Evan Carmichael reviews Bobby's landing page for his novel Whisper and recommends adding a book description, email signup, testimonials, and blog. He outlines two promotion paths: mainstream PR through services like PR Leads, and targeted outreach to niche bloggers with review copies and guest posts.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Bobby, who is an author, just wrote a novel, Whisper, has a website, and wanted my advice on how to get that book up and going and selling. So let's check out the site to start. So it looks like it's just a landing page at the moment. Let's turn off the music here. So just a landing page, nothing, so just a contact and a homepage. So for here, I don't really know what your book is about. So I see a street setting here, it might be a good idea to say a little bit about what your book is about. A lot of times on these landing pages you want to leave a box for people to be able to put their name and information in so you can email them them when something comes out, or if you want to have people preorder the book, that's a great way. So whoever's visiting the site, it may not be a lot of people yet, but you can get people to potentially preorder, at least sign up for a newsletter to know when it's coming out. So that's usually kind of standard for these types of launches. So this doesn't really tell me anything. So again, I want to know a little bit about what the book is about, give me an option to sign up for more information when it comes out, or potentially even preorder. I also try to show some testimonials on here, so who has read the book, who really loves it, show a picture, show some quotes, help build up the hype, right? So "book coming soon" isn't going to do too much to build up the hype. You want to actually show people getting excited. It could be a video of them saying how great it is or just them, you know, have a written text of what they've done, what they've read and how they like it. From there, you know, once you launch it, it's the challenge of getting the word out. And you can go two ways. One is through the mainstream media. Again, I have no idea what the book is about, but if it's hitting on any kind of hot topic, then you can approach media as an expert and you can get the book showcased. And, you know, you're a subject matter expert, so you can be featured. You can build your own PR list, or you can use a service like PR Leads that I've used in the past to get into the media and see what they're talking about and get featured. I found that print tends to work the best in terms of getting people to go to a website because it's written down, they can copy and paste and put it into their browser and go over to your site. But you know, when you're first getting this thing launched, you're ready to go to whoever wants to cover you. So that's one way, mainstream. The other way I'd go is try to get the online media. So look at bloggers who cover books and who cover the area that you're talking about. So if Whisper has elements of personal development, you can go, you know, talk to personal development blogs. If it's elements of travel, you can talk to travel blogs. Basically, you want to get the people who are interested in this type of book to talk about it, and you can give them review copies. You can potentially write a guest blog on their blog to talk about the book. You can give them as prizes to their readers. You basically want to kick up some attention so that they are willing to, you know, promote you a little bit. And get the word out about your blog, sorry, your book. So hopefully that's a good start. Once people visit the site, again, you want to get their information. You might want to have a blog here as well to show more content and preview other things that you're working on, but definitely a little bit more than what you've got here right now. It's a great start, it looks nice, looks professional, but I'd try to add a little bit more on there and start building up some more momentum to help drive some interest in the book. So hopefully that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below, and I'd also love to hear your comments if you want to leave one under the video. And stay tuned for next episode.
