#101 - Do This One Thing to Market Your Book

If you could only do one thing to market your book, where should you focus? Hi, my name is Shelley Hitz and I help published authors reach more readers with the message of your book using our five step marketing plan so you can consistently market your book without feeling pushy or salesy. And in these Ask Shelley episodes, I promise to share at least one thing that will help you to write, self publish and market your books so that the message of your books can impact lives. So I received this question, I thought it was a great question. If you could only do one thing to market your book, what would I recommend? And the thing that I would recommend is to optimize and really focus on Amazon. So this can be in different ways. So you will utilize Amazon and the tools that they've given you to market your books. A majority of books typically are sold on Amazon. So why not spend your time really optimizing and utilizing the tools that they've given you so that you can reach the people who are buying books right there on Amazon from around the world. It really is amazing. So there's a few things you can do to utilize Amazon and the first thing is just to optimize your sales page. So you know you get to choose as a self published author you get. Now if you are a hybrid author or traditionally published then it may be different but as a self published author you get to choose your categories and your keywords. And so that's something that you can really put a little bit of extra time and research into if you want to have an extra tool to help you. I recommend Publisher Rocket. I'll put my affiliate link in the description. And what Publisher Rocket does is it helps you to be able to to do that research and to really see what are people even looking for on Amazon, what are the best categories to put my books in. So that's something to do. But then we now have the ability to add a content. A content are graphics that you add to your page and it just is eye catching. It's another way to grab your reader's attention. And so if you haven't added the A content yet, I highly recommend that you do it. I do have a tutorial where I show you exactly how to do this in ChristianBookAcademy.com it's in our marketing workshops module and I take you step by step in the video and then we have templates for you as well. Those templates can be purchased in the bookmarketing shop.com as well. But I just recently did this and added it to My book, Living Beyond Brokenness. And so if you check out that book on Amazon, you'll see on what I did and how I added it. The other thing is to get reviews. So if you have less than 10 reviews for your book on Amazon, I would really spend some effort and some time to get at least 10. And then once you have 10, just let them come in organically from there. But the more reviews you have, the more social proof. And it just helps the buyers making decisions on whether your book is the right one for them. Those are just some things to think about with optimizing your Amazon sales page. Then number two, when you're using Amazon and utilizing what they provided, you can publish a short Kindle ebook that uses phrases people are searching for on Amazon and almost like using SEO search engine optimization. So you're optimizing this particular book for what people are already searching for. It's a short book, it's a quick win, it's a novella or something like that. And you offer it for free through the KDP select program. You can do it for five days, every 90 days, or it can be perma free. And that's a whole other strategy. But then you're getting new eyeballs on your book. And when you do a free promotion, then you can submit your book to all these sites that promote free books and it gets your book in front of new people. And so that is a great option when you're using everything that Amazon has given you to promote your book. And then number three is Amazon ads. So if you haven't tried Amazon ads yet, I highly recommend that you do some learning on that. So we have a lesson on Amazon ads in Christian Book Academy, but there's a lot of different training out there and it does take a learning curve. It's not going to be a get rich quick thing, but if you really dial in and figure out what's working and you can really sell books through Amazon ads, we do. That's one of our primary ways that we're selling books at this point of time and so utilizing Amazon to its fullest. Number one, optimizing your sales page with the categories keywords, A content, reviews. All of those things matter. Number two, write a short Kindle ebook that's focused around a keyword phrase that people are searching for and promote your other book inside that short Kindle book. But offer it for free every so often and then, you know, distribute it to all these free sites so you can get new eyeballs on your work and potentially new people in that short Kindle ebook. You should also have a call to action to join your email list. But then at the end of the book or in various places in the book, you can also share that you have, you know, another book on the topic. And then number three, Amazon ads. So I hope that this was helpful. There's so much that Amazon offers us that we can use for free. Your Amazon author profile. You can go to that author profile and optimize that as well. You can add your blog feed, if you have a blog. You can add images and videos. And there's other things you can do with that. But this is just a starting point. And if you if I just did one thing and there was only one thing, then I would focus on Amazon. And so I hope this was helpful. And praying that God continues to reach many people with the message of your book.