Best Seller Authors

Book Marketing, Publishing, Author Resources

Increase Your Book’s Promotion Power by 650 Percent

I was referred to a webinar featuring my friend Tara Hunt (you might know her at @MissRogue on Twitter).

When I got to the link, I was delighted to see the attached video along with others and the promise of more to come.

Steve Cunningham of Polar Unlimited has a program call ReadItFor.Me featuring great books summarized in less than 10 minutes. Every book I saw was worthy of recommendation. I’d suggest you watch the videos and buy all of them.

Watch this video on The Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt, order a copy and use these principles in your own business, book promotion and publicity campaigns.

Register for the webinar and/or listen to all the recordings on Steve’s site.

Idea for Authors Marketing Any Book

You can contact reviewers like Steve that may be appropriate for your book. Once you get a video like this, post it on your blog.. and link wherever your can to the reviewers site. There is so much more credibilty in a review by a 3rd party.

And I’m sure you will agree.. this is much more appealing than a text only review in a magazine!

While you are waiting for these types of reviews.. or even before your book is published.. you can make you own videos about the book and post them for all to see and comment on.

Now here’s the social media marketing advanced book marketing technique… Don’t make the video about your own book

You read right. No matter how wonderful your book is, no matter how much of a must read it will become, no matter how essential your message it to the world.. you will get much more WHUFFIE (you watched the video and ordered The Whuffie Factor so you know this, right?) when you turn the spotlight on other people.

By now you know other authors. Imagine how they will feel about a video like this (or an interview, review or guest post on your blog).

The more you shine your light on others, the brighter it becomes.

Does an Author Need to Build Email Relationships?

email_largethe age of social media, we often hear that email is dead or at least an outdated technology for connecting with your readers.

True, email mailing response is down, but unless you have a huge following online already, you need to have a mailing list and stay in touch with readers and prospective readers.

Even more.. people working in publishing, vendors, media and a large number of readers (your end customers) will still want have a way to connect with you and stay in touch that they are comfortable with. For the time being, that certainly includes email.

I recommend building a database of those that opt in to hear form  you, answering email enquiries as fast as you can, and giving readers in any medium easy ways to close the loop and stay in touch. Communicate on your blog (and others through comments), social media, and email.

To grow your mailing list with people that would like to hear from you, join my FREE Email List Buliding Network

Here’s some help managing the email overload we all face today.

  1. Read Keith Ferrazzi’s blog post on email. These 7 Mistakes to Avoid from a best selling author and master networker, inspired this post
  2. Be careful about auotmatic replies on your email. When I read a “I’m swamped and only read my mail…” message, I question whether the person has the bandwidth to take on new business or grow. A “vacation reply” politely tells others about a temporary hold on responses
  3. Nothing wrong with setting a policy that you’ll check once a day, have reader emails screened or assigned to others. Just be authentic, and remember that each writer took the time to reach out and will appreciate a human response.
  4. Use a ZeroInBox strategy. I’ve increased my own capacity to handle mail volume each time I put strategies like this in place.

Think of email as if you were are store with customers coming in the front door. A busy store will hire help, change pricing, set hours or publish guidelines on signs, but never think of closing the doors when customers are flooding in.

Like the store with vistors, buyers and VIP customers, put policies into place to handle everything.

Most of all, don’t wait till you are on top of the best seller list. Building capacity to handle the crowd will be a key asset in getting you there.

Vegas Author Bio of Warren Whitlock

I was digging through the archives and found this video.

My friend, the late Jim Wilson of VegasBuzzz asked me to lunch one day and next thing I knew he had a camera in my face asking me what I do.

Wish I had some more video of Jim.. but this is a reminder of what he taught me. It only takes a few minutes to create content and share online.

We’ve been researching local search, and the ranking possible from videos like this one here.

Granted, the quality is much.. and on this book marketing blog, it’s a bit over over promotion. Jim grabbed 2 books I’d given him over the years to feature (both best sellers). However, I liked how he put a little music, a couple of slides and made a one take video in a restaurant somewhat interesting.

When Jim posted this on his BIO site, my search engine postion shot up and I got a little rise in traffic. Over time, as we’ve added videos from classes, interviews with best selling authors and book promotion examples, we’ve see a steady increase in traffic from the search engines. Not from one post.. but cumulative from all of them put together.

Go to a site like 12seconds.tv, Ustream.com or utterli.com Post a comment here. Share some of your expertise. You’ll soon be recognized as the expert in your field.

It’s as simple as that.

Guest Post: Authors Get Sponsors For Your Book

guest post by Michael Volkin

Authors can have a variety of extracurricular activities. Depending on how involved the author wants to be with his/her book, radio shows, speaking tours and other activities can create extra income. Each of these activities could have a sponsor associated with it.

For example, if you have an online radio show at BlogTalkRadio.com, you could have sponsors advertise on your show. Doing this is a great compliment to book sales and can provide a good source of income.

A good sponsor will not only pay you, but also help you sell books, so the partnership might be beneficial in more ways than one. To find a sponsor, I would recommend going to the website GetYourSponsor.com, simply fill out a profile and other companies or entities wanting to provide a sponsorship might see a match.

I have a couple sponsors that even asked tosell my Social Networking for Authors, books for me! It doesn’t get any better than that.