We’ve built our checklists, done all of our pre-launch tasks, and our book has finally been released. Now, the question arises: what do we do next?
When our book is finally out, it can sometimes be hard to know what to do next. I find that this is because there’s an attitude that most authors have that’s honestly kind of baffling, but it’s one that I share as well. We spend all of this time and energy pouring our creativity into creating a book, and then when it comes out, we’re really hesitant to talk about it. We’ll discuss it with other authors, and sometimes with readers, but for some reason, many authors have real trouble with self-promotion.
We don’t like going out and telling people, “Hey, I wrote this book, and it’s really good. You should buy it.” For some reason, those words just sort of stick in our throats, and the idea of having to go and tell strangers about this awesome thing that we’ve created gives us anxiety.
But it’s important to understand that if you don’t tell people about your book and how good it is, chances are they’ll never find out. The sheer number of people in this world is insane, and the chances of them finding your book amidst all of the different things they could be paying attention to is incredibly small.
Now, that’s not to say that people won’t find your book, but I can almost guarantee you that if you don’t tell them about it, they won’t. There’s just too much other stuff to pay attention to, and so if we want to be successful, we have to get over this idea that our book is going to magically break out without us having to tell people about it.
All right, now that we’ve set the anxiety-inducing baseline of needing to tell people about our book, how do we actually go about doing that? There are a few things that we can do, and we’ve already addressed a lot of them in the previous videos.
Social posts are fantastic. Getting on interviews, talking to people about the story that we’ve created, asking other authors to shout out the book, asking readers to post about it on social media that talk about the kinds of books we’ve written, finding book clubs, all of these things can be really helpful in getting the word out about our book.
We talked about how it’s important to be emailing your list to inform them that the book is coming, but it’s equally important, after the fact, to keep sending those emails. And we don’t want to feel like we’re bothering people, right? And again, that’s where this mentality comes in that’s really hard to overcome. We don’t want to bother people, but if we don’t tell them about our book, nobody else will. And so it’s up to us to inform people that our book exists.
Thankfully, there are some helpful tools that we can use in order to reach wider audiences. There are a number of different kinds of promo sites that you can get on that will post about your book for you, or will send your book to specific lists of people who like the genre that you’re writing in. Additionally, you can run Facebook ads, or you can run Amazon ads, and capture people’s attention that way. Both Facebook and Amazon ads can be very effective, as can BookBub and a variety of other promotional sites. But all of them cost money, and they also take time to figure out. So if you can afford it, they’re a great route to go.
If you can’t afford it, what I would recommend doing after your book has come out is trying to find as many groups of people online who talk about the kinds of books that you’ve written, and go and join those communities. Become an active member, and complying with their promotional rules, post about your book. I would definitely recommend posting three times about other books for every single time that you post about your book. The goal is to bring value to that community.
If you can bring value to the community by commenting on other people’s posts, by checking out the books that they’re recommending, by promoting other people’s books, when you post about your book, you’re going to find your reach is a lot higher. People take you more seriously, because it doesn’t seem like you’re just there to take their money. Instead, as an active member of the community, you are participating with them in the love of that specific genre.
At the end of the day, the most important thing is that you just keep talking about it. One of the biggest mistakes that I have made is switching my focus too soon. A great way to promote a book that has come out over the next few months is to watch for milestones in terms of number of units moved, or number of reviews that you’ve received, and do a post celebrating that. In that post, you can give a short one-sentence description of it, and say, “Hey, if you’ve read this, share it with a friend.”
There’s a common saying in sales that a buyer needs six or more encounters with a product before they’re likely to buy it. And so if you only post once when your book comes out, there’s absolutely no way that you’re going to get those six touches. You need multiple posts over a period of time in order for people to even notice you.
And so the biggest thing post-launch is making sure that you are not forgetting about your book and just leaving it up to chance. Be consistent, keep posting about it, keep telling everybody how good it is.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/lzq4OCWWUAY
Thanks for reading and watching.
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