6 Tips for Marketing Your Book Online | The Writers' House UK

6 Top Tips for Marketing Your Book Online

by Rob Tucker, Co-founder at ReadWave

For the last four years we?ve been running an online digital publishing platform (recently rebranded as ReadWave), which helps writers build up a readership and showcase their stories online. During that time we?ve had access to a lot of data on what people read online, when they read and, most importantly, why some writers are successful in gaining readers and others aren?t. Here are some of the key insights that we?ve learned over the last four years, which hopefully will help you plan a marketing strategy for your writing:

1) The Importance of Short Stories (even for novelists)

If you?re not yet a well-known author, then readers are 300 times more likely to read a short story of yours rather than the first chapter of a novel. Even if your eventual goal is to sell your novel, start by writing some great short stories and hosting them as free giveaways online. When it comes to online reading, try to keep your stories under 1,500 words, as these get by far the most hits.

2) The Limitations of Personal Websites

When most writers decide to market their writing, they usually start by building their own website. If you make your own website the centre of your marketing campaign, you?re going to come up against some fairly large problems. Not only is getting people to visit your website extremely difficult, but normally people visiting your site will look around for a few minutes and then leave, never coming back again. You need to retain your visitors and keep them coming back again and again.

A better option is to make one of your social networks the centre of your marketing campaign; that means your Facebook, Twitter, ReadWave page. A good way of doing this is to build a mini-website on Facebook itself, through your Facebook Fan page. If you?re not scared of a bit of HTML, then do it yourself using the Static HTML App. Try setting it up so that readers get a free giveaway if they ?like? your Facebook page. It will be much more effective to use this as the centrepiece of your marketing campaign as opposed to driving traffic to your personal website.

3) Building a Mailing List

Every writer needs a database of the names and email addresses of their grassroots supporters. Regardless of whether you?ve written anything new this month or not, you need to keep your early supporters constantly engaged through newsletters. Really you should put the same time and effort into writing your newsletters as you do into writing your stories. Building a mailing list is difficult, there?s no doubt about it. After speaking to lots of writers, we?ve decided to make newsletters a built-in feature at ReadWave, since at the moment there are almost no services that are specifically geared towards helping writers get more sign-ups. If you?re putting a newsletter sign-up form on your website then we recommend MailChimp.

A word of warning, though ? beginners at email marketing tend to get a bit scared of sending out thousands of emails in one go and compensate for this by being stiff or, even worse, sounding corporate. Often, you only get one chance to dazzle a new subscriber before he/she will ignore your emails forever. Be funny and easy to approach in your newsletters. Think of it as a chance to build a positive brand around yourself, rather than to sell, sell, sell.

4) A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

When it comes to digital content, pictures are key. Stories with interesting pictures are five times more popular than those without. It?s also worth noting that the peak time for online reading is mid-week, when people are bored at work. Readers don?t want to be engaged with your magnum opus ? they just want to flick through something that is quick and easy to read while their boss isn?t looking. Think about your online and offline content as two fundamentally different things; online content is very much about surface values. Readers won?t have a lot of time to ponder the hidden depths of your story.

5) Social Reading

?Social Reading? is the name given to the auto-sharing system used by newspapers such as The Huffington Post on Facebook, i.e. when you read something on Facebook and it is automatically reposted to your Facebook timeline. Social reading is potentially a powerful tool.

At ReadWave, we provide this Facebook integration for free. Just link your Facebook account to your ReadWave account. We?ve noticed that some writers are better at getting social reads than others. Part of the reason for this is the way Facebook is set up. Content that has been automatically shared will only appear on your timeline, whereas content that has been manually shared will appear on the newsfeed as well. So putting this in terms of practical advice, if someone ?likes? or ?reads? your story, try to engage them in conversation and get them to respond. If you can create a conversation then you?ll get many, many more likes.

6) Embedding and Linking

The more times a link to your story appears online, the better your Google ranking will be, so be sure to post a link to your stories on as many writing communities and blogs as you can. Think of creative ways to get the link to your stories out there. It takes time and effort but it will be worth it in the long run.

Here?s a little tip for linking to your story. Instead of writing, ?Please read my story, Cooper & the Thieves, here?, instead write it so that the hyperlink appears on the keywords, e.g., ?Please read my story Cooper & the Thieves?. This way Google will index your story more efficiently.

At ReadWave, we?re also building a reading widget to help you get your stories onto blogs and other websites. The widget allows you to embed your story anywhere online in exactly the same way that you can embed a YouTube video. If you?re approaching bloggers to try to get them to post your story then take the time to get to know them and contribute to their blog. Online marketing operates on a favour-for-favours system, so be generous and you shall receive.

Those are my top tips for marketing your book. All of them are geared towards creating a positive brand around your stories based on free content, rather than simply selling. Best of luck to you all in building your readership and if you have any questions, you can contact me at:

rob@readwave.com

www.readwave.com

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The Writers? House UK would like to thank Rob Tucker at ReadWave for the article giving his insight into tips for marketing your book online.

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Source: http://www.writershouse.co.uk/6-tips-for-marketing-your-book-online

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