Marketing, Promotion and Sales Services
What is Book Marketing, Promotion and Sales?
Firstly, marketing, promotion and sales are different things:
Therefore, there is no point spending a lot of time and money promoting your book if you haven’t done the marketing first – i.e. if you don’t know who you should be communicating with, then any communication that you do may be ineffective. Also, making sales is a much easier task if you have got your marketing right and you have done lots of promotion.
What does Book Promotion Involve?
Promoting your book will involve two types of activity:
Passive promotion sets up the means by which people can communicate with you and makes your book visible to potential customers, but it is the active promotion that will drive interested people to Facebook, Twitter, etc. for more information and only active promotion is likely to result in sales of your book. For active promotion to work it must be regular and on-going – you have to be persistent and, well, active! There is no getting away from the fact that active promotion is hard work and very time-consuming in what is an increasingly crowded marketplace, but it the only way you will sell copies of your book.
Many companies who offer self-publishing services will sell you a lot of passive promotion packages but what they won’t do much of is the active promotion – as a self-publisher you will need to do this yourself. Indeed, it would be hugely expensive for a self-publisher to employ the full-time services of a promotions executive. Also, communication with your audience and/or target communities is likely to be far more effective if you do it yourself, much can be done for free and making contact with your audience/community can be hugely rewarding. If you don't want to get involved in marketing and promoting your book then we are not the self-publishing service for you. We can recommend other companies that will carry out active promotion and sales for you but they will expect to receive a percentage of your sales revenue in return and these companies will publish your book under their own imprint (see our White Paper on Self-publishing for more information).
What Do We Offer?
We believe that self-publishers should be hands-on when it comes to marketing, promotion and sales. Learning through doing is by far the best way to become confident with things like social media. These are crucial activities for true self-publishers so you need to own the processes rather than just buying a packaged and passive ‘result’. Therefore, instead of setting things up for you, we act as your mentor and give you the benefit of our experience to empower you to do your own promotion and sell your own books. We therefore save you money because a lot of the ‘services’ you are sold by other self-publishing companies are easy to set up for yourself at no cost. As we don’t take a percentage of your sales revenue we have no vested interest in your choice of suppliers so we are able to recommend the best and cheapest options, rather than those options that suit us.
For a single price of £750 (inc. VAT) we will work with you to create a marketing plan. We will also advise you on how to implement this plan in order to achieve the key goals of book promotion:
Our advice will cover the following topics (please note that there are additional costs attached to some of these activities – we will tell you what these costs will be):
Book Data
Online Promotion
Print promotion
Personal promotion
Book sales
Advanced services
Contact us to discuss your marketing and promotional requirements:
Firstly, marketing, promotion and sales are different things:
- Marketing is about determining the market for your book and involves activities like market research, audience and community definition, defining your unique selling points, etc.;
- Promotion is about actively communicating with your target market/audience/community – establishing a dialogue with the market so that your audience/community is engaged and enthused about your book;
- Sales is about turning promotion into an actual sales transaction – whether that be a direct sale to a customer or a bulk order to a wholesaler or retailer.
Therefore, there is no point spending a lot of time and money promoting your book if you haven’t done the marketing first – i.e. if you don’t know who you should be communicating with, then any communication that you do may be ineffective. Also, making sales is a much easier task if you have got your marketing right and you have done lots of promotion.
What does Book Promotion Involve?
Promoting your book will involve two types of activity:
- Passive activities like setting up a Facebook page and a website, creating a Twitter and Pinterest account, ensuring your ebook is available to buy in all relevant online retail accounts, in the hope that people will find you, communicate with you and buy your book;
- Active promotion, which involves things like sending out emails and/or books to potential reviewers, blogging and tweeting about your book, signing copies of your book at an author event and networking.
Passive promotion sets up the means by which people can communicate with you and makes your book visible to potential customers, but it is the active promotion that will drive interested people to Facebook, Twitter, etc. for more information and only active promotion is likely to result in sales of your book. For active promotion to work it must be regular and on-going – you have to be persistent and, well, active! There is no getting away from the fact that active promotion is hard work and very time-consuming in what is an increasingly crowded marketplace, but it the only way you will sell copies of your book.
Many companies who offer self-publishing services will sell you a lot of passive promotion packages but what they won’t do much of is the active promotion – as a self-publisher you will need to do this yourself. Indeed, it would be hugely expensive for a self-publisher to employ the full-time services of a promotions executive. Also, communication with your audience and/or target communities is likely to be far more effective if you do it yourself, much can be done for free and making contact with your audience/community can be hugely rewarding. If you don't want to get involved in marketing and promoting your book then we are not the self-publishing service for you. We can recommend other companies that will carry out active promotion and sales for you but they will expect to receive a percentage of your sales revenue in return and these companies will publish your book under their own imprint (see our White Paper on Self-publishing for more information).
What Do We Offer?
We believe that self-publishers should be hands-on when it comes to marketing, promotion and sales. Learning through doing is by far the best way to become confident with things like social media. These are crucial activities for true self-publishers so you need to own the processes rather than just buying a packaged and passive ‘result’. Therefore, instead of setting things up for you, we act as your mentor and give you the benefit of our experience to empower you to do your own promotion and sell your own books. We therefore save you money because a lot of the ‘services’ you are sold by other self-publishing companies are easy to set up for yourself at no cost. As we don’t take a percentage of your sales revenue we have no vested interest in your choice of suppliers so we are able to recommend the best and cheapest options, rather than those options that suit us.
For a single price of £750 (inc. VAT) we will work with you to create a marketing plan. We will also advise you on how to implement this plan in order to achieve the key goals of book promotion:
- Getting information about your book to retailers and wholesalers who are most likely to stock your print book and/or your ebook;
- Getting information about your book to people most likely to review your book;
- Getting information about your book to people most likely to buy your book.
Our advice will cover the following topics (please note that there are additional costs attached to some of these activities – we will tell you what these costs will be):
Book Data
- ISBN
- Nielsen PubWeb
- Bowker
Online Promotion
- Website – we will help you to create your own website using free tools.
- Social media – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, SEO, blogging, etc.
- Email promotion – create an emailing list and send out regular promotional emails.
- Online book promotion sites – e.g. Goodreads, iAuthor, NetGalley, etc.
Print promotion
- Bookseller target list – identify local bookshops and other retailers who may be interested in stocking your book.
- Media target list – identify local, regional, national, specialist media that may write articles on or review your book.
- Advance Information (AI) sheets for booksellers – create an AI to send to bookshops.
- Press releases for media – create a press release and send it to journalists, etc.
- Leaflets, business cards, posters, etc. – create these if you need them for an event.
Personal promotion
- Book launch
- Signing sessions
- Interviews – radio and TV
Book sales
- Price
- Discount
- Sale or return
Advanced services
- Sales representation
- PR packages
- Video
- Podcast
Contact us to discuss your marketing and promotional requirements: