors and bloggers with the same genre interests as you. Agree to support each other’s work across Twitter with RT’s. This is a tweet support team. You can set up automated tweets with their book links and Twitter handles in them and they can do the same for you. Apps like SocialOomph have free options and can schedule the tweets for you.
  3. Engage in discussion with your followers on Twitter. If you don’t talk to your followers in tweets, they won’t know anything about you other than you are selling books. If your genre is Romance, then tweet about things that would interest people who enjoy this genre. That could be relationships, travel, friendship, interiors, love, family, life goals, or anything related to romance that has a natural connection to your writing.

 

Love's Child TwitterAd 12

Love's Child New Apple Award

 

Link backs and SEO.

/ lizziechantree / 13 Comments

Lizzie Chantree Monday Marketing2

Welcome to another Monday Marketing post. I hope you’ve had a relaxing weekend and are ready for a brand new week?

Today’s topic is link backs and raising the SEO rankings of your blog or website. I recently discovered that a great way to generate more views on your site is to add internal links.

  1. Write an article or post with original content. Google notices if content is the same somewhere else on the web.
  2. Add internal links within your post. This is a great way to create more page views within one article. People often only stay on a page for a few minutes, but may click links to other related topics if highlighted in the post and stay on your website or blog for longer, which in turn will boost your SEO and make your site more visible. I have added links in this post for you to see what I mean. Click the highlighted text and you will be taken to other articles on my blog.
  3. How to add an internal link in WordPress: Highlight the word in your text that you would like to make an internal link, then click the insert link button in your control panel. Open a new tab/webpage in your browser and open a different page on your website that is relevant to the keyword you have highlighted and copy the link. For example: The word marketing in one of my posts, could be part of the current post, but could also lead you to another post i’ve written on the topic, which you might also enjoy. Then paste that link from the browser into the insert link box in the article you are writing. Check the open in another page box to ensure a new window opens with the alternative page, then click, add link. This will make your chosen word into a live internal link.

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 / 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.

 

Author Branding

/ lizziechantree / 20 Comments

Branding

I’ve been reading quite a bit about author branding lately and the topic really fascinates me. I have run my own businesses for years, which is why my romance novels are focused around entrepreneurs, but I remember back to my first business logo and how awful it was! I was 17 and my first business was called Juniper Berry. The logo was quite unimaginative with a tree in a brown square box with some text underneath.

When I invented my first product, I was attending The School of Communication Arts in London and had begun to learn about product design and branding. We were set tasks to design new branding and packaging for some big companies as a project and the results were anything from funny shaped boxes to business cards made from a jigsaw! It did make me realise how important the identity is to a product and as authors, our books are our product and we are brand ambassadors.

When someone looks for your book or product, can they easily identify that they are from you? Can they read the label clearly, even from a phone screen or iPad? Does your branding follow through across all of your novels, or does it confuse your readers? This might sound obvious, but when you look at a selection of work from some authors, its not always easy to see which ones belong together.

I often identify my favourite author’s books online by their book covers. I know their style and expect their latest covers, merchandise or social media to be uniform. My books are all romances about various businesses and their quirky owners, but they are still very different. One is a sizzling beach read, one a romantic mystery novel and one is full of magic. Here are my covers:

 

Even though they are different, I always use similar colour palettes and type faces. My author picture and social media branding is the same on all platforms:

Vector illustration of a portable modern tablet pc e-book reader.

I understand that it might seem strange to think of writing books as a business, but we are making a product that we really hope others will love and packaging it in a way that appeals to those people is vitally important.

I’m in the process of designing bookmarks and have asked some of my readers what they would like to see on them. Most would like the cover design work followed through, as they enjoy bookmarks that match the books they are currently reading. Again, this is all branding and a wonderful way to connect with our amazing readers. I’ll let you see the finished design when they are done, but I will be listening to my readers and carrying through my brand design.