Positioning Your Book for Book Marketing Success with Sarah Bean

Hello. Hi everybody. Nice to see you. I'm Sarah Bean. I'm our marketing manager here at Book Launchers taking over for Julie today while she is out. I am going to give a couple minutes for everyone to hop on. But as you're getting here, please feel free to drop a comment, let me know where you're, you're connecting from today. I am in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is super cold outside and not kind of snowy, kind of rainy, kind of mushy out, which is tends to be the standard for Michigan this time of year. I definitely miss California right about now. But yeah, please drop some comments as to where you are and looking forward to chatting with everyone. I'm gonna give it just another minute or two before really diving in today. And big thanks to Angela Jones from Book Launchers who's also here today to help us move along. So let's see, I definitely throw in some. Throw in some where you're from and, and I would also just love to hear since I'm not on these live streams that often, I would love to hear who here is an author, already published a book or if you're writing a book or if you're just starting to like go through the process. I would really love to for you to put into the chat where you are so I can kind of just get a gauge of what the audience is like here. You know, I know everybody knows Julie really well. So I'm going to do my best to just to keep up. So basically today we are going to be chatting about holiday book marketing and I realized that Julie covered this like a month ago. But I'm going to get a little bit more in depth with it as I am the marketing manager here at Book Launchers. A lot of what I cover is how authors can really be maximizing and any time of their book, whether it's pre launch, post launch, what season it is, obviously with the holidays coming up. Well actually we're mid holiday season right now with all of that going on. Everyone always wants to know how do you break through the noise? How do you break through the conversation? So I've got some great tips here today. Some things that maybe you've probably heard before, maybe some things that you haven't heard before. I hope we're gonna do some prizes. We're gonna, you know, just chat it up. Okay, so I'm seeing some comments come in. Thank you so much. On the Verge Renee is on the verge of publishing your book formats almost finished and proofreaders are next. Awesome. What kind of Book is it? Renee, go ahead and drop in the chat. What kind of book you have. And it looks like coffee. Create and Connect. Publish. Ext. Explore, Embrace x Dance Prompts Journal. 100 Prompts to Help you enjoy your creativity through movement. You know what I feel like my daughter, who is she's five, but I feel like she's a natural for this because everything she does is always expressed through movement. I mean, whether it's just she's talking or just dancing at all times. And I really need to take a few lessons from her. But I think that is awesome. Definitely. Like also drop a link in the chat so I can check it out. Bill Miller having one published book, writing number two. Always marketing all nonfiction, business and leadership books. Absolutely. Always, always writing right. And they always say the best way to sell book number one is to write book number two and put that out. So definitely going there. Wesmo author and narrator here. 73 degrees in LA. Yeah, you don't have to brag. I lived in LA for 20 years. I miss it completely. It's. And it's always fun because my favorite thing was always to go to Rodeo Drive during the holidays and see the fake snow and all the lights. Although I will say that there is something about the Midwest during the win during the winter and the Christmas season that is especially. It does help you get a little bit more into the spirit. So some of the things that we are gonna like I said today, we're gonna chat on holiday book marketing. I know Julie covered it before. We're gonna cover it again. We're gonna give away some prizes. I do want to mention that we do have the winners for commenting on the day of video from our last video release. And that is Darla Mondragon, 718 and Bonnie Lester, 3724. So I'm gonna go ahead and put those in the chat. Congratulations. So congratulations to those who won some prizes. And I will have Angela let me know specifically what prizes we're giving away to them today. But we're going to be giving away others later. Some it might be if you're commenting, it might be a special comment comment. And I do have a couple of marketing questions. So we will go from there. Other announcements there is Julie is going to be participating in the AuthorPreneur Summit. It's going to be on this week and you can join in or you can grab a premium pass for replays. But it is a great event that Julie's going to be a part of. Angela will drop the link in the chat for us. So you can be sure to join that. And the other thing that I want to really draw your attention to is December 16th. So not this weekend, but next weekend is our Book Launchers Holiday Extravaganza Deep Dive. That is going to be December 16th at 10am Pacific. If you get the newsletter from book launchers.com newsletter, you can join up for our holiday extravaganza. And I will let you, Angela, drop the link there as well. So we're going to have a whole bunch of people from Book Launchers, myself included, that will be attending, kind of celebrating the milestones of the year. We're going to be celebrating, you know, everything that we did this year. Book Launchers, we published close to. We helped indie authors publish close to 50 books this year. That is phenomenal. And really, I think this is one of our best years yet. We had so many great voices. It's great to see some of them in the chat here. Hi, Efren. So we are very excited to celebrate. There's gonna be prizes, there's gonna be games, there's gonna be all sorts of fun stuff. So be sure to join us on December 16th for that. Okay, so a little bit of housekeeping out of the way. I am going to dive a little bit into holiday book marketing. So as most of you know, we are all about the non fiction here at Book Launchers, including all that business building, brand building books that you can put out into the world. They're going to help further your mission, your goals. I will say that some of these tips can apply whether you're doing non fiction or fiction. But we're going to try and err more on the nonfiction side here. So a little bit of education about this holiday season because one of the things that I hear authors talk about all the time is, oh, it's Christmas, I gotta sell my book, right? It's the holidays. I gotta get on Black Friday. How do I get Cyber Monday? What do I need to do to promote my book? And you're not wrong. I pulled some, just some stats here and I've got my little cheat sheet here. Basically what we are looking at during this holiday season is people buy in waves. So the first wave are the shoppers that are buying paperback books and hardback books for other people. Right? They're easy to wrap. You can place them under the tree, you get to see the people unwrap it. Or other gifts if you're, you know, if you're giving them mass Hanukkah gifts or just other Gifts for whatever it is that you're celebrating. But those paperbacks and hardbacks are really easy gifts to the second wave that's perhaps talked about a little bit less is the people who are buying books, ebooks and audiobooks after Christmas, right? It's Christmas. You've received gift cards, you've gotten Amazon gift cards, you've gotten Visa gift cards, you've gotten Audible gift cards. Now you got to go out and spend that money. And so those weeks that are right after Christmas are a really important time for book marketing. So, you know, you know, Christmas is the big one here in the US for our international viewers, especially the Canada, uk, the rest of Commonwealth. Boxing Day is a huge post shopping day. And plus a lot of people are spending that time online because what are you doing when you have that week off work? You're online, you're, you're spending time. Aside from spending time with family, I always get a ton of information about every. Basically every store I've ever been to is having 60% off, 70% off sales. I'm doing more buying post Christmas than I do pre Christmas. So it is a huge amount of time that you want to be in front of your audience. So one thing to be very aware of is that the holiday sales make up a huge portion of the overall sales in all of publishing. So particularly in publishing there, we make publishers make over 25% of their annual revenue between November and December. Okay, it's something like 20 to 40%. It varies. But a lot of books are being purchased from November and December into the first few weeks of January. So how do you capitalize on that time? How do you capitalize on the $1.3 trillion that are being spent. Spent in December? All right, so we're going to dive into some, some strategies here. Some things that you should be sure you're doing, some things that you cannot miss doing, and then other things that you can kind of work out. And we're also going to get a little bit into social media ideas, things you can be doing to just kind of up your platform as well. Because it's not just about the book, it's about your platform as a whole. And as I go through, please throw your, your questions in the chat. I'll either will, I'm not sure if I'm going to save them all to the end or if I answer them as I'll go. It'll probably depend on whether or not I catch it in the chat. But thank goodness I have Angela here who's gonna help out and keep it all straight. So, and I would love to hear from you as I am going through. Please feel free to drop your favorite strategies in the chat, things that you've done, things that have worked and things that have not worked. Because it can really help I of us, you know, just be better marketers of our content. So the first thing that, and this is basically just a given, is how to offer deals, right? You want to be looking at one of the biggest deals that we do for almost all of our clients is ebook sales. And ebook sales, it's not just as simple as lowering your ebook price down to 99 cents and then leaving it. You have to buy the ad space to go with it. And so we employ a number of book promotion sites to get those books in front of new readers. And there's a lot of little tricks that you want to look at here specifically around the timing. So, for example, you don't necessarily want an ebook sale to end on a Saturday or Sunday, or run ebook promotion by ad space that's going to run on a Saturday or Sunday because people don't check their email as often on those days. So you want to make sure your ebook sales are going to be during weekdays. Now, knowing that so many people are spending money after Christmas into New Year's, running an ebook sale during that time is a great way to start capturing on, hey, I know you've got money to spend, let's spend it here on my book. So you want to take a look at when people are going to be online, when they're checking their email and when they're going to have that ability to use those gift cards that they were gifted. You also want to take a look at what else can I be offering to go with this? So if you have other swag, other products, things that you're already offering people, can you sort of bundle that together to make really fun holiday packages? So you could package your book with other services, you could package it with courses, with a workshop, with some kind of swag that you have on your website, whether it's a book and a T shirt or a book and a mug, or a all of the things you want to look at your own product and see how can I put these together to make a really fun and exclusive holiday package? And this is something that is going to be really, really important. If you're doing direct sales places like Amazon, those retailers make it a little bit more difficult to bundle together. But if you were running direct sales from your own website or E commerce site, you can start putting together those holiday bundles that are exclusive to just this time of year. So that's a great one to just start to take a look at is what deals you can be offering people. This one is one that I recommend 100% of the time and that is to be optimizing your metadata. Okay, metadata, it's not sexy. It's not the thing that people want to hear about during the holidays, but it is not one of the number one ways that people are going to find you, how you are going to be discoverable. And so you want to make sure that your metadata, even if you've already done your keyword research, if your research is less than three months old, or excuse me, if it's three months old or older, you should be doing a refresh on that you can use. Thanks, Siri. You could be using tools like Google Keyword Planner. You can use Publisher Rocket, which we recommend quite often. But you want to ensure that your keywords are up to date. People search for things in cycles. We tend to find that something that someone is searching for in the summer is very different than what they are searching for in December. So keyword trends change. Make sure you are updating your metadata to keep up with that. But now that you're in the holiday season, what are the things that people are putting into that Amazon Search Bar Best gifts for dad, Christmas gift for employee Best gifts for mom, what to buy my husband. You have to realize that Amazon Search bar is actually a search engine. People use it just like they use Google. So within your metadata you can also be incorporating that target buyer or that target reader. So if you were a children's book author, you might want to put something like gifts for five year olds. Or if you are a nonfiction author, best gift to give employees this season. You can also spend some time look at your book description. Can you incorporate into your book description a a disclaimer like perfect gift to give to youngsters. Perfect gift for the parents in your life. You want to ensure that even places like on your website or in any of your social media content, if you're running ads that you have things that are going to very easily identify you to your target reader. So think about who are the people you need to buy buy gifts for in your life. If you go through and start going, you know, gifts for mom, gifts for husband, gifts for, you know, sister who's hard to buy for, you can also start to look at things like problems that that person might be having. So give the gift of joy this season. If Your book is about joy or give the gift of self discovery. You know, start to look at what do you think people would be searching for. And one of the easiest ways that you can do this for free is literally just go to Amazon and start searching in keywords. Amazon will start to fill in the most search terms for you. So you can make a list that are specifically related to your book and start to incorporate those into your metadata in your book descriptions. So that's a really easy, you know, no cost way to be able to start to capture some eyeballs over the holiday season. Now while you're looking at your book's metadata, you also want to ensure that you are looking at your website and your social media, your product pages, all of the places where you show up, where is your platform? Make sure that your website pages are up to date, your social media links are up to date and have regular content. You want to optimize those pages, those headlines leverage SEO for what people are searching for around the holidays. Like some of the biggest ones might be things like gift ideas, presents, ideas for mom, ideas for student, ideas for writer. Don't forget your social media as well. You want to make sure all of these are very up to date with what's happening in the current season. And we'll get into more social media tips and ideas as we go. But make sure your website, your Amazon product page, your Goodreads pages are all up to date. Go through, look at your bios, add in awards images, videos. That's going to help with your book promotion, new recognition, new updates, reach out to the people that you know that have bought the book and try and get a push for reviews. Especially over the holidays. You want reviews coming into those Amazon product pages so Amazon knows where to sell your book to other people. If they purchase your book on Amazon, great, have them leave that review on Amazon. If they didn't do it on Amazon, they can leave a review on Goodreads or their favorite book retailer. But that is a big, big push. So I'm going to take a quick pause here before we dive in because I realized that we're 20 minutes in and I haven't given away anything yet. So that seems like I need to fix that one of. So we have, Angela had already put in the chat some of the prizes that we have today. So we have copies of Julie's books. So either self self publish or self promote and success seed. We have an oh so soft journal and we have a hashtag, no boring books mug. And one of the things that we are going to do today. Let's see for our first giveaway. Let's see. I think we are going to go. Let's see. I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12:30 morning. I have about 20 different little ideas here. Some are better than others. So Angela, I'd like you to count back from your Last comment at 5:20 about hitting that like button. Yes, everybody please go hit that like button. Count 20 comments back and we will go ahead and that will be our winner for our first prize today. We are going to be doing more prizes a little bit later, but why don't we go ahead and do that first one. So 20 comments back for my 20 holiday marketing ideas. Okay, while we do that, I am going to dive into a little bit more and this is in regards to your email marketing. Okay, email marketing. It can and cannot be some of the best or worst things that you have to do as an author. Right? You always want to be connecting with that audience, building those relationships. Well, the holidays are a great time to do that email marketing and I will tell you why, particularly the time period between December 20 and December 24. Do you know what is happening all across the world? People that did not plan their holiday purchases are now looking for last minute gifts. And some of the best things that you can give as last minute gifts are going to be ebooks and audiobooks. They're quick, they're easy to deliver, you don't have to throw it under the tree. So those items are going to be some of the best things to remind people that they make great holiday gifts. So I highly recommend that you schedule some email and social media marketing between December 20th and December 24th for. Excuse me, let's think about that. December 20th through December 24th. That reminds people that ebooks, audiobooks, make great gifts. Be sure to identify in your marketing who your book is perfect for and make sure to send those emails with links to your ebook, audiobook, any kind of holiday bundles that you're doing. That is a great way to get all that last minute put push during that time. So if you're running any kind of special. So it could be the ebooks on sale, it could be if you buy your paperback, you get a free gift. It could be if you have the audiobook, maybe you're giving away other things. Whatever the promotion that you're setting up is going to be, that's a great time to sort of run that promo and just remind those last minute shoppers like myself that ebooks make a great gift the next thing that we are going to chat about a little bit and I'm sorry if I'm going fast on these, I want to make sure that I have some some time to cover it all. But one of the things that I definitely want to take a look at is your ad budget. If you are running Amazon ads and this could also go for Google and Facebook ads, but specifically for Amazon ads, you want to consider that now is the time of year where more people are going to those platforms to purch. So consider spending a little bit more to make some more. If your budget's maybe five to ten dollars a day, but you're getting beat out constantly, your book is not going to show up on those sponsored results. Consider expanding your budget especially during the holiday season and see what that does for the for your ads. I just took a quick look at some Amazon internal data from March 2020 and it said advertisers who increase their budget by saw 109% increase in AD attributed sales compared to those who didn't. Now that stat could apply to other times besides just the holidays, but it is a good time to start experimenting a little. What happens if you raise that budget to 20 or 25 a day? See what that does for your impressions and your click through rate. If nothing else, it's going to give you incredible data to be able to improve your ads over quarter one next year. So even if you are not making exact sales, that increase in budget is going to give you a lot of data to work with so you can figure out how to improve ads over the long run. So just make sure that you're taking a look at those ad budgets and ad spends. See where maybe you might want to dive a little bit more in and see how that improves your results as you go. Okay, so we're gonna now we've talked about your website, we've talked about your social media offering bundles. Those are all kind of gimmies. We're gonna take a look now at what you can be doing in person. All of these things like local events, local market. I've already been to I think three different holiday fairs around here. It's a great opportunity to connect in person with people who could be could be your potential buyer. Now sure, if you are selling a business book, being at a holiday craft fair is maybe not going to be the exact type of event that you want to be at. You want to ensure that you are going to events where your target reader still exists. But there is an influx of these events that Happen all during the holidays. Every association, every group, every type of organization has something around the holidays to celebrate that year and celebrate their members. So what can you be, where can you be in person? Where can you be getting a table or a booth? You can look at local Christmas market, book fairs, small business gatherings. What's happening through your local chamber of commerce? Take a look at how you connect with your target reader in person. You're going to be able to get feedback in real time about your book and your materials and you can build relationships in person. So local chamber of commerce is a great place to start for that. But keep in mind that where your target reader is going to be shopping, where they're going to be spending their time. Okay, so those are a couple of the things that's some of the ideas that you can be doing on the back end and in person. Now we're going to dive a little bit into social media. So if you guys are anything like me, I mean, trying to put together social media content can be a real, real just sort of slog. It's a grind. But this is the great time because a lot of eyeballs are online. So what are some of the ideas that you can be doing to be drawing new audiences to you? So I put together some ideas here. You guys can feel free to drop some in the chat. In fact, I would, I may or may not give away the next prize based on some ideas that I see for either for holiday social media in the chat. All right, so let's kick off now. Some of the ones that I saw that I thought were really creative is creating a holiday playlist. Now this could be holiday music. Maybe you put together a playlist that you put out on social media. Maybe it's music that inspires you or music that is directly related to your book and your content. But one of my favorite ones was putting together a holiday playlist of of books. Books that inspired you, books that helped you get to where you are, or books that you think people should read this holiday season. Now you can always incorporate your own into this. But really getting a collection of books and putting this together as either a reel or a blog post or a carousel post can be a really fun way to up engagement. It helps your audience get to know you a little bit better. So creating one of those and having it centered around the holidays is a great way to move forward. I highly recommend putting together holiday content can be a blog, a short story, a video. You can even use some things like if you were to write a short story or a novella, or, you know, even the holiday playlist. You could use it as a new reader. Opt in for your list. It should be something new and something fun for your audience. You can develop activities or presentations that are related to your book and the holiday theme. So if your book is about baking, you could do a holiday cooking bake class. If your book is about dogs, you can host a talk or do a blog about the dangers dogs face around the holidays. If your book is a memoir, you can create content about how the holidays played a role in how you were brought up and how you got to where you are. So always look at your content first as your guide and then sort of move from there. But think about fun ways that you can incorporate the holiday message and what's front and center on people's minds into what you are creating. This is one of my favorite ones and it's something that I don't think people do enough and should be doing a lot more of. And this is partnering with other authors. Everybody's looking to do the same thing. Everybody's looking to expand that brand, expand the message and their reach, and get more eyeballs on their books. Well, a great way to do this is to partner with another author, particularly one that is related to your book, and start running cross promotions. You can do two for one bottles, bundles. Buy one book, get a second book for free from that other author. You can run multi day like days of Christmas giveaways, you know, the 12 days of Christmas. And these can involve giving away a book, giving away, you know, content, giving away swag, giving away courses, mini workshops, and then look to that other author because more than likely they have a lot of ideas as well. So when the two of you, or three of you or four of you come together, you can not only leverage each other's lists, you get to introduce your audience to new content and those authors are introducing them to you. So reach out to other authors that are within your network, people that you know, people that you are inspired by, people whose work is related to yours. Right? That's the key. It's not like you're going to pair a romance writer with like a pet writer. I mean, I guess you could, but really you want to be looking at the same types of audience and readers. So you want them to be somewhat related. Now it could be something, for example, if you're looking for some ideas, let's say you wrote a financial book and someone else, you know, wrote a book on real estate. Those two go together very well. So for Example, Julie and her books. She's got self promote and succeed. She's got self publish and succeed. She could also, pardon me, partner with another author that covers self publishing tips or writing tips and be able to offer that as a bundle. So you want to look at things that potentially it doesn't have to be exactly like your book, but tangential. You want them to be able to easily shift between the two ideas. One of the favorite ones that my, one of my favorite authors did this season was doing holiday cards for their readers. So it was, you know, she put out a list, hey, if you want to get a holiday card from me, enter your name and your address. And then everybody was able to contact, come back and they all got a personalized card from that author. But the fun part about it is that she also included some swag. She included a bookmark and also a discount card. Right. So it had on it discount codes for things from her website and from her merch. I thought that was such a fun idea. It was something really cute. It was a thrill to get it in the mail and it was something that was easy to do. It was relatively low cost and it encourages those connections with your audience. Okay, so I am noting here. Yeah, I haven't seen any other social media holiday social media ideas. I really want to give away another book, I think, or another prize. So I would love to see some ideas in the chat. Please feel free to drop in, big or small, whatever you like. But let's put some of those in the chat. Oh, Efren, one of my themes, the opposite of truth, Selfish benefits of being selfless. Of selflessness. Planning to write a roundup rag blog entry with this holiday theme. Selflessness is a great one to be doing not only in December, but also in January, you know, which is like new start, new you. So I think there's a lot you can do there. That is a great idea. Okay, moving on to a couple of other ideas. While we have some stuff that drops into the chat, run a virtual holiday party for your followers. You can do a holiday party similar to how Book Launchers does our holiday extravaganza. It can, you know, you can give away prizes, invite special guests overall, just you. What you're looking to do is celebrate and spread the joy. You can give away gift cards or prizes that people might want to give away as gifts to other people. What you want to look at is how you can up your engagement with your community and your audience. So you always want to look at what's going to make it fun for them to be there. What value are they going to get from this session? Let's spend some time together celebrating. So holiday virtual holiday parties are really fun and honestly, it's my favorite live that we do every year. So I'm excited about the one that we do next weekend. So this one is really going to be great for you blog writers or for those of you that although this could easily work as a video as well, and this is the idea of putting together your own holiday gift guide. Now, while you can certainly pitch your book to be featured in other other holiday gift guides, I hate to tell you this, but in December, it's already too late for the big ones, right? They start putting together the holiday gift cards and like September. In fact, as a media, as someone who works with media all the time, I'm already getting requests for what's going to be good for like February's gift guides, but for smaller blogs, not the big, you know, New York Times or, you know, whatever it might be. For smaller blogs, you can definitely put together your own holiday gift guide that features not only your book, but other books that you think are great gifts for people in different people's life. You have to remember to think about all of the different types of readers. So whether it's a gift for dad, a young professional gift for your employee, gift for the dog lover, gift for whoever all the different people are, you want to think of a wide variety. You want to make sure you're optimizing that blog post. If you're going to do it on blog post on your website for SEO. So you're making sure you've got all of those key terms that are in there. If you're doing it on social media, you can do something like a social media carousel and images. You could do a short, a reel. If you write a long enough post, you actually could still pitch it to some editors. Like I said, the big ones have been set for months, but there are still outlets that are out there that accept guest contributions that will take a look at it, I would say all the way up until maybe the end of next week. So, you know, be sure to do some research. But it is something that you might want to consider. If you haven't done it for this year, you might want to take a look at doing it for next year. So putting together a holiday gift guide, it's a great way to draw attention to you, your book, and to other people's books that you really respect. So I'm going to take a little bit of a time here. Let's see. I'm going to throw a couple of the comments on what some people have done for social media. We'll give away another prize. So Efren does blog posts around his holiday theme. Young and Independent community creates reels with Christmas music with my book as the image behind Great also sends out Christmas cards asking people to sponsor a copy of my book. For someone who could benefit from the content and not afford it, that is a great idea. I love that Kevin hall has a memoir about growing up in a small town. It's at the local library and they Kevin contacted them by hanging up a flyer and put a notice in their social media. Let's see. Young and Independent also added a personalized pen with the title of the book and a website as a gift for anyone who purchase it. I love those. Let's see. I started that with my new book and I got 50 copies sponsored by just five people. That is a really great idea. In fact, I really love that. I. I think, I'm not sure. I think Young and Independent you may have already won one. I'm not totally sure. If not, I'm definitely picking that as the best answer. But Angela, you can weigh in and let me know for sure. So I really love that idea of people sponsoring the book as an opportunity to give it out to other people. I think that's a fantastic idea. Oh, you haven't won yet. Great. Congratulations. So I'm not sure what our options are left. Angela will drop it in the chat and let you know where to reach out to in order to to claim your prize. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about some of that social media. 1. Canva is your friend. You want to look at creating some special holiday themed social media graphics that you can use to release. And Canva does the most amazing things. Now you can feature your book in all sorts of settings in people's hands, at a party, on a Christmas table under the tree. So create some really fun social media graphics. And don't forget the hashtags. This isn't something that I spend a ton of time doing, but I do think during the holiday season it's a really good one to be thinking about. You want to think about hashtag Christmas gifts, hashtag gifts for dad, hashtag holiday cheer. Look at all of the different hashtags that are trending, which is really easy to do if you go on Instagram, Google anyone you start to look at. You can just put it into the search and see how many posts with those Tags have come up most recently and start digging through. I also recommend looking at other authors and other people, other influencers that you're trying to emulate. Look at hashtags they're using, but be sure to tie those hashtags back to your holiday themed content. I also recommend doing things like gratitude posts. This is a great one for this time of year. I mean, it's great all year round. It is great for really anytime because gratitude is one of the most important things that we can have on our life. So one of the things that I highly recommend as an author is for you to talk about the things that you are the most grateful for. Identify the blessings in your life with content around each one. What are you grateful when it came to your book, your work, milestones you hit for this year? Create posts around that and close. Use that to close out 2023. I'm sorry, I have a little visitor now. It's not. So what I also recommend you start doing during this time is look starting to preview 2024. Sorry, just a moment. You. That's my daughter. Sorry everybody. So we want to start to look at 2024. What are the things that are going to be big for your book and your brand during 2024? Sorry, my daughter just showed up. I need you to go. Mom. Okay. Sorry about that. Okay, so as I was saying, let's start talking about 2024. What is going to be coming up for you the end of 2023? You want to start previewing? What's happening? Are you working on a new book? Are you releasing a course? Are you doing workshops? Do you have speaking events coming up? Are you launching a new community preview? What's to come for you, your book and your audience? You want to start giving that 2024 preview. It's here and we want you to be excited about it. So start looking at content that you can start to promote and give little previews for your audience so that they constantly are staying engaged with you. But 2023 isn't fully done yet. So talk about a year end wrap up. All the things that you did, the milestones you hit with your book and content. What did you achieve this year? How did your followers help you get there? Encourage engagement by talking about the thing, asking them what milestones they hit in 2023. So you definitely want to look at the year as a whole. It's pretty amazing. It may not feel like it when you're in it, but when you look at where you start at the beginning of the year and where you end. A lot of things happen during that time. Incorporate that into your gratitude post and talk about, hey, 2023 was a great year and here are all the reasons why, and here's how you helped me get there. So be sure to include some of that in your social media content. Lastly. Well, actually not lastly. I have a few more ideas here. New Year's Day is key for nonfiction. Think about what happens in New Year's. Everyone makes their resolutions. Everyone is sure that they are giving up those negative habits and starting to incorporate new, healthy habits. And January is when everyone starts their 2024 book reading goals. Okay? So it's a great amount of time to be talking about all of these ideas. People make resolutions on the first of the year, right after readers make their resolutions and they buy the books that are going to help them hit those goals. So if you're writing nonfiction, you want to email your list with New Year's resolution theme emails and putting that out on social media. You might consider things like hosting webinars about resolutions that are related to your topic. And you can also start with, you know, a lot of people say they're going to watch less TV and read more books, so you want to be Are you resolved to read more this year? Here's some titles to get you started. Feature yearbooks and related books that are and you can use that holiday gift guide or the booklets that you've already put together to incorporate that. And then the last idea that I have and then we'll give away. I think we have one more gift, right, Angela? The last idea that we have is partnering up with a charity. And this is one of my favorite ones. You can come up with a charity, something like, you know, whatever one is very close to your heart or one that you already work with, or one that is related to your book's topic. And you can put out content, something around. You know, all sales of your book that are during a certain time are going to go to that charity of choice. You can reach out to that organization and see if they'll promote the book during that time as a fundraiser for them. Another option is that you can also for every person who donates to that charity during a certain amount of time can get a free gift from you. So whether that's ebooks, signed copies of your books, services, courses, workshops, all of those fun things, you can kind of go either way or you can run them together. Sales for my book are going to go to this charity or if someone donates to that charity and sends Me a receipt. I'm going to get them free gifts. The great thing that you can do. Not only are you going to be promoting goodwill, you're going to be, you know, including a organization that is close to your heart, but you get the opportunity to partner with that organization and perhaps reach some of their patrons and some of their partners. So it's just an idea, but it's something that works really well this time of year. I highly recommend you find one that you either already have relationships with or are related to your book content as a way to to start those conversations. So. All right, guys, we hit 20. I went through 20 different ideas on social media and holiday marketing, so I hope that was really useful for you. I really appreciate you all being here and I also appreciate your tolerance. While my little elf helper came in to say hi, we do have one more prize to give and I'm going to come up with a question for this. Okay, so out of the holiday ideas that I mentioned today, what is one that I did not mention that you think would be good? Either something you've done or something that you've seen other people do? I would love an original idea that I did not mention today for holiday book marketing. I'm going to give it a couple of minutes. Let's see what everybody comes up with. We'll just give it a minute or two. But please, we've got one more gift to give away and I want to end on a strong note. Please go ahead and drop any of those ideas in the chat now. Oh, great. I'm seeing to. I see that everybody wanted to meet Charlotte. We are trying to not encourage her to interrupt mom on calls. Okay, so let's see. Holiday giveaways. Absolutely thankful we get to have our children nearby and watch them grow up. That is very true. I do consider myself very lucky. I have two really amazing children who are both under the age of five. So life is in survival mode pretty much at all times. Bill Miller, give away an audiobook for free to buyers of your print book with a proof of receipt sales. That's a great one. Oh, yes. And if you have any last minute questions, anything that you want to ask me, it doesn't have to be around around holiday marketing. If you just have any other marketing questions in general, feel free to drop it in the chat. I have a couple more minutes that I can. I can answer anything that you might have. Let's get to know the author stuff. Random live videos of wrapping, stuffing, turkey or other personal canon moments. I actually really like that one ever. And that's a great idea because, you know, social media is not just about promoting ourselves, it's about connecting with our audience and those really personal aspects. Dropping little moments from your life, things that you're dealing with, things that you're experiencing is a great way to connect with the audience. So that's a really good one. All right, we've got, let's see, any new ones? How far in advance do you need to approach a charity to set charity giveaways up? That's a great question. It's going to depend on the charity. Charity, if it's a local one that is in your area, more than likely it's something that they can do fairly quickly. If it's a national one, you're going to have to be, you're going to have to be aware of, of not only their editorial calendars, what fundraisers they already do, but if it's a huge charity, they're going to have guidelines as far as who they'll partner up with. But you could also work with local chapters of those national charities. So for example, let's take like the Susan B. Coleman Breast Cancer organization. They have local chapters all over the country. Whereas in, you know, for example, for me, one of the charities I'm most passionate about is a group called Young Storytellers that's based in Los Angeles that helps with helps Title 1 schools as far as encouraging kids to use their voice and explore their creativity. One I worked with for years. And so if I were to do something like that, I could probably reach out to them a couple weeks in advance and then they would set up social media to go with it. Other charities are going to have editorial calendars up to a quarter or maybe even further in advance. So it's going to depend on the organization and it's definitely something you can look at over time. It doesn't have to be a one shot deal. You want to build a relationship with them. Efren says maybe just promote three charities to illustrate what the author supports, which coincides with themes from their book. Absolutely. Yeah. Choose different ones and, and be sure to, you know, to look at how, where they need the most help as well. Okay, so I am going ahead, going ahead to choose a winner and I am going to choose Bill Miller, who chose giving away an audiobook for free, free to buyers of your print book with a print with a proof of sales. I think that is a great way to, to get people not only to buy the print book, but being able to give away that audiobook People love audiobooks. It's such a huge area and I think that goes really well with the holiday bundle idea. So Bill Miller, congratulations. I think you had a great idea there. Anthony. Offer AI prompts that give that people give access to to achieve their goals aligned with our book. AI prompts. Is that AI prompts or giveaway prompts? Feel free to specify in the chat a little bit there. Congrats Bill, on your win. I think you had a good, good idea there. Anthony, if you want to specify in the comment, I'm happy to. Albert Prompts. I don't know what that is. Sorry guys, I don't know what that one is. Oh, young and independent offer a free workshop to teach my audience a new skill such as how to start a low cost business in 2024 as a business coach, business analyst. Awesome idea. Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, Anthony is talking about AI prompts and yes, that is a great idea. AI prompts are obviously hugely in demand and something that a lot of people have trouble with if they're not familiar with using AI. So I think that is a, a great prompt to give that can you can use that as a reader magnet. You can use that as a free gift. You can use it as something that you give away just as a holiday. You know, hey, it's the holidays. I'm giving away copies of, you know, this. So I think that's a great way to go about it. So. All right everybody. Well, I am going to wrap up today. I really appreciate you spending time with me. I you hope hope I did okay with in Julie's absence and I hope you got a lot out of this. I also will see you on our holiday extravaganza on December 16, 10am Pacific. Go back and look at the beginning of our chat where Angela dropped the the link for it. And I also want to remind you about the authorpreneur summit that's going to be happening this week that Jewel will be participating in. You can join into that summit. You can just get a premium pass and get the replays and I'm going to go ahead and drop that link one more time if you want to cat. There you go. And one more for the if you want to get the newsletter that has the link for our holiday extravaganza. There you go. I'm doing Angela's job for her, but it's okay. So anyway, I hope everybody has a wonderful season. Happy marketing. Good luck everybody. It.