Review in Practice: How to Market a Book

About the Book

Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.

Marketing a book in 2023 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.

But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.

Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.

In particular, you’ll learn:

✔️ How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.;
✔️ How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career;
✔️ How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you;
✔️ How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book;
✔️ How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and
✔️ How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,

After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.

Purchase Link: https://www.amazon.com/How-Market-Book-Overperform-Marketing-ebook/dp/B08TZJQ1FB

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Today’s author needs to be able to do all stages of the publishing process in order to run their author business, but one person cannot do it all. It can be overwhelming, even for the D.I.Y. author. (That’s me. 😉 ). I share my experience and knowledge about doing my marketing and promotions myself in my book, The D.I.Y. Author, which will be released on June 4th, 2024. But learning to run an author business doesn’t end when you publish a book, and although I just wrote a book about building and growing your author business, I still have much to learn on this never ending road to success. That’s why I took advantage of the free ebook by Reedsy‘s Ricardo Fayette, How to Market Your Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market. Fayette knows a lot more than I do on the subject of book marketing, so I refer my readers to his book in my book.

I don’t do paid advertising, and that is what a good portion of this book is about.

“But couldn’t I reach a larger audience with paid advertising?” Absolutely.

Someday, I hope to be able to expand into the paid advertising arena, so I read through those sections, and I must say, Ricardo Fayette explains things in such a way that even someone like me, who gets headaches when thinking analytics, can understand, and he is very thorough. He lays out the differences between Amazon Ads, Facebook Ads, and BookBub Ads, weighing the pros and cons of each. And man, did I learn a lot, particularly about BookBub Ads. He really gave me a lot to think about. Hopefully, I will be able to include what I’ve learned about paid advertising from this book in the revised edition of The D.I.Y. Author by putting it into practice at a future date.

Fayette also talks about the importance of a mailing list and how to set up a newsletter with a reader magnet, reminding me of another area where my efforts have been lacking. He compares several email servers and offers the basics of a good newsletter. I set out two years ago to find a new email server because I wasn’t happy with MailChimp. But things got busy and life happened, and my quest for an email server got laid to the side. I opted to stick with what I knew, not wanting to take the time to learn a new server system, let alone the time it takes to research them first. This book offers a list with some I wasn’t familiar with which are geared more toward authors. This peaked my curiosity, as it sounded like it might be just what I’m looking for. I haven’t sent out a newsletter in over six months, and my readers have probably forgotten me. This might be the motivation that I need to get a newsletter up and running, and keep it running.

He shares tips for working the Amazon system, as well as some of the other retailers, for those who publish wide. He even talks about selling direct from your website, and how to make each of these methods work for you. He covers keywords, backcover copy and book covers.

On the subject of book covers, I have to disagree with him as he insists you must outsource your book cover with an expensive professional cover designer. I do outsource many of my book covers because I’d rather put my time into my writing, but although I am a writer and not a book designer, I posess the design knowledge and most of the skills to create a good book cover. I designed the covers for my Women in the West Adventure Series and I’m quite happy with them. I wasn’t happy with the cover I did for The Rock Star & The Outlaw, so I outsourced it to someone who had more skill than I did, and changed the cover three months after publication. So, while I’m not saying you shouldn’t outsource your book covers, I don’t think that it is an absolute necessity. While Fayette is adament on this point, reminding us of it repeatedly throughout the book, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

This is one of the most comprehensive books on book marketing that I’ve come across, and one I will be referring back to many times in the future as I grow and expand my author business. A great value from a free book.

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About Author Kaye Lynne Booth

For Kaye Lynne Booth, writing is a passion. Kaye Lynne is an author with published short fiction and poetry, both online and in print, including her short story collection, Last Call and Other Short Fiction; and her paranormal mystery novella, Hidden Secrets; Books 1 & 2 of her Women in the West adventure series, Delilah and Sarah, and her Time-Travel Adventure novel, The Rock Star & The Outlaw. Kaye holds a dual M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing with emphasis in genre fiction and screenwriting, and an M.A. in publishing. Kaye Lynne is the founder of WordCrafter Quality Writing & Author Services and WordCrafter Press. She also maintains an authors’ blog and website, Writing to be Read, where she publishes content of interest in the literary world.

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6 Comments on “Review in Practice: How to Market a Book”

  1. HI Kaye, I haven’t done a newsletter and I doubt I will. It just seems like more work to me – smile. WRT book covers, I do some myself and some I outsource. It depends on the theme of the book and whether I think I can create the best cover myself or not.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Yes. As you know I outsource some covers, as well. The newsletter is something I struggle with, because it is a lot of work. If I paid for a plan instead of using the free one on Mailchimp, or changed servers, I think I could automate it, so it ran more smoothly. I cherish the scheduling tool on WordPress because I can take a ‘blog day’ and schedule the posts ahead so they all post when they are supposed to, and automating the newsletter should work the same way. What’s important about the Newsletter is the mailing list that every author needs to build and grow. I think the most subscribers I’ve had is like 67 for the newsletter. My blog has many more, but I don’t have all of their emails, so I have no way to engage directly with them. 😦

      Liked by 1 person

      • Some people put a newsletter subscriber button on their blog.

        Liked by 1 person

        • That is the thing. I tried to set one up to pop up when you first come on, but could never get it to work right, so I settled for the sign up link at the bottom of my posts. I don’t think many people even see it. I think I need to change servers, but that means learning a whole new system and that takes a lot of time, so I keep putting it off.

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