Write it, publish it, sell it
Reading Time: 8 minutes You need to market your book. But what if you really, really, don’t like marketing? You became a writer to write, after all – not to sell. Here are some ways to approach marketing if you really don’t like marketing.
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Reading Time: 4 minutes From Google Ads to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter there are lots of options for paid advertising online. So where do you start – and what works for books?
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Reading Time: 5 minutes The book used to be the thing you marketed. Today it’s also a tool to market yourself or your business. Business coach, content consultant and publisher Alison Jones shares her advice for using self-publishing as a business strategy.
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Reading Time: 6 minutes Alison Baverstock, author of How to Market Books, offers her top 10 marketing tips for self-published authors.
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Reading Time: 7 minutes For authors and publishers, content is our bread and butter. But content no longer just mean the products we publish – it also means marketing. So how do we build an effective content strategy? This question was addressed at the 2015 London Book Fair Publishing for Digital Minds Conference.
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Reading Time: 5 minutes Social media has been key to Emily Benet’s success as a writer. Her first book, Shop Girl Diaries, started life as a blog; her second, The Temp, as a serialised novel posted online; and her latest, #PleaseRetweet, is a comedy about social media obsession. Social media is a wonderful tool for writers – but it has pitfalls too. The key is to use it, and not let it use you, as she reveals in her top pros and cons of social media for writers.
Read moreReading Time: 3 minutes WordPress is the blogging software I always recommend. It is flexible, extendible, easy to use – and free. But there is more to it than writing a personal online journal. You can use it to build a website, promote your books – and build a community. Here are 10 ways to make the most of it.
Read moreReading Time: 4 minutes When people ask me what it takes to write a book that sells, I tell them it is 50% writing and 50% marketing. As an author you are marketing yourself as well as your book. The challenge is to find your audience and then connect with them. If they like you and your book, they will spread the word.
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Reading Time: 2 minutes We’re all familiar with blog-to-book success stories. But what about blog-to-sitcom? Regular readers will remember Emily Benet. She won the 2010 Author Blog Award in the Published Author category, which was announced at the Publishing Talk tweetup at the London Book Fair. Her début book, Shop Girl Diaries, began as a weekly blog about working in her mum’s unusual chandelier shop.
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Reading Time: 6 minutes Are you on Pinterest yet? The latest social media phenomenon has crept up on many of us – yet the statistics show that pinning is winning. Pinterest is already the third most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter, according to a 2012 report by Experian. It has an estimated 13 million users. It is the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique US visitors mark according to comScore. And it now drives more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined, according to a Shareaholic study in January 2012. All of which is reason enough to take an interest in Pinterest. But what is it – and how can you use it as a publisher or an author?
Read moreReading Time: 2 minutes One of the best ways to use Twitter is as a way to promote your blog – which in turn promotes your book, your writing, or your publishing business. Twitter is by far the biggest driver of traffic to my blogs because an automatic tweet is posted whenever I publish a blog post – without even having to log in to Twitter. This tutorial will show you how it’s done, using Twitterfeed.
Read moreReading Time: < 1 minute Yes, it’s true: Seth Godin, who I periodically reference on this blog, and whose books I thoroughly recommend [UK|US], now
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