I know we quite often talk about growing our author business and that we need to drive sales for our books, whether self-published or traditionally published, but how do you actually do this? What would be the steps to follow?

Section 1: Your book launch (the first week)

When you self-publish, you won’t have someone doing your book launch for you, so you will have to bring your own magic. Don’t think that if you publish a book that you will automatically have reviews or that people will even know about it. People may not even know it has come into existence. However, if you do it right, you could get awesome reviews within hours of your launch and you can even have the chance to become an Amazon bestseller!

There are a few key points to follow for the launch.

Having a launch team and Beta readers

As you know, you need reviews for your book as soon as possible. Amazon is quite strict about reviews and they require that someone spends at least $50 before they can review anything on Amazon, so you should think if your Beta readers are avid Amazon book buyers or not. You can also let them review you on Goodreads, but this will not affect the Amazon reviews as such.

This is were your launch team will come in handy. These are confirmed readers that want to buy your book and review it as it comes out. Be very grateful for these people as they are more than their weight in gold for you and your author business.

Using Amazon and keywords and freebies

You need to use the correct keywords to make it easy for people to find your book or to find your book in the genre that your book is written in. You can give up to seven keywords when uploading your book on Amazon, so make sure to use words that correctly show off your book and will make sure people will find it when they do searches. These keywords are different to your ad keywords (which can be up to 200). You can also use two categories, a broad spectrum one and a more detailed one. This will make sure that you don’t lose anyone if they don’t search your specific category. For example, Fiction > Romance and Fiction > Chick Lit > Romance.

You can also do advertising on Amazon and that is a whole other blog post that I may ask Ashleigh Giamoccaro to do for you here as she is the queen in this area. Being a bestseller on Amazon is not easy and requires paid promotions. You can promote your book at $2 a day, but when you launch, you will need to be more extravagant in your budget.

You will also need to make sure that you make it worth the readers while to sign up to your emailing list. This usually means that you give them something free, like a 5000 word story magnet or, depending on your book, a checklist, video or audio file. Your email list will help you keep your readers up to date with any more books that you may be releasing or to follow your blog posts.

Your existing marketing platform

This is your social media pages, your family, your friends and if you work, then even your colleagues. In your launch week you must not shut up about your book. Talk to anyone and everyone about it. You also need to email your mailing list at least two or three times reminding them to not miss out.

Section 2: Blogs, interviews and video’s (the second week)

You may be tempted to do everything in your first week, but you will most likely come unstuck and will end up burning your candle at both ends. There is no reason for you to do this. You can do interviews and blogs in the second week, after you have made sure that your book sold in the right places during your launch week. That means, you must pay attention to your advertising and email lists first and then you can do the rest.

So, when you are done with your first week of the launch, you can then look at contacting people to interview you. You can contact five of each platform, namely; YouTube, Podcasts, Blogs and Magazines (depending on your book).

You can organize a press kit up front which will help you be more organized. You can find an article about how to do one at Paper Raven Books here.

Section 3: Continue promoting your book

You need to continue promoting your book, you can’t stop after the launch, you’re in it for the long haul.

Ashleigh would be able to help with this as well and I will definitely be asking her if she wouldn’t mind doing a blog post for you on this matter. It is very important and cannot be overlooked.

Lastly, enjoy the launch! This is your baby…your book that is being shown to the world. Make sure people see the passion there when you share or promote it. You are your own best cheerleader.

That’s it from me for now…

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Enjoy the moments