Getting the Biggest Bang for Your Book Marketing Dollars

Posted on by Gretchen

A client recently asked me if they needed to think about book marketing as well as mounting a book publicity campaign. There are plenty of book publicity services out there, but not so many stand alone book marketing firms. That’s because publishers don’t like to spend their scant marketing dollars on expensive advertising. Who knows if it’s even effective?

The world of book marketing is a vast one. With the explosion in different book publishing options, there’s been a similar proliferation in ways to spend money to market your book. But how to know which book marketing companies really deliver?

At February Media, it’s our business to try to weed out the good from the bad, figure out what works, and determine best practices for our authors. We try to provide book publicity services and book marketing services that get the most bang for our clients’ marketing dollars.

Among all the sites out there, there are only a few that can really deliver a real audience and results. First are the sites devoted to promoting discounted ebooks. Among them are the discount sites like BookBub, Riffle, Bookriot, and Goodreads. All these sites have other functions as well but they all also offer discounted ebooks. Then there are the giveaway sites like Bookish, Goodreads, and BookRiot. See what I’m getting at? These familiar sites do provide a variety of marketing services.

Another way to market your book is by advertising on sites that cater to book clubs and avid readers. Some sites that cater to book clubs and take ads or sponsorships are BookMovement.com, ReadingGroupGuides.com, and (again) Bookish. There are also sites like BookBrowse and LibraryThing that are harder to categorize. Both of them, along with Goodreads and BookMovement have a lot of elements of a social media site.

Finally, you can also always run powerful social media advertising campaigns for your book on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Some plug ins like ShortStack allow you to run giveaways right from your social media site! So take a close look at these sites and see if they have anything to offer to you and your campaign. Remember, it’s hard to get people to read your book if no one knows about it!

Authors on Facebook: To Delete or Not To Delete

Posted on by Gretchen

Let’s face it, Facebook broke our trust. By now you know that Facebook let third party applications harvest data from potentially hundreds of millions of users around the world. What happened to that data is not yet fully known. But we do know that at least some of it was used to try to influence the 2016 election in President Donald Trump’s favor.

A lot of authors I know and work with have an equivocal relationship with Facebook. I did too when I first encountered it in the mid aughts. Posts mostly consisted of lots of photos of what people were eating and just random thoughts. People didn’t really know what to use it for and it kind of felt like not even Facebook was sure what it was.

The first time I thought that Facebook was useful for authors was when I searched for Freakonomics on the site. The Freakonomics authors had not yet set up an author page or any presence on Facebook at all. But since so many people had listed it as their favorite book, Facebook had pulled in Freakonomics’ Wiki page which had over a hundred thousand “likes”. The authors eventually got control of that page but it was a lesson to me. Always create an author and book page, even if you do nothing with it. You just never know.

I started experimenting with Facebook advertising for my authors and I was, frankly, awed by the ability to target book lovers with my ads so easily and inexpensively. At this point, Facebook was encouraging businesses to grow their audiences and the algorithm would allow your posts to reach every one of those peoples’ feeds…for free. Once a majority of companies did come and had built their audiences, Facebook decided that in order to reach those people, you had to pay to reach them. This was where the real money was. Individuals didn’t pay for Facebook, instead they were served ads. Businesses paid to reach audiences and the value was great because the targeting was so specific. Want to reach female literary thriller fans in Kalamazoo, Michigan between the ages of 18-35? Check. Want to promote your event in Naples, FL to male golf fans over the age of 55 in a certain zip code. Check. It remains an incredible tool.

But the only reason it’s incredible is because we’ve been lulled into putting so much personal information on the site. I mean, one of the nicest things is to get all those birthday wishes from friends and acquaintances. Or seeing photos of an old friend’s children. And it’s also a terrific organizational tool. In addition to giving you a connection to your readers and fans, it can be a tool for change. So many democratic protests (even in Russia) and grassroots organizations depend on Facebook to get the word out about their activities. So now that we are fully aware of how Facebook has abused our trust, despite all the positive aspects of the site, should authors abandon it?

First of all, the horse has pretty much left the barn at this point. Facebook allowed this data to be harvested for about 10 years. And that led to a robust black market for the data. Who knows who has it at this point? The only saving grace is that data is not dynamic, it is static. While your life changes, the data that Facebook harvested does not. As time goes by, as you move, change jobs, have children, etc. that data becomes obsolete. And Facebook has an incentive to make sure this stops. They are facing extraordinary fines.

While we’re waiting to see what happens to Facebook, I would recommend that you do a little housework around your personal Facebook page (if you use it) and delete all the information that you prefer not to be used by advertisers to target you. Then look at your personal profile and your author page profile. Is there anything there that you don’t want people to know? When you’re an author, it’s usually pretty easy for folks to find out where you’re from. Often it’s right in your bio on your Amazon book page. So if Facebook knows that, so what? But if you’re really paranoid, you might want to become less specific. Instead of saying you live in Darien, Connecticut, maybe you put just Connecticut. Maybe you want to take out your birth year but leave your birthday. It’s up to you. Just be sure that you’re okay with what’s there. The point is to be very conscious of what information is available about you.

Then go into “settings” and then to “apps” and see what apps are accessing your information. Remove all the apps that you don’t want there. These are apps that you allowed to access your Facebook information as a way to log into their site. Instead of signing in to apps with Facebook, log in with an email address.

You can also change your posting style as well. Everyone has a different style of using Facebook. Some folks post lots and lots of photos of themselves, their kids, and their pets. You might want to cut back on that kind of sharing. Face recognition technology is gaining steam and who know what trouble that can get you in. I hardly ever post photos of my kids and I never tag anyone in my photos. If you’re using your author page, keep the posts closely related to your work as an author and your books. Post links to your reviews, giveaways, your events, and any other publicly available writing you might want to promote (short stories or essays for example). But keep personal information out of it.

I don’t think that Facebook will change from its advertising model and maybe, in a few years, we’ll all have left the site for greener fields. But in the meantime, because of ease of targeting and relatively inexpensive advertising rates, Facebook remains a useful tool for authors to reach fans and new readers.

February Media in Politico!

Posted on by Gretchen

Our founder, Gretchen Crary, was quoted in Todd Purdum’s analysis of what Hillary Clinton gains from touring for her new memoir, Hard Choices.  Follow the link below for the full article.

She already has two best-sellers under her belt. She has 100 percent name recognition, prohibitive political support in the polls — and more money than most ordinary people could ever dream of. So why does Hillary Clinton need another book, much less one that’s pre-sold a million copies and dominated news coverage even before its official release?

“They can really take advantage of all these new tools with her, because she has a huge social media following,” said Gretchen Crary, a veteran book publicist who now runs February Media, her own public relations and marketing firm. “Authors really should take a page from politicians’ playbooks, because you build an audience the same way you build a constituency: You have to go to these anemic coffee klatches where three people show up, and turn them into your ambassadors.”

 

Read the full article here

5 Tips for Hitting Bestsellers Lists

Posted on by Hillary

As a book publicist, one of the very first questions I’m usually asked is, “Can you help make my book into a bestseller?” While there is no tried and true way, what I can tell you about are some of the secret tips that the big publishers use to give their books the best chance to hit those sought after lists.

Authors and publishers are always trying to game the lists. Some authors pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies that guarantee bestsellers by buying thousands of copies of your book from a variety of outlets, both in stores and online. Some authors hire call centers and have them place orders for them. There are many ways to game the system but, thankfully, that type of trickery is rare.

There are many bestseller lists, but the most important one is The New York Times Bestsellers list. It’s seen as somewhat incorruptible and that gives it caché. The first thing to know about The New York Times list is that the folks who compile it get their data directly from bookstores as well as from Nielson BookScan. (BookScan, like the TV ratings from Nielson, are compiled statistical surveys. They claim to cover about 75% of all outlets but, depending on the type of book, their numbers can be wildly off.)

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The Debut Author’s Advantage

Posted on by Hillary

You only have one chance to be a debut author. Debuts are special in the world of publishing. While the experience of having gone through the publishing process can make you wiser–and therefore theoretically better at it–there are reasons to try to get it right the first time.

In publishing, your “track”–your past sales record–is everything. When I worked at HarperCollins, we had weekly meetings where we picked apart the sales history of every author on that week’s New York Times bestseller list. It was normal to hear things like, “Debbie Macomber’s track is up 10% from her previous book last year.” We watched sales as if they were price fluctuations in blue chip stocks. These fluctuations represented investments gone sour, opportunities to poach a best-selling author who might not be pleased with their current house, and changing trends in consumer tastes. In an industry where there’s very little real science to determine what books will succeed, the information we did have was dissected and rehashed constantly.

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