As professionals who have been in the book publishing, marketing and sales business for years, we receive quite a number of messages from new authors searching for direction or support to grow their reader base and increase book sales.
A lot of the time, we’ve found that these authors make the same all-too-familiar mistake: minimal awareness!
For authors that come to us for consulting, we offer several options to help: sales page optimization, marketing and book placements. If you’re an author that decides to go the self-publishing route, the onus falls on you to beat the drum to create awareness for your written work. You have to put in the work to gain the audience.
What are the guides you need to increase book sales and grow your reader base?
- Take full use of your online platforms: This really cannot be over-emphasized. Post copies of your write-ups to your social media handles, social groups, readers’ forums etc.
This increases people’s knowledge of who you are and what your work is. Even before you’re ready to push out your book, you would already have a fan base that would be willing to buy your published works.
- Advertise! Apart from word-of-mouth referrals and advertising, there are diverse, pocket-friendly ways to advertise your content on the social media space.
Instagram or Facebook boosted posts can push your work to a large audience and can be as low as N800 per day depending on the desired target audience. This way, you get to have a lot more people aware of what you are capable of, and even gain more followers that would most likely buy your book.
- Create a blog or mailing list: This is an avenue to get the email addresses of your readers. In order to gather subscribers to your mailing list or blog, you’d need to offer something very good – e.g. special discounts, weekly letters etc. We’ve created mailing lists for some authors which turned out to be just the thing needed to promote sales!
With a blog, weekly article or mailing list, you have an audience you can promote your book to, and keep in touch with your readers.
Do you have any questions or more guides to add? Feel free to drop it in the comment section. We want to hear from you!
