Promoting Your Book - A No BS Guide For Authors and Small Publishers

Blog Post Summary - Status on a few things that I have started and reported on already. It’s short ….

Update to email campaign effort - This took a lot of time to get together and whereas it did produce some sales (20 books) and another 40+ signups to my newsletter, the results were not consistent with the level of effort. I did however learn a lot as I had to figure out how get a video on the offer page, do some copywriting and a few other things. These will all come in handy later so it forced me to learn some new skills.

Tip on Press Releases - As reported in the last blog, I uploaded press/news releases to a number of sites. I was rejected from 3 sites. One was because my entry was not ecommerce related. OK … fine. The other two were because I have too many line breaks. DO NOT put any line breaks in anywhere besides the end of the paragraph. Specifically:

This is an example of a first paragraph followed directly by another paragraph…the CORRECT WAY. The next paragraph follows immediately with no open space. Promoting your book is good for you. Eat your vegetables. Buy low. Sell high. Never sleep where you throw up.
This is an example of a first paragraph followed directly by another paragraph…the CORRECT WAY. The next paragraph follows immediately with no open space. Promoting your book is good for you. Eat your vegetables. Buy low. Sell high. Never sleep where you throw up.

This is an example of a first paragraph followed by another paragraph and an additional line break…this is the INCORRECT WAY. Promoting your book is good for you. Eat your vegetables. Buy low. Sell high. Never sleep where you throw up.

This is an example of a first paragraph followed by another paragraph and an additional line break…this is the INCORRECT WAY. Promoting your book is good for you. Eat your vegetables. Buy low. Sell high. Never sleep where you throw up.

Just thought I would let you in on that one as I had to do them over to get accepted. There are, by the way, plenty of reasons they may reject you. Dont take it personally, just figure out what you did wrong and fix it.

Think like an entrepreneur - failure is not the opposite of success, it is a part of success.

Summary of this Blog: Doing your own single webpage promo site and sending out to your mailing list is worth it. Include the fact that your book is on amazon.com (if it is of course). Apologize in advance to anyone who may think you are spamming them.

I promised I would start providing a summary of the blog at the top in case I get over infatuated with my ramblings and lose you. That way you will have got the important part.

What I have done … it seems like it took two weeks … is collect up every email address I have in many different email accounts to send a notice about my new book, The Wealth Manifesto. Each group of addresses typically comes from one thing or the other that I have been a part of over the last 5+ years or, in a few cases, a group of people that had their email addresses collected up for me.

I have an opt in list that I started not too long ago - 100 plus names. These others are lists of whatever emails I have from … whatever!

For example, I have lists for: my 30th year HS reunion, a reunion for another company I worked for 15 years ago, a list of all the people I have ever dealt with in the real estate world (I am a RE broker and investor), a list of the people on this huge program I worked for as a satellite systems consultant with Lockheed (I am an electrical engineer as well), etc.

I have composed a general email that I then tailor just a tiny bit to each group to reflect how I know them, how long its been, what’s up, etc.

The emails all link to the obligatory splash page I set up with the sales copy, headlines and subheadlines, offer, bonuses, testimonials, guarantees. If you create or buy any info products you will recognize the drill.

You can see my recent book promotion efforts on the special offer site here. Go ahead … buy a book (make my day!)

Technically, I dont think I am spamming all these people (even YOU may have received an email from me OH MY!). I am only going to send it once and I make this real clear in the email (”… not sure of some of addresses, please accept my apologies in advance, will never receive anything from me again, etc. etc.”).

I suppose that could be open to interpretation. I sent the emails out this morning and have sold a modest 5 books … probably only 150 addresses so far (have not done the two big ones with 1000+ each). I have also posted the note to several online groups although one moderator blocked it as ‘a commercial.’

Who asked him anyway? You may want to consider bribing a moderator with a free copy if you get stuck in this predicament. Dont be a pain it the butt; tell them what you got, what you are doing and let em tell you what they think.

Dont know if it will work but what the heck.

Most everyone has seen the “Bestseller Campaigns” that have been waged by authors famous and otherwise. There is more to this but this is the basic idea:

You get all of your friends and/or business relations to email out a promo message to everyone on their mailing lists. You of course do the same. Often this is set up such that each person participating includes some kind of offer that will drive the recipient to their site to receive the bonus(es).

The scale of this is nice because everybody who participates in the offer gets visibility with everyone on everyone’s mailing list. The real objective is of course to get everyone to buy the book that is the focus of the campaign to be able to get the freebies (and the book). Some people send these out to MILLIONS of people (John Kremer says not to bother if you dont have 500,000 names).

The prospects are usually driven to amazon.com so the author can say they are an Amazon.com bestseller; sometimes it goes to the author’s website.

Whatever. I’m not doing that. I have a few friends that will send a message out to their list. They have pretty good sized lists (nearly 100K names in one case) so some I should get some decent sales results.

I personally have 7 DIFFERENT lists totaling about 3,500 or so names. I have not been doing this very long and these lists are different in the sense that not all of these people have opted into my mailing list

I’ll talk about why I have these and what I going to do in the next posting time. It’s Friday night and time for the NBA playoffs.

Later….