Publishing your books online especially on Amazon is one of the simplest and quickest ways to get your life changing ideas, insights and experiences into the public domain for the benefit of your target audience as well as for your possible financial gain and self-actualisation.
As such, it is important to understand that, publishing is just one stage of the process that writers go through, since, once the book is published; people must get to know about it through marketing and after that, a mechanism for transactions must be put in place in order to guarantee smooth selling.
This therefore brings us to the subject of Marketing Your Books Online. We are talking about marketing because writing or being an author is actually a business that must be considered seriously apart from being your passionate hobby only.
As a writer, you are a business person like any other, and that is if you do it right, just like Paulo Coelho and John Maxwell. If you are still starting in the world of writing, you are actually an SME like any other in any field; the only difference is that you are in the literature industry.
As such, while you embark on your writing career, you may be interested in getting some SME tips from reading The SME Handbook: https://amzn.to/2SOWYAa
Marketing, in many of its forms is simply done through Communication, of which I describe communication as the intentional and purposeful exchange of mutually beneficial data using common or easily agreeable symbols.
In a book that I wrote about Marketing called The Sales and Marketing Pocket Book: https://amzn.to/2vADnf3, I described Marketing, Advertising and Selling as follows:
Marketing – engaging in activities that make your products and services appealing to your targeted clients.
Selling – offering or presenting products and services to clients so that they can buy at their convenience.
Advertising – An appealing generic public display or customized private presentation of data about a product or service to a targeted audience in a way that arouses interest in order to create, maintain and promote a mutually beneficial transactional engagement.
Some of the most effective approaches that we as writers can adopt in marketing our books besides word of mouth is to utilise the internet by making use of mechanisms that include: blogging, social media and even being a guest content/news contributor to a media house such as: zwnews24.com.
With the word of mouth approach, through the live interactions that you do with people, you simply need to tell them that you are a writer and that you have books that they can buy from specific platforms and then encourage them to spread the word in their respective circles as well.
More so, whether you choose blogging, social media, content contribution to news platforms or even to WhatsApp groups such as the Writers Clinic, there is always a chance and an opportunity for you to market your books.
Quite often, starting a blog is simple, whether it’s your writers/author blog where you specifically talk about your books or it’s a blog on any other subject, at the end, you must have the privilege to mention that you are a writer and to possibly list or display your book links as a way or marketing your work.
Those who are familiar with LinkedIn may agree with me that it offers so much benefits in the corporate world including a blogging facility as you can see on this link: https://bit.ly/2OZIJHC
Way before I published my books, I was already dropping some teasers about my books on LinkedIn. I can as well continue to talk about the same books on this very same LinkedIn platform especially now that the books are published.
On social media, you can make use of platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram to share links, images, and interviews as well as write ups concerning your literary work in order to generate leads towards sales.
You can share vivid images of your book covers as profile photos on Social Media and more so you can also post teasers of the contents of your book like what Simbarashe Nyamadzawo does with his books on Facebook
More so, you can as well start to discuss some chapters, subjects or characters in your books to generate interest among your social media followers and any possible audience for that matter.
The idea is to gain people’s attention on your literary work and then to arouse their interest towards your books in a way that can possibly create sales and generate revenue.
As a content/news contributor on zwnews24.com or any other platform, you may be given a column where you can write on a subject that you are knowledgeable about. In the article that you write or on your author profile can be included information about your books just like we see in various advertorials in the newspapers.
If you really and consciously look at this presentation, you can realise that in its depth and width, it is actually an example of a business flyer that I have sent out about the books that I have written, the zwnews24.com platform that we are running as well as my social and professional personality for possible mutually beneficial engagement.
When we breakdown this presentation, you can notice that I have provided some links to the following books: The Sales and Marketing Pocket Book and The SME Handbook.
If you click on any of the links that I have provided, you will be taken straight to Amazon, the book shop and more so, if you click on https://live.zwnews24.com/news/, you automatically get to see our news site and the work that we are doing to promote SMEs and authors like you and me with publicity through the interviews that you can also participate in.
Authors and SMEs stand a chance to be featured on zwnews24.com if they respond to the interview template that can be provided to anyone interested and your published interview will appear as follows: https://bit.ly/38CjZNw
As an author, you can share the published interview with people in your circles through social media and other means or you can even put it on your website or blog if you have one.
This published interview approach helps you with online publicity and even with marketing as your audience get to see what you do and they also have a chance to understand you better.
If you so wish, you can even convert the interview article into the pdf or jpeg formats for easy and convenient sharing on social media especially when the prices of data bundles can be an issue of concern.
Conclusion: Do not forget to market your published work and if you can’t do it on your own, find somebody who can help you, because being a writer is a business and as such, it must be done with a business mind-set.
Brian Kazungu is a Christian, Media Practitioner, Author, Poet, Technology Enthusiast, Entrepreneur and an Opinion Leader.
For more of his writings and motivation, follow him on:
https://www.amazon.com/author/briankazungu
https://muckrack.com/brian-kazungu
@BKazungu -Twitter
Writers Clinic is a writer training and author empowerment arm of leading book publishers, Royalty Books founded by Phillip Chidavaenzi.
Phillip Kundeni Chidavaenzi
Author | Editor | Literary Consultant
Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Royalty Books (Pvt.) Ltd
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