Book Marketing Tips – Lit World Interviews

My Guest Post on @JensPenDen It’s all about being #Free

Author Jenna Willett did an amazing Guest Post for us about what She Learned from Chuck Sambuchino. It was only fair I did a Gust Post on JensPenDen.

Five Free Author Gifts For Christmas

That’s right. I searched and found FIVE downloads you can get for Free as of the writing of the article, yesterday, on JensPenDen, ranging from how to write a query letter to marketing your book. Go check out my Guest Post and download away by clicking here. They are FREE after all.

Much Respect

Ronovan

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Get Book Sales with your Book Description.

There are foods out there that I love, but they look awful. I can cook some of the best tasting things you will ever eat, but they may just not look that great.

“What’s is this?” My son asked.

“Diced chicken, rice, condensed cream of mushroom soup, broccoli, garlic powder, salt, pepper…”

“Daddy, can I have a sandwich?”

I was describing a delicious casserole dish that is seriously amazing, but I lost my audience. I was giving him not what he wanted, I was giving him the chef’s description of the dish. He didn’t ask for the recipe, he wanted to know what it was and what it tasted like.

As Authors we need to keep this in mind when we come up with our “Book Descriptions”.

Did anyone else shudder or get a bad taste in their mouth when I said those last two words? They are almost as bad as the words “synopsis” or “hook” or . . . NOOOOO “pitch” or Sally Fields forbid-“query letter“.

I look through Amazon a lot as I look for Author Interviews.

Straight Talk Time from Ronovan

There are some seriously B.A.D. Book Descriptions. What’s B.A.D.? Oh, that means Badly Authored Descriptions. These Book Descriptions have been by Authors. When I read them it makes me wonder one of two things;

Did the Author use up all their talent in the book writing or
Does the Author just not know how to write

Sorry, I know, that was bad, but you have to admit when you are looking at a book description and you see two or three lines or you see a recipe of the book you wonder the same things. And this is Straight Talk, not Sweet Talk.

You have to stand out from the crowd. If you ever look at ‘Amazon Best Sellers Rank’ and then look at the Book Descriptions, most often there is a correlation.

How to Write a Book Description

Establish Who You Are

Who the heck are you? Why should I trust you to write this book and believe I am getting quality?

I have several Author friends who are award winning. Mention it right off the bat. Show the reader you are legit.

The LWI: Book Description is from Award Winning author Ronovan Writes.

You don’t have Awards?

The LWI: Book Description is Ronovan Writes third novel.

Ronovan Writes brings us the first in his NEW series “The LWI: Book Descriptors”.

Author Historian Ronovan Writes delivers his newest jump into adventure with “The LWI: Book Descriptors”

Okay, so they might not be the best but I think you see what I mean. You need to give them a piece of you. Connect somehow. Pretend you are reading and think what would catch your eye. Read those Amazon Best Seller Book Descriptions.

Review Blurbs

I had a comment in a recent article asking if regular people read the long reviews on Amazon. If they get that far they just might. How do you let the potential purchaser of your book know people like it?

Okay, so there is the star review they can see but you want them to see the words.

Take review quotes and put them in your Book Description. Not a lot of them. Pick those which keep the energy going in your “pitch”. Always remember your Book Description is a sales pitch.

“Ronovan Writes nails the book to the wall with non-stop action and keeps you guessing every step of the way. I started reading it and could not put it down until I was finished. Who needs sleep?”

“The LWI: Book Descriptors had me pacing the floor wondering what would happen next. I loved and hated the author at the same time as he pulled me through every emotion and made me question what I believed.”

“I started reading this as a night time read and the next thing I know I am wide awake. My wife hit me to turn out the light. Ronovan Writes “The LWI: Book Descriptors” is worth a night on the couch, or two.”

Keep the quotes short and not many. You only have a little time of the modern day person’s short attention span.

The Story

Now tell about your book. Give the nutshell version. The commercial, the “hook”. You threw out the line with Who You Are, you baited them with the Review Blurbs, now hook them with your pitch of the book. The real description of the story. Forget the little parts, the recipe. Tell them what you have for them.

“The LWI: Book Descriptors” races you through the dark places that we thought we knew to be true, but in reality were all a devastating plan from on high. If you can handle surprise, revelations and being kept on the edge of your seat in the world of political espionage, you’re in the right place.

How to Conclude

There are various methods. The comparison, just like you do with a literary agent or publisher where you mention how your book is similar to some other super star author’s.

Close with your best review quote blurb or blurbs.

“Not since The DaVinci Code have I read such a reality shaking story. Ronovan Writes delivers a gripping tale of intrigue and desperation. I can’t wait for his next book.”

Length of Book Description

Get the job done. After this point do all the quotes you want, or whatever else, but get the job done quickly and if you want more quotes or then add comparisons, go ahead and do it.

Formatting the Description

Wake people up. Bold, symbols like asterisks. Do something to wake the reader up from looking through dozens of descriptions already.

Let’s see what it might look like:

Author Historian Ronovan Writes delivers his newest jump into adventure with “The LWI: Book Descriptors”

5 out of 5 Star Reviews

*****“Ronovan Writes nails the book to the wall with non-stop action and keeps you guessing every step of the way. I started reading it and could not put it down until I was finished. Who needs sleep?”– Joe Contrare-Amazon Review

More Reader Praise:

“Not since The DaVinci Code have I read such a reality shaking story. Ronovan Writes delivers a gripping tale of intrigue and desperation. I can’t wait for his next book.”-Daniel Constano-Amazon Reviewer

These are suggestions. The idea to take away from this is to put some effort into the Book Description or your months of writing a book will not get read by many. All that time and effort and you waste it away with soup can ingredients.

Make your Book Description as good as if not BETTER than your Book!

Much Respect

Ronovan

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And as always . . .

Read a Book, Write a Review.

Basics for Linking up with Readers.

Being a success: It’s not all about your writing.

These days to be a successful author you have to be more than just a great writer. You have to be savvy about the ways of marketing and social networking. I can feel the cringe vibrate from your keyboard to mine. But how do you think you found this article if you didn’t have some bit of that working for you already or me either?

Today I just want to discuss a couple or few basics.

As I look for people to interview some of the things I remind bloggers of keep coming up with authors. After fall, aren’t we writers/authors bloggers of a sort as well?

Broken links:

They happen to us all. You’ve clicked one and it takes you nowhere. Imagine as I am clicking a link on someone’s Twitter profile to get information about them to approach them for an interview and I get the error message that the page can’t be found. I am a guy wanting to help authors out and simply wanting to see more information. But that also means I am acting as a fan and wanting to look at information about people I think fans want to learn about.

So imagine that if it is a fan, they see your great header photo that looks way cool, you have an amazing and very professional profile head shot and then . . . the Click of Doom. Some might search the internet or I might personally search Amazon, but this is like being at the checkout line at the grocery store and you see all the candy and the little things. That’s right . . . This is Impulse Clicking you just gave them the empty box of Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups. Will they search, will I go to Amazon, will we step out of the checkout line for you? Would you for us?

No Links:

What’s worse than a Broken Link, maybe no way to connect at all? You have a great site that you’ve set up but you haven’t put it out there on you various connections for people to see. You don’t have it on Twitter, you don’t have it in your email signature. You don’t have it anywhere! No matter who you are or what your fame is, you are your best advertising and you are the only one you can always count on 100% of the time. So if you fail yourself, how can you count on anyone else?

Nothing to Link To:

You need a site of some type to link to. This sounds a lot like the No Links point but there is a difference in not noting your links and not having anything to link to. There are free platforms all over the internet. I personally have a ‘Blogger’ account at blogspot,com and of course my main one is here at WordPress.com, and I am branching out as I explore more and more platforms to discover what is best. For me personally, I recommend WordPress. Perhaps I like WordPress because I am simply accustomed to it, but it is an easy platform and you can get involved in a good community. Writers tend to support each other a great deal on WordPress in giving ‘shout outs’ about each other.

I will be putting together a ‘How To’ of creating an author blog/site very soon. Each person here at LitWorldInterviews (LWI) has their own particular talents. We all enjoy writing. We are all at different stages of our writing careers. My other talent is an enjoyment of how to make friendly or professional looking sites and getting your name out in the public. You will be seeing the LWI site change very, very soon as it has grown into something more than I thought it might be at first.

One thing to Remember:

Don’t spread your focus too thin. Give your attention to two, maybe three outlets. A blog, a social network (I use Twitter), and one other thing, perhaps facebook or Google+. I know people think of facebook as a social thing but a lot use it as their primary author page. I still use more than three but only because I have them built in. Which you can too and I will be showing you how.

Until Next Time,

Ronovan

Marketing – Your Way

There have been quite a lot of articles around lately about how free and very low priced books are creating a large band of readers who are not prepared to pay for regular priced ones, thereby swiping the food out of “legitimate” authors mouths. That’s fine. People who are never going to pay for a book don’t matter, and probably wouldn’t buy your book even if it suddenly became illegal to ever give one away for free anyway. You’re in charge of the pricing of your work, and if somebody wants to read it they will buy it. Regardless of what all those intrepid freebie hunters get up to. So don’t be shouting at hardworking people simply doing their best to get a new product to the eyes of people who would otherwise never have a clue who they are. Indie authors who started publishing eBooks with Amazon seven to ten years ago had a lot more room to move up there than new Indies today. Some of the strategies that they used to get noticed, and beat their way up the rankings back then might not be so easy to implement successfully now with the thousands of books being published every single day. Those early writers who managed to grab hold of a rung on the ladder and work their way to the top will probably stay there now, so they won’t have to think totally out of the box to come up with brand new ways for their latest books to be noticed in amongst that epic labyrinth of millions of others that is Amazon 2014.

New ways will be found though. The kind of person who has the will and the determination to write a book, then polish it to publishing standard, design and make a cover for it, publish it, and then market it, all the while scribbling away at the next book, is most definitely the kind of person who is capable of thinking outside of any old box. I think that the self-publishing landscape will probably have to shift and morph to accommodate the sheer volume of new books pouring in, and the work to get to the top will be harder. I also think that we should be wary of demonising one or another of the tactics scribblers use to get their books to new eyeballs. After all, if there really was a proven formula to sell books, everyone would be in Stephen King Land, and that is not a reasonable idea to have. There is no formula that will ensure your success as an author. It’s all down to lots of hard work, trial and error, more patience than you would expect, and a large dollop of good luck. Indies are their own bosses, and with that goes the privilege of making their own rules as far as their own careers are concerned. They can do as little as they want, or as much as they want to market their books. They can sell boxed sets, give their books away for free or charge 99 cents or $9.99 for them if they want to. Very little of what other Indie authors do should have any effect on you. What works for one person’s book promotion won’t necessarily work for yours and vice versa. Apart from never, ever – seriously never – ever – spamming anyone with desperate pleas to buy your book, keep all of your options open when the time comes to launch your labour of love into the arms of the reading population.

If you have the resources to pay for the professional finishing of your book after writing it, and are able to afford to pay for it to be advertised, you obviously are going to fare better out of the starting gates than the writer who can’t afford these things. For the Indie who is going it totally alone, the work will be harder, and the pace to the point where you finally find some regular readers will be much slower. Much bumpier too, what with the inevitable learning curves with missed typos, disastrous first attempt covers, and formatting faux pas. You’d have to be some kind of superior being if you get it totally right the first time around without any help at all. It’s not the end of the world to make mistakes, as long as you fix them just as fast as you can when you realise what you’ve done wrong. The wonderful thing is that every time you falter and scrape your knees – or your ego, you’ve learned something new about the industry by the time you’re back up again.

It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about the free, the low priced, or the Goodreads giveaway. There are many vocal supporters both for and against these things. The only opinion that should count in your Indie world is your own. You are your publisher, editor, creative department, and sales department – and you get to make all executive decisions. I’ve tried the freebies and the 99 cents to very good effect – but that’s just me. Your book – your decisions, so try them all for yourself, and see how things go, and don’t for a minute believe that your little promo is going to have an effect on the sales of anyone else’s books at all. Only their own marketing efforts will. One thing I’ve learned in this wonderful world of Indie is that you’re learning all the time, and that opinions seemingly set in stone often change.

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Let Your Friends Know

Like this:

How to Write a Book Description

Establish Who You Are

Review Blurbs

The Story

How to Conclude

Length of Book Description

Formatting the Description

Let’s see what it might look like:

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Read a Book, Write a Review.

Let Your Friends Know

Like this:

Being a success: It’s not all about your writing.

Today I just want to discuss a couple or few basics.

Broken links:

No Links:

Nothing to Link To:

One thing to Remember:

Let Your Friends Know

Like this:

Let Your Friends Know

Like this: