Book Marketing Collaboration Ideas for Working with Influencers

It's likely the fantasy of every author. You launch your book and a celebrity or social media influencer somehow got a copy of your book, read it, loved it, and posts about it to their million plus followers. Next thing you know, your book's flying off the virtual shelves and you couldn't stop the momentum if you wanted to. Ah, it's a nice dream, but let's be real. While it could happen, it's not the most likely outcome, but you can connect with influencers in a variety of ways and give your book a great big boost. So if you're looking for collaboration ideas to partner up with influencers, well, this video is positively for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad. I'm founder of a fabulous full service self publishing company called Book Launchers. At our company, we help you write, publish and promote a fabulous nonfiction book that will help you grow your brand and your business. A big part of that marketing is helping our authors, many of whom don't have an existing audience when their book launches, get their message in front of audiences of other people. That can be companies, associations, events, and of course, influencers. We've talked about influencer outreach before. I'll share that video at the end and even how to find those influencers. Today, I want to explore ways that you can offer to work together with an influencer. Now, one caveat on this before I turn you loose. We told one of our authors to connect with one of our other authors. They had similar audiences, so we thought they might be able to support each other without doing any research. Author A contacted Author B and asked for Author B to read their book, write a review, and then proceeded to ask what else could be done to support the book efforts. Author B was upset and ended up even saying the book wasn't even good and that the option of working together was not there. Yikes. So please, please, please take step one, which is to research your potential collaboration partner. First, figure out what they do, where they post content, what that content is about, what topics they talk about, and use that information to see where you can add value. Now, how you add value, that's what this list of ideas is for. Idea numero uno. Provide guest expert content. If they have a blog, you could potentially write a really great piece for their site or be a guest on their podcast, providing really great content in your area of expertise. Make a couple of killer suggestions when you contact them so they can gauge if this content is a fit. And because you've done your research, it will be right. Idea 2 invite them to be a guest on your podcast or your live stream show, or even be a guest speaker on a virtual event. Do this carefully as many influencers get invitations all the time, but if there is a really great fit, then it could be a great way to connect and collaborate. Idea three, you could give them copies of your book to use in a giveaway. Idea 4. Create something really cool and exciting to invite them to to be a part of, like a book, an event, an article of the top 10 influencers, a series of interviews for a bigger project. Be creative. Come up with something cool. Number five, if you have a budget, you could see if they do paid placements or paid shoutouts. You could ask for this for free, but I don't think that's going to fly as easily because I know how many people ask us for help every single day. I think going in offering to pay because you know it's a value will go a long way to them feeling respected and valued and potentially leading to new opportunities and a relationship. Idea 6. If you have a bit of a following yourself, maybe you can do an exchange. I did this with IngramSpark. See, they even sent me a T shirt. The whole collaboration started when I suggested that I could provide some content about using their insights reports. Hopefully you saw that video. It's pretty cool. As a result, I got connected to their social media manager and then through that I got invited to an Instagram live that they hosted and then I interviewed their social media manager for our channel. It was an exchange of exposure. We're also doing some other collaborations for our authors where they're going to be highlighting our authors on their channels. Number seven, can you do a social media takeover or a live tweet of their event or sort of hijack what they have going on, but in a way that adds value and gets their attention? I mean, if you're attending an event that they're speaking at, posting play by play action of what they're doing can be a huge, huge value to them. They can retweet it or repost it and they'll definitely notice that you did it and likely reach out to say thank you. Just get creative and add value to them. You will get noticed and likely get in front of their audience and over time you might even build a relationship that leads to even bigger and better collaborations. That's only seven ideas and there are so many ways to collaborate with an influencer. What have you done or seen done? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you get one step closer to being one of my beloved YouTube besties like Professor E.A. burlingame, Sean Hayes, Linda K. Lee, Easy Graphics Michael W. Cook, Scully's House of Thriller Scully's House of Thrill, Scully's House of Thrillers. So go ahead, say hi to these folks, because they've likely already commented on this video, and I'll see you over on this video right here, which is all about influencer outreach. Or this one on selling more books with social media. Both are fabulous, if I do say so myself, and you can tell me otherwise in the comments after if you want. Or just agree with me. See you there.