Facebook promotion for your book

Early this month I introduced a very useful site which creates single universal book links to all Amazon websites. Your potential customer, regardless of where they are on the planet, gets taken to their 'local' Amazon website. The company offering these links, Viewbook.at, are now providing a Facebook promotion for books, in return for generating referrals to their site. In essence they'll give you a promotional link to use, and then if 10 authors you introduce sign up, to use their FREE global Amazon links, they'll promote details of your book to their 10,000+ Facebook fans. The link to this promotional page is - Viewbook.at book promotion

Another useful universal link they have now introduced is for Amazon author pages. Again the idea is elegant in its simplicity. You are provided with a bespoke shortened URL which is linked to your Amazon author page, and regardless of where your potential customer lives, they will be taken directly to their 'local' Amazon website. The link to create your own is - Viewauthor.at These links are very useful when promoting your book and author page on both the global platforms of Twitter and Facebook, as they provide all your followers the ability to go straight to their own 'local' Amazon site.

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What is "Social Media Jail"?

At some point in your time on Twitter (or Facebook) you are likely to end up in a 'social media jail', without knowing why. So why does a post on 'Social Media Jail' feature on a marketing tips blog? The simple answer is that whilst you are being served prison food, and left feeling like a social outcast, your marketing machine is slowly grinding to a halt. Social media is very similar to a production facility in a factory – if the production line comes to a standstill, so too does the business . . . in your case, book sales.

Marketing is all about getting the message out on a constant basis. Companies such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, BMW etc., are all well-known global companies, but they too need to constantly market their product. So, if you do end up in a social media jail, you can’t be getting your message out. The first sentence you may face is with Twitter. There are two aspects here. The first is a short block from the system, based upon the transgression, and the other is suspension, which can last for several days. A short block occurs when one of the technical limitations is surpassed.

The current technical limits for Twitter accounts are:

Direct Messages: 250 per day.

Updates/Tweets: 1,000 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.

Changes to Account Email: 4 per hour.

Following (daily): Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior. The technical follow limit is 1,000 per day.

Following (account-based): Once an account is following 2,000 other users, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. (see my additional post about this ruling.)

Suspension from Twitter occurs without any warning. One minute you can be using the system, the next you just get a message to say the account is suspended. Also, your followers will appear as ZERO! Don’t panic though, because if you successfully appeal the suspension then they will be re-instated, but you may lose a few. The biggest cause of a Twitter suspension is aggressive following, or using prohibited third-party software. The ‘guidelines’ Twitter provide are very ambiguous and don’t come with any true guidance. If they don’t like it, they’ll suspend the account. It can be best be likened to speed limits on the road. If you exceed the limit, you’ll get a possible ban. However, in Twitter’s case, they won’t tell you specifically what the ‘speed limit’ is, which isn’t particularly helpful. More details about Twitter’s rules can be found here.

It seems Facebook also provides a similar ‘service’ to Twitter, and this happens when you ask too many people to be your friend. Again, limits aren’t made transparent, and if you try to befriend too many people in a short period of time, you could be serving a sentence of several days, or even weeks. In fact, the latest joke doing the rounds is that Facebook is an actual jail. You sit around, waste time, have a profile picture, write on walls and get poked by people you don’t really know. You have been warned! 

Every author should be on Goodreads!

Well, I’m sure you’ll agree that is a very bold statement, but I stand by it, and here’s why. Goodreads is the single biggest website on the Internet for bringing authors and readers together. Currently over 16 million members use the Goodreads website. It provides a platform both to share your books, read the books of others, enjoy engaging forums, promote new releases with a giveaway, link up with your followers from Twitter/Facebook etc etc.

I want to use this post to highlight three aspects of Goodreads (and there are plenty more) which you can use to help with marketing your book.

1) Giveaways

When I initially published my book I decided to give away a few paperback copies. I thought, optimistically, a hundred or so people on Goodreads would be perhaps interested in receiving a copy. I was staggered when over 1,800 people requested one of the free copies. That, straightaway, meant 1,800+ people (and all those who saw it, but didn’t request it) knew my book now existed. I also had over 300 people place it on their ‘to read’ list. There are a few rules regarding the 'giveaway' programme on Goodreads, but it certainly will create some immediate exposure.

2) Harvesting Twitter followers

This is a tip I was given by an author friend. You’ll find with Goodreads you’ll only be permitted to add a certain number of friends per day, before the system blocks you until you enter a new day. However, Goodreads do appreciate you may have Twitter followers on Goodreads, which you currently haven’t yet befriended on the site. These they will allow you to add as friends in bulk. You can do this by going to your profile page, scrolling down to your Friends list, clicking where it indicates how many friends you have, and then clicking on ‘Find Friends From’. Then select Twitter (and you can use the other social sites too) from the choices available. The system will then tell you how many Twitter followers you have on Goodreads that you can send a friend request to. Those who do agree to be friends on Goodreads will then slowly start to populate your 'friends' list.

3) Listopia

If you have a book riding high in one of the Listopia ‘lists’, it provides a good opportunity for further promotion. Currently I have a book which has been in the top ten ‘Thrillers You Must Read’ category for over 16 months, of which for two months during 2013 it was #1. This particular listing on Goodreads has given the novel some excellent exposure.  (I’m sure, now that I’ve just said that, one or two will see it as their duty to topple it, sooner rather than later. C'est la vie. However, any additional votes will be gratefully received.) 

In tomorrow’s post I’ll be looking at the painful issue of poor book reviews.

Why you need to create a BRAND

As authors we generally have one goal, apart from writing books . . . and that’s to sell them. If you accept that as a key goal, then one thing is vitally important, and that is getting the message out there that your books exist. Without some form of marketing, your book will just reside on Amazon’s server as a Kindle file, and do nothing more. So what do I mean by an author having a brand? The picture below represents arguably the best known brand on the planet.

Certainly, if a company called Interbrand are to be believed, the Coca-Cola brand is the most valuable in the world, with a current estimate, for the brand alone, in the region of $67billion. No, that’s not a typo. It’s valued in billions of US dollars. Why? The answer to that is quite simple, although the calculation Interbrand use is very complex. Wherever you go in the world you’ll generally be able to buy a bottle, or can, of Coca-Cola. Compared to a ‘local cola’ or supermarket ‘own brand’ cola, Coca-Cola is more expensive. So it sells more than any other cola, and sells at a higher price than any other cola, and the logo is recognised the world over. That’s the value of the brand.

Now as an author you’ll never compete with Coca-Cola. Not even JK Rowling comes close, and neither should she. It is a different product, in a different market. But let’s get back to the Coca-Cola logo for a minute. It has remained unchanged for decades - hence why we immediately recognise it. So if Coca-Cola advertises on the TV, in the press, on poster sites, the logo is consistently the same. I now want to raise the question . . . what is YOUR logo? It can’t be your book cover, unless you only write one book, and most authors write several. Most marketing of books, particularly indie books, is done on the Internet, using, in the main, social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. If you do use Facebook, make sure it’s an ‘author fan page’ you use to market your book, not your page which family and close friends connect with you. Sure, mention the odd success on the latter, but leave the marketing to your author page. I digress slightly, but within intent. Your logo needs to be YOU! Until your books become a brand in their own right, like Harry Potter, the only common theme running across your books is you.

So how do you build a brand around you? The first thing is create consistency across all marketing platforms, and one way to do this is use the SAME photograph of yourself on EVERYTHING related to your books. Now, I loathe having my picture taken, and the photo I use is one taken by my youngest daughter (using my camera!) when I wasn’t looking. It probably looks posed, but I can assure you it wasn’t - but it’s the one I chose to use. You’ll not see another photo of me on anything linked to my books. I use it on Twitter, Facebook, my website, other websites which promote my book, etc. I know other people who do the same, and it helps me enormously. If I’m interested in their tweets, and I can see their face on my Twitter feed, I’ll click on the tweet. The same goes for Facebook, when I’m scrolling through the latest updates. However, if they change their profile picture, and many do, I’ll easily miss their message, and what’s the point of messaging in the first instance if you give people a barrier to seeing it.

So for me, rule number one is - select a picture you are happy with (or in my case find acceptable), and STICK with it. (Leave the profile picture changing for your family and close friends on your personal Facebook account.) Don’t hide behind a book cover, or some other artwork. People interact best with people, and are more likely to trust you if they can see what you look like. I very rarely follow back ‘Eggs’ on Twitter, and I certainly don’t start the following process with them.

Rule number two is - ensure you maximise the potential of your bio on Twitter. If you are an author, tell people that. Use the limited number of characters wisely, and also come across as a real person. I’ve had many people tweet me after following, making an observation about my bio, and in particular my comment about getting 100,000 words in the correct order. (Although that has since been updated to promote this blog.) I’ve seen some authors with just the word ‘author’ in their bio, and nothing more. If that’s as creative as they can be, do I want to look at their books, let alone read them? Probably not. Your bio should also provide a link to your website, not your book on Amazon. Your website gives people the chance to find a little bit more about you and your work. They can always go to Amazon from your website, if they like what they see/read. (See the post about AIDA to understand more why an Amazon book link on your blog isn't ideal.)

By creating a common ‘theme’ across all the marketing platforms you use, you will start to become more recognised, and recognition will, if established correctly, build a good reputation. That good reputation will then help to sell your books.

Finally, at the beginning of this article I drew your attention to the Coca-Cola logo at the top of the page. So ingrained is that logo in our brains, you probably didn’t spot the subtle mistake in the one I used. (See if you can spot it.) When you can see and recognise a logo, and not immediately see a subtle mistake, you know that logo is part of a very strong brand. 

Marketing Tips for Authors – Author Online Toolkit Part Two

Part Two - Measuring Effectiveness

In the last post I discussed the first part of your online marketing tool-kit, namely the tools of Twitter, Facebook and a website/blog as a minimum. There are of course countless other social media tools such as LinkedIn, Google+ etc. How many you use is a matter of personal choice, and time. But if we say the purpose of all this activity, is to eventually sell more books, we need to know what is, and what isn’t working.

Lord Lever Hulme once remarked – ‘I know half of my advertising works . . . but I don’t know which half it is.’ This is the biggest problem with marketing, most especially those marketing activities which cost money. It is very easy to spend money, and see absolutely no return for that investment. (I’ll cover the cost versus return in another article)

With so much sold online these days, and I’m thinking here specifically about e-books, a web presence is essential, and a website/blog is one of the essential tools. You can have a free blog such as Blogger, which won’t cost you anything for a domain name or server hosting – or you can go to the other extreme and have a bespoke site built and managed by a webmaster. Plus there are many options in between. Regardless which you choose you’ll still need to measure what is going on. Unless having a website is for vanity reasons, they need to work for you. The best tool for measuring online activity is Google Analytics. Blogger, for example, does have a certain amount of statistics, but Google Analytics is the real powerhouse in terms of measuring website activity. These days, just knowing the number of hits the website receives simply isn’t enough.

Google Analytics is a supremely effective tool for measuring a website’s activity. And even better news – it’s absolutely FREE!

So how does it work? Well, the first thing you need to do is attach some very specific “html” code to each page of your website (or just on the Master page, if you have one). Again, the good news is that Google will have automatically written the code for you when you sign up to use the service, and they’ll give you all the instructions required to insert it. To access Google Analytics just click here.

What does Google Analytics tell me?

Once you have set up your free account you can start analysing the data Analytics generates for you. The data is updated every day and you will be taken to your home page each time you log on. It is possible to manage several websites simultaneously within Google Analytics. All the websites you manage will be listed on the home page. By selecting “view reports” you will be taken to your “dashboard”. I don’t have the scope within this article to cover all the functionality of Google Analytics but I can provide a flavour of its power.

The Dashboard

The dashboard is where you choose what you want to view immediately you select “view reports”. The default provides the following information:

Audience Overview – A graph shows you day by day the total number of hits the website has received. Below the graph, there is other data, including – total number of pages viewed, average number of pages viewed per visit, bounce rate (the percentage of people who left the site from the same page they entered the site without visiting any other pages), the average time each visitor spent on the site and the percentage of people who visited the site for the first time. All that information in itself is very powerful, but as you’ll discover there is a great deal more to come.

Standard Reports

Real Time – This provides data on what is happening right now on your website

Audience – This is the default data, as described above. You can also drill down into areas such as demographics, behaviour and technology.

Traffic Sources – This element provides information on how your visitors arrived at your site. Was it direct traffic (those that type your web address into the address bar), search engines (and it tells you which ones) or from referring sites. This last one is especially important. The more sites that are linked to your site the more important Google considers your site. Think about all the sites that you have visited that offer you a download as a PDF (portable document format) file. Adobe are the creators of PDF files and as Adobe Acrobat Reader is used to read these files many sites provide a link to Adobe’s website where the free Acrobat Reader software can be downloaded. Adobe therefore have millions of referring sites across the Internet, making them a very important site as far as Google are concerned. Also within this section Analytics will tell you the keywords used, by those visitors that used a search engine, to find your site. This is invaluable data when trying to optimise your site for search engine visibility.

Content – This section provides deeper analysis on which specific pages have been visited. Look for the pages that have very high bounce rates and short periods of time spent on them. This may suggest that the visitor is not finding the page of interest – time for some action to help boost its ratings!

As we have already seen the default dashboard is a gold mine of useful information about what is happening on your website. However, other aspects of website activity may be more important to you. As Google recognise this fact they have structured Analytics to provide you with a dashboard that can be customised. I’ll be doing more Google Analytics articles in the future to look at some features in more detail.

So that is a quick guide to some of the functionality of Google Analytics. It’s intuitive, it’s powerful, it will add value to your web marketing initiatives and above all else – it’s FREE!

One final point – you should use Google Analytics to track how you your visitors get to the site and use the site. Don’t corrupt your data with activity from internal laptops and PCs. Make sure you use the Analytics filter to ensure that internal visits to your website are not included in your data collection. Each computer attached to the Internet has its own IP (Internet Protocol) address. If you wish to know the IP address of each computer then log on to www.whatismyip.com and it will provide you with the number, which is supplied in four blocks, such as: 123.45.67.255

You will need to type the number into the Google Analytics filter. This process should be done for each computer connected to the internet.

Marketing Tips for Authors – Author Online Toolkit Part One

Part One - Creating a Presence

So you’ve published your first book and now you need to market it online. This will require a few essential tools, and they will fall under two categories – creating a presence and measuring. Let’s start with creating presence. As a minimum I’d suggest a Twitter account, Facebook ‘fan-page’ and a website.

Before you jump in with a Twitter account based upon the title of your book, consider this question. Do you intend to only write one book? If the answer is ‘no’, then avoid naming your account after your book. If you do, what is your strategy for book 2? Start all over again with a new Twitter account? Not the best idea, I’m sure you’ll agree. I personally believe people are more likely to engage with you on Twitter if you include three things within your Twitter account. 1) A photo of you 2) An informative bio and 3) The word ‘author’ in that bio. The reason for item 3) will become apparent in a moment.

A Facebook ‘fan-page’ is also a useful addition when trying to ‘get the word out’. Unlike a ‘standard’ Facebook page, a fan-page also provides a few tools for measuring your reach, and letting you know the most viewed/liked/shared posts. All useful stuff for deciding upon the content of your future posts.

The final key tool for creating presence is a website. I’d suggest avoiding just a blog, as it has its limitations. A website provides greater flexibility, but perhaps also have a separate blog, using Blogger or WordPress. (I've chosen Blogger as it is extremely versatile, and easy to use.) There are numerous pre-designed websites on the market, but if you are trying to display creativity, (and what author isn’t?),  then a bespoke solution is probably more appropriate. If you don’t want to be dealing with html coding you may want to consider Serif’s WebPlus x6. It’s inexpensive, easy to use and very flexible. My author website was built using it. You’ll also need suitable ftp software for uploading your updates onto your server. FTP Commander is available free of charge in its basic form. I've used it for several years for various websites, and it's both simple and reliable.

So, you now have your ‘presence’ toolkit. The next stage is to measure what you are doing, and to start using a few tools to help you become more efficient and effective online. This I’ll cover in Part Two of this article.

How to move your Website/Blog up the Google rankings!

OK, so you’ve designed a website/blog, uploaded it onto an Internet server, but when you type the details into Google . . .nothing! It’s nowhere to be seen. Why is this? To start with Google probably hasn’t yet identified that it exists, among the 633 million, or so, websites in the World. The quickest way for Google to find out you have a site, is to tell Google. Sure, it will eventually stumble across your site, but that could take some time. If you visit their submissionpage, you can give them the details they need.

Let’s assume you’ve now done that. How can you stand out in a search among 633 million other sites? One method is to ensure you have keywords embedded in the different pages of your site. As an author, ‘books’ may be one of them. This should be done when the site is developed. However, Google has its own method of determining how important your site is, and it’s called PageRank. It uses a VERY complex algorithm, but it centres around one key aspect – back links to your site. Google consider your site to be more important the more other sites link to your site. And the more sites those sites have, with links back to them, the more important your site will be. If a site with a PageRank of 8/10 links back to your site; that is deemed more important than a site with a PageRank of 1/10.

Every website is given a ranking of 1 to 10 – with the exception of those sites which have so few back links, which then get non-classified, with a ‘N/A’ against their name. eBay.com, for example, has a ranking of 8/10. It gets more and more difficult to move up the rankings, so 10/10 is almost impossible, with only a few sites globally having achieved it. Google.com itself ranks at 9/10. One domain which does achieve the coveted 10/10 ranking is Twitter.com (Facebook.com, even with more users worldwide, trails it with 9/10) So, the more back links you have to your site, particularly from sites with good PageRank scores, the more important your site will appear to Google. To check out your sites PageRank (NB – Each page on your site has its own PageRank score) use the free tool which can be found at the base of my author website home page.

Marketing Tips for Authors – The 4Ps Part Four

So far in this series I’ve covered the first three Ps – Product, Price and Promotion. This then just leaves the fourth part – Place. Before I move on to Place let me first just recap on the other three. The idea of the 4Ps concept is it pulls the key elements of marketing together. First the product needs to be right. In the case of an author, a book, for example, needs to entertain the target audience. That entertainment comes at a price. The idea is to price it at an optimum price to get the balance right between generating sufficient profit per unit, whilst maximising volume. The next step is to then promote the product with the right message to the right audience. And it’s this last step which leads me on to Place. Place isn’t, necessarily, a physical place. A potential reader needs to know where to go to get the book. Prior to the digital revolution, this, in previous decades, would generally have been a book store. But now even physical books can be ordered from the comfort of your home, as indeed can be e-books.

In an earlier post I discussed the importance of online tools such as Twitter and Facebook as methods of generating awareness. Books can’t be bought directly from these platforms, so the awareness campaigns on these sites need links to other sites. This can be places like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, iTunes store etc. But also your own website if it has e-commerce capability. If you have a Smashwords account you can download your own book in all the various different formats and put them on your site. (Please check the Smashwords T&Cs before doing this to ensure it doesn’t breach their contract.) So a Kindle user can download a Kindle formatted book from your site, as can an iPad user etc. However, the key point, regardless of where your book is sold, is that there is a link between promotion and place – in the case of online selling, this should be a hyperlink. I’ve lost count of the number of people promoting their book on Twitter and there being no link within the tweet. It is hard enough to sell anything these days, but make it harder for the customer to buy a product and the chances are they won’t. They’re not going to copy a book title from a tweet, then ‘open up’ Amazon and paste it into Amazon’s search facility. The purchasing ‘journey’ needs as few obstacles as possible. Let me finish by giving an example. People will only put in extra effort if they have a high desire for a product or service. Many shops in the UK selling clothes over more than one level adopt a simple policy. Men’s clothes are displayed on the ground floor, and women’s clothes on the first floor. Why? Because the shop owners know that women, generally speaking, will put in more effort to buy clothes than men. In essence, they’ve removed the ‘barrier’ of the staircase. I hope you’ve found this series about the 4Ps of marketing helpful.