Marketing & Promoting -Part 1
Alright, so media, websites, and I’m good, right? Now, readers will just seek me out. Not quite, grasshopper, not quite. Still much to do. Now that you are set-up online and ready to reach the masses, the question still remains, how? How do you reach beyond, your internet reach, and out into the world? This is where the real marketing and promoting begin, you have the platforms, now what to put on it and how to drive readers to it?
There are many sites for authors to use for the sole purpose of promoting your books to readers. Story origin, and BookFunnel are two that come to mind. These websites allow the author a wide variety of features like email collection to build mailing lists, group promotions, ARC delivery for reviewers and newsletter swaps.
Story Origin just recently switched to a paid platform, at $10 a month or $100 a year in order to use all of the features. Book Funnel has three plans to choose from, starting with $20 a year for very new beginners, a $100 plan that allows email collection, 2 pen names and up to 5000 downloads and a $250 dollar plan that includes all of the features and priority support. You are going to want a plan with Email Collection. That is the whole purpose of using these sites. This is an essential part of building your readership.
Now, in conjunction with Story Origin and Book Funnel, you will want to integrate an email service such as Mailchimp, in order to collect reader email addresses as they click on your book, during your promotions. This is how you build your newsletter list and begin to reach a more targeted audience that are interested in your genre and your book. These are your more standard marketing sites and both have author pages, author dashboards, helpful tools, and tutorials to help you get up and running. I have found Story Origin to be very simple to use and I use Mailchimp as my email service and newsletter builder. The websites mentioned above are listed below for you to easily note.
Stay tuned for part 2.
www.storyorigin.com
www.Bookfunnel.com
www.mailchimp.com