Online Promotion for Non-fiction Authors
Posted on 16 August 2010 by Karen Risch
A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed top sites that promote non-fiction authors and their books, and since then, I’ve been in the thick of it. As a ghostwriter, it’s unusual for me to go hands-on with anything but the manuscript, yet the memoir I just finished was so engaging, and the client so wonderful, that I found myself wishing to be involved. My client was happy to have me aboard.
There’s quite a long list of possible online promotion mechanisms, and I thought you might like an inside look at all the moving pieces in a major push to point, pull, prod, and otherwise lead as many people as possible toward an author and his book, which comes out in the spring of 2011. This list focuses on social media and the author’s own site.
Here’s our checklist, with some explanation so you can see how it would apply to you, too.
- Update your existing Web site: tease book release, promise excerpts and other book extras, invite people to sign up to be notified whenever something new about the book is available and to be among the first to know when the book goes on sale.
- Plan future revision of your Web site home page to include the book cover as soon as it’s available, as well as further site build-out to include a page dedicated to the book with links to excerpts, extras, endorsements, photo albums, purchase (Amazon, Borders, Powells, etc.), Q&A, and media kit.
- Make the most of a blog. Carefully research keywords and use them well. Make smart choices about your blog post titles; specifically, don’t be overly clever/obtuse but instead make your post titles out of search terms. (In this case, we also moved the client’s blog into the WordPress format so that it could be self-hosted, meaning it lives at the same domain as the client’s Web site, making that site more robust and improving SEO.)
- Update Wikipedia entry and any other places where biographical information appears online, including in special groups of which you’re a member. Add your name to any applicable Wikis.
- Make it easy to update all social networks at once: e.g., the Facebook public profile page feeds to Twitter which feeds to the Facebook personal page, which feeds to the … and so it goes, making a chain to all social networking sites and pages.
- For the six months prior to the book release, increase your communication with potential readers. We’ll ramp up blog posting to two per month (and promote the posts on social networking sites as well as by e-mail), increase Facebook/Twitter posting to at least several times per week, comment in other groups or blogs at least twice a month, and guest blog at least once a month. After the book launch, we’ll keep up the pace for at least another six months.
Just for grins, here’s a list of the online accounts we had to establish to make all this (and a few other bells and whistles) happen—all of which are free, except the e-mail marketing sites.
- Amazon to create an aStore (Don’t know what that is? Browse ours.)
- Constant Contact (Other good e-mail marketing programs exist, such as iContact.)
- Facebook, which can also feed to a Web page or blog
- Feedburner to create an RSS feed for the blog
- Flickr (BTW, we compared with Picasa and chose Flickr because of the larger community and greater SEO potential.)
- Google Analytics to tell us how well the Web site and blog serve traffic
- Google Profile (Everyone should do this! Here’s mine.)
- iTunes to create a special playlist
- Twitter, which can also feed to a Web page or blog
- Wikipedia (You need a login to edit entries.)
- WordPress
- YouTube
To keep all the login information straight for these and a few others, such as the ftp info for my client’s Web site, I created a spreadsheet in Excel.
Hello. We haven’t even touched traditional promotion, publicity, and public relations. Thank goodness Bigtime Publisher has a whole department devoted to that!
You might also like to read:
- Top 5 Web Sites Promoting Non-fiction Authors and Their Books
- Write Your Nonfiction Book Proposal
- Author Photos: Negotiate Costs and Terms Up Front
- Roman Polanski’s ‘Ghost Writer’: Dead On
- Ask for Endorsements: Here’s How
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