Neighbors who ask Buffy Andrews for a cup of sugar probably get a full canister.
I emailed several authors, asking their advice on book promotion for the post I published yesterday. Some didn’t respond, which was fine. I knew they were busy. Some responded with a single tip or a few, which I was hoping for, and I gladly included them in the post. Buffy responded in less than an hour “off the top of my head” with a detailed promotion strategy. So I’m using her tips as a separate guest post (yesterday’s post was pretty long already), with a few of my observations sprinkled in and at the end. So here’s Buffy:
I market my books just as I market anything else. You want to fish where the fish swim. So, identify your audience, figure out who would be most interested in your book, then go fishing.
Create a board for each book. Using Quozio, pin review snippets to board, making sure that you change the URL to Amazon so the pin links to a point of purchase.
Buttry comment: To make this work, you need to be persistent and diligent. Buffy has 107 pins on her The Moment Keeper board (and 970 followers) and 95 pins and 972 followers for The Yearbook Series.
Seek interested groups
Promote via Facebook groups AND Google+ groups etc. I belong to a ton of Facebook and Google+ groups, from children’s books to antibullying groups (my middle grade Freaky Frank has a strong antibully message) to romance novels.
Buttry comment: A Facebook group’s members share an interest that is easily identifiable. Most of the 65 public Facebook groups that Buffy belongs to have thousands of members. I count five groups with “romance” in their names, with more than 27,000 members. Even allowing for considerable likely overlap, any time Buffy posts about one of her romance novels in those groups, she has an opportunity to reach more than 10,000 people interested in the type of book she’s promoting.
Make sure you @ accounts you know would be interested in your book. There are a ton of Twitter accounts that promote books for free. Also, add relevant hashtags. If you’re writing a baking cookbook, for example, you might want to include @pillsbury or @dominosugar in your tweet.
Preorder ELLA’S RAIN and save http://t.co/3c308JBkT3 @PrismBookGroup @eBooksWeLove @kindlepromoter @KindlePromotion pic.twitter.com/D9zpuwitsh
— Buffy Andrews (@Buffyandrews) December 15, 2014
Also, don’t forget you’ll want to schedule all hours because while you’re sleeping, customers in London have started their day. So definitely use Hootsuite or TweetDeck to time tweets. Also, consider a fictional Twitter account. I have an account for Grandma Dorothy, a character in Ella’s Rain.
Instant coffee never tastes as good as what I brew in my percolator. As in life, instant is rarely better. #Wordsofwisdom #quotes
— Grandma D (@Grandma_Dorothy) March 8, 2013
Buttry comment: Grandma Dorothy has tweeted 698 times and has 199 followers and the book hasn’t been released yet.
Author page
Have an author website for a good landing page.
Buttry comment: Here are some examples of the author pages of Buffy (screen shot above), Doug Worgul, Richard Hine, Bruce DeSilva and Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman.
Social book sites
Make sure you are on Goodreads and there are others like LibraryThing. There are also book clubs on Goodreads that you might consider joining. For example, if you wrote a book about the Civil War, you might consider joining a Goodreads book club in which that is the focus.
Buttry comment: Here are Buffy’s pages on Goodreads and LibraryThing.
Make sure you have AuthorApp on your Facebook page and Authorgraph is nice, too.
Some people boost posts on Facebook.
Buttry comment: When you post an update from an author page, Facebook will ask if you want to promote the post. This will show it in more people’s news feeds as a promoted post. The cost is modest, and I would suggest trying a few to see if you get notably more shares, likes and comments than on posts you don’t promote, and, more importantly, if the posts seem to generate sales and/or reviews. Try it with a few posts and then decide whether the results are worth the cost.
Social networks
Other social networks I promote include: Linkedin, Tumblr, Tout, Instagram, RebelMouse, etc.
Thunderclap
I do Thunderclap campaigns. It doesn’t cost anything to do if you get 100 people to support you.
Bookbub
If you can get on Bookbub, that’s huge. My books have climbed to best-seller status via Bookbub. It’s not cheap but can result in thousands of sales. Also, Ereader News Today.
Online store
Buffy also sells her books and other merchandise through an online store.
Email signature
OK, I’m done sharing Buffy’s tips, but I’ll pass on a few observations about her promotion and why it’s successful. She may have the biggest email signature I’ve ever seen. But I’ll bet it sells a few books.
Generosity
Buffy and I were colleagues at Digital First Media when Mimi’s novel, Gathering String, came out. They had met when I visited her newsroom and bonded quickly as fellow writers. Neither Mimi nor I would have thought of asking Buffy to help promote Mimi’s novel. I was a corporate editor above Buffy in the DFM hierarchy and it wouldn’t have been proper. But Buffy stayed connected with us on social media and asked Mimi if she would do a Q&A for Buffy’s writing blog. I don’t know how many books that helped Mimi sell, but it was a generous act, and she continued praising Mimi’s work in social media.
@nhcheryl @mimijohnson @stevebuttry @mjenkins Or Mandy’s Marauders. OK. Gotta stop. WIP is calling me to write sex scene (I’m serious). Bye!
— Buffy Andrews (@Buffyandrews) June 15, 2012
@stevebuttry @nhcheryl @mimijohnson @mjenkins In Gathering String, Mimi nails the scenes. Not too much. Just right. I loved her book.
— Buffy Andrews (@Buffyandrews) June 15, 2012
@mimijohnson *Smiles* I feel like I know Sam well. Must mean you’re a great writer:)
— Buffy Andrews (@Buffyandrews) June 15, 2012
And now, after I’ve left DFM, Mimi and I remain happy to promote Buffy’s books. I’m unlikely to read the genre’s she writes — romance novels and adolescent fiction — but I’m an enthusiastic supporter of her work anyway. Generosity can be one of the most selfish things you do: Most people are enthusiastic about helping those who have been helpful to them.
Aggressive promotion
I think Buffy is unusual among writers in her tireless promotion of her work. As I noted in yesterday’s post, I think it’s kind of rare to find the inclinations to write and promote in the same person.
Most writers would be uneasy doing as much self-promotion as Buffy does, and I’ve heard remarks that mixed annoyance and admiration from DFM colleagues about her relentless promotional efforts.
As I said yesterday, push past your discomfort and learn to promote your work. The time, effort and passion you put into your book is worth enduring the awkward feeling of self-promotion.
Buffy’s books
In a good example of using your personal network, Buffy added this note in her email: “I’m really pushing The Christmas Violin. I really, really, really want this to become a Hallmark movie. So, if you have any connections, pass it along. It’s just one of those books that you’d see on the Hallmark channel or Lifetime. It’s been getting a lot of good reviews.” Alas, I can think of no connections in TV production or with Hallmark or Lifetime. But I pass this along in case you might. (That’s one of the ways your personal network works: Some of the people who can’t help pass your request along and sometimes you make a connection.)
The Moment Keeper (This book reached No. 1 in Amazon’s inspirational romance category this year. It also was No. 3 in women’s literary fiction and No. 7 in women’s romance fiction and about 120 overall.)
Ella’s Rain (this comes out Feb. 25 and can be pre-ordered)
And 3 books in The Yearbook Series: Gina and Mike, Sue and Tom and Tess and Jeremy
Thanks to Buffy for this guest post. Also check out the tips on promoting books from Chuck Offenburger.
[…] « Buffy Andrews’ tips for promoting books […]
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Great post, Buffy! Will be bookmarking this for future perusal!
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http://www.bublish.com is a great place to promote your books. They have a free version, a free trial and an affordable monthly subscriptions. Check it out.
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These are fantastic tips. I love Pinterest and I needed to know how to promote my books there. However, I’ve got a question about Facebook groups that I hope someone can help me with… I’ve joined several and all that I can find right now of interest are public, so I’m weary about posting my books because I need to know if my friends will see every single post I submit to those groups. I don’t want to inundate them. I have an author page which I’m promoting there, which I think is enough. Can I join these groups with my author page? That would be better if so. Thoughts??? Thanks much!!
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I think you can. I’ll call your question to Buffy’s attention (she’ll probably see it anyway). She’ll have a better answer than me. I don’t think your posts in groups show up in your friends’ timelines though. You might experiment and see about that.
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Thanks, Steve! I appreciate you getting back to my post. I hope to hear from Buffy, too. ~Tonya
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Hi Tonya, I’m pretty sure you can’t join a group as your author page. When you post to groups, your friends will see notifications that you’ve done so via the Earth icon. They can just ignore those. If this concerns you, I suggest posting to Google communities. I belong to a ton of Google+ groups, probably 50 covering everything from middle-grade to women’s fiction. You might try that route.
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[…] Lewis contributed to that series on advice for a new journalism professor. Chuck Offenburger and Buffy Andrews contributed advice on promoting books. Nancy March contributed guest posts on a community […]
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[…] Journalist Steve Buttry, writer of a popular national blog, profiled YDR editor and author Buffy Andrews. Specifically, Buffy provided tips for promoting books. […]
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[…] about the book, but shared some tips on promoting a book (from authors Chuck Offenburger and Buffy Andrews as well as my own […]
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