Melissa Hawkes – On Marketing for Authors

Everyone wants to be heard and seen but often times, it takes more effort than just writing content. For authors, reaching readers is of primary importance and whether you start with connecting with reviewers and book bloggers to help spread the world about your book, or sharing about your book on online forums, marketing helps get more visibility. I have Melissa Hawkes with me today on Creator’s Roulette to tell us more about marketing. She is an author in the Young Adult, Fiction genres and has combined her extensive corporate marketing experience with her book knowledge, to create an author-targeted blog, full of wonderful tips on how to market your novel effectively.

Let’s hear her ideas that you can add to your marketing toolkit.

---

Marketing for Authors

Marketers. You either love us or hate us. Truth be told, marketing is probably more important than the writing of a book itself. Don’t believe me? Let me put it this way if I showed you a rock and simply said, “buy this.” You’d usher me aside. However, if I showed you a rock and told you about the healing properties this rock has, that it was once owned by Oprah Winfrey and that if you keep it close to your side it’ll bring you good luck – you might have a change of tone. You might have written the best imaginative, well-written and all-round perfect novel but without bringing readers to see your book and prompting them to buy, you won’t make any sales. In this generation, people want to know how your book will benefit them and why they should buy it. Which brings me to my first point…

Identify a Target Audience

Your target audience are the people who will buy your books, so it’s important to work out who you want to be targeting. To find your target audience, think of who is most likely to buy your book and separate your answers in to four categories; gender, age, location and interests. Instead of selling your fantasy book to your sceptical neighbours next door, go online and find a fantasy reading book club, where not only can you promote your own work, but you can also join a community where you can benefit from others.

Build a Launch Team

A launch team is a team of people who will join in on promotional activities, review your book on Amazon and share your work with their own audience. Say you’re running a book giveaway; your launch team will enter and tag others to get entries up. Or, say that you have a new offer on your book, your launch team will share that offer with their own social media following.

You should look for the following qualities in a launch team;

• They should be people you know well and are comfortable sharing your work
• They should be genuinely interested in your book and want to see it do well
• They should have a social media following of their own

In order to gain a launch team you may have to offer something in return for all their hard work in sharing your posts, this could be a free book of yours before it’s been released, early access in all competitions and promotions and additional freebies. Aim for a launch team of around 20 – 30 people.

Prioritize Engagement

In marketing there are two especially important terms you should learn; they are reach and engagement and they are both vital to your career as an author. Reach is the number of users who see your posts. Just see them, nothing more, nothing less. Engagement is the number of users who interact with your posts whether that’s by liking, sharing or commenting. Any serious author’s long-term goal in terms of marketing should be to increase engagement, as ultimately this is the measure that will get you sales. It shows how many users enjoy your content and want to see more. Networking is the number #1 way to create engagement, as the closer users feel they ‘know’ you, the more comfortable they are commenting and sharing your posts. Your launch team will also come in handy when building engagement, as they’ll bring traffic – A.K.A reach, to your post, meaning you’ll have a higher chance of getting likes and comments.

Use Paid Advertisements

The need for paid advertisements is most strong in this day and age, because we’re now so social media driven, millions of companies are pushing social media content out every day so it can be difficult for anyone to actual find or see your posts. That’s where Paid Advertisements come in. Paid Advertisements are promotional content that you put money behind in order to secure a higher reach. They are the best and most reliable way of getting your social media posts out to the target audience you want. Paid Advertisements work through the metrics you set for it, usually to align with your target audience. When you create an advert, it’ll ask you what age, gender, location and interests you’d like to reach, so if you’re promoting a fitness guide and users have said that fitness is an interest, then your social media platform will display your ad to them. Some might assume that you have to spend lots of money on paid advertisements, but you don’t. Just £2 on a Facebook ad can reach up to 2,500 people. A great social media post you should use a paid advertisement on, is a contest or giveaway, because it’s more likely that users will engage with those types of posts.

Run a Social Media Contest or Giveaway

We love free stuff! Who doesn’t? If you run a contest or giveaway, you’ll gain far more attraction to your book than if you were just to sell it normally. A great giveaway for authors is to offer a signed copy of your book, with extras included, such as a poster or bookmark. If you want to take it one step further and maximise the number of entries, offer something more valuable like an eBook. Once you’ve come up with what you’ll be giving away, think about how to execute it. If you’re looking for engagement, ask entrants to tag three friends in order to be entered, or if you need more website sign ups, ask entrants to go on to your website and sign up to receive marketing emails to be automatically entered. Make sure you ask fellow authors and those in your launch team to enter and share your post.

That’s all from me, if you’d like to see more marketing tips and plans, such as a 12-month strategic marketing plan for your book, then go to my blog at www.melissahawkes.com/blog. Thanks for having me Kriti!

So, what are you waiting for?

---

Hope you enjoyed these tips fro Melissa and have already been using some of them. It feels good to have your ideas validated!

Banner Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash