Marketing Books Beyond Social Media - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Marketing Books

Beyond Social Media

Basics: The List

a.

Keep

a list of fans, friends, and supportive family you can notify as soon

as

you have the book or story published.

b. Put

a signup button for the list on your webpage.

c.

Newsletters

Basics: Ephemera

a. Bookmarks

b. Business cards

c. Flyers, short chapters, and other handouts

All of these can be ordered from printers. Vistaprint, Overnight Prints, and many others can produce good quality handouts for minimal cost.

Niche Marketing and Sales

a.

Do

your stories appeal to people with certain hobbies, jobs, passions, beliefs? Can you sell books at places those people frequent? If you have a niche, use it!

This

is also the place to hand out bookmarks and other ephemera

.

For example, Dave C. writes books involving quilting. He sells the books at quilting conventions and events, at quilting stores, and speaks to quilting groups, bring his books to sell. Others might have books involving a particular religion, so they might sell books at a church fair or festival and go to speak to church groups and advertise in the church weekly bulletin or newsletter. I’ve seen people set up inside

RenFests

with fantasy books that appeal to that crowd.

Book Festivals, Fairs, etc.

a. Texas Book Festival- you can apply to be a featured author at this and other book

festivals

, put your name where people will see it and get familiar with it

b. Sisters in Crime Table at the Texas Book Festival- you can hand out ephemera, sell books, and talk to readers directly

c. Other fairs and markets: farmers markets, craft fairs, etc

d.

SinC

National events: send books for ALA, and other events

Direct Advertising

a. Buy Advertising in one of the many services that readers subscribe to

b. Run sales and advertise those sales

c. Join

story bundles and sell books in packages with other authors

Many of these sites are for ebooks only, and each has its own requirements regarding pricing, number of positive reviews received, length of the book, and other factors. Some advertise by genre, and others don’t. Most limit the number of times per month that you can advertise with them.

Remember, what works for some types of books not work as well for others. One genre might sell better at one site than at another. You will have to experiment to find what works for you.

Buying Advertising

Advertising sites recommended to me in Sisters in Crime Self-Publishing Group:

Bargain Booksy

:

$50

,

subscribers broken down by genre, 147,000 for mystery alone! No review requirements, 4.99 or less book price required, most listed books are .99, doesn’t compete with free books,

which

are under FreeBooksy

Fussy Librarian:

need 10 reviews, 117,000 subscribers total, 88,965 for mystery, most listed books are free or .99, ad price varies by genre between $9 and $18. Breaks down by level of violence/sex/language as well

E-Book Soda:

15,000 emails total, 32,000 twitter, need 8 reviews, most free or .99, $15 for standard listing, can add on twitter and facebook ads for $6

E-reader News Today

:

price of ad varies by price of book!

Starts

at $40

More Advertising sites to try

Manybooks

Read

Cheaply

Books and the Bear Riffle

Booksends, Mystery Reads, Book Lemur, Genre Pulse/Book Grow,

Price Dropped Books/Book Grow, Book

Gorilla Robin

Reads

And the big one:

BookBub

– which is picky and expensive, but has an extensive reach.

Short Story Markets:

Getting your name and work in front of tens of thousands of readers at once is a great form of marketing. If you can sell a short story to a major magazine, that would be worth its weight in gold in marketing money. Readers who read your story in a magazine and enjoy it will go look for more of your work online.

How to submit stories

Locate the website for the magazines and read the submission guidelines. Follow all formatting directions. Pay attention to word court limits.

Most sites also ask for a cover letter. If you don’t know how to do a cover letter for your story, look online for examples. Generally, you should include the title of your story, its approximate word count, a few sentence summary of the story, and a short statement of your publication history. Address the cover letter to the editor of the magazine, if you know who that is. Generally, you can do a search and find out.

Markets for

short

mysteries:

a.

Anthologies

b. Print Magazines (from Mystery Writers of America accepted publishers list)

All Due Respect, American Way Magazine, Antioch Review, Big Click Webzine

Big

Pulp Magazine Cemetery Dance Publications, City Journal

CriminalElement.com

Dell Magazines: Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Magazine, Analog, Asimov’s

First Line Magazine Forensic Examiner Missouri Review Mystery Scene Magazine

Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine Sniplits Spinetingler Magazine Strand Magazine

Virginia Quarterly Review Woman’s World Magazine

c. e-zines, web publications

Magazine submissions

Tip: Start with your best work and submit to the professional level magazines that pay the most first, then work your way down the list to semi-pro and token markets. You don’t want to sell something to a token payment market that might have sold to a pro market

!

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine has a department of First Stories for those who have never been published before. Alfred Hitchcock Magazine runs a regular contest for flash fiction stories based on a picture printed in the magazine.

Places to submit mysteries: Online magazines

Beat to a Pulp

Betty Fedora

Big Pulp

Crimefactory

Crime Syndicate Magazine

Crimson Streets

Flash Bang Mysteries

Heater

I Pulp

Kings River Life Magazine

Mysterical-E

Mystery Weekly Magazine

Over My Dead Body

Pulp Metal Magazine

Shotgun Honey

Spinetingler Magazine

Suspense

Magazine - print and ezine

Thrillers, Killers 'n' Chillers

Tough

A Twist of Noir

Yellow Mama

Finding other places to submit

http

://publishedtodeath.blogspot.com/2016/01/217-paying-markets-for-short-fiction.html

: this site also has a section for calls for submissions

https://

shortmystery.blogspot.com/p/markets.html

Handy Definitions

Professional market:

a market that pays 6¢/ word or more

Semi-pro market:

a market that pays between 3 and 5.99 ¢/ word

Token market:

periodical markets that pay a minimum of ¼¢/word to just under 1¢/word , Payment may be in the form of a print copy,

Flash fiction:

fiction that is extremely brief, typically only a few hundred words or fewer in its entirety.

Short Story:

fiction that is between 1000 and 9000 words in length in most cases, though may go as long as 15,000 words

Novella:

fiction that is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, typically between 20,000 and 50,000 words

Novel:

fiction that is over 50,000 words in length