Book Marketing Made Simple
Hi there, welcome to the Bestseller Café! I’ve create a relaxed, café style atmosphere to make it easy for authors to learn how to solve their biggest marketing challenge: BOOK VISIBILITY. The strategies posted here are designed to get your books seen and purchased by a growing number of readers.
We all want massive visibility for our books, and paid advertising is the fastest way to get attention. The problem is you can burn through a great deal of money while you are learning how to make it effective. Fortunately there is a free method for marketing your books, which is making connections with influential people, and persuading them to promote your books to their massive audiences at no cost. (Yes, they absolutely will, if you do it the right way, and it’s easier than you think.)
I love the atmosphere of a café as meeting place, with all of its warmth and friendly interactions, so I used it for this website to symbolize how book marketing can be just as easy and stress-free when you make café-style ‘connections and conversations’ with influential people.
I frequently meet friends at our local café, and make espresso each day for myself and my wife. When we travel, we take time to visit cafés, and have even been to the famous Van Gogh Café in Arles, France that was painted by Vincent Van Gogh.
Unfortunately, a large number of authors make the rookie mistake of dropping drive-by links everywhere on social media, relentlessly shouting “Here’s my new book. Buy now!” This is a complete swing and a miss, because it will mostly be ignored as just another piece of annoying spam.
Instead, the real power of social media is using the same energy to make a series of one-to-one, personal connections with book influencers who will promote a new book to their oceans of followers, who not only trust them, but act on their recommendations.
This includes for example, book bloggers, Facebook literary influencers, Twitter book influencers, Instagram book influencers, influencers on TikTok (#BookTok), YouTube book influencers, and news media personalities. There are many lateral variations on this, such as doing guest posts on high visibility blogs, and also list swapping with other authors. But the easiest to understand and make happen is working directly with literary influencers.
When an influencer recommends your new book, a considerable number of their followers will buy it. But that is just the start. You want those followers to stick around and buy ALL of your books. The way to keep them on board and grow their interest is with an Author Platform. This enables you to build a community of fans you can keep interested between books, and notify each time you have a new book, at zero advertising cost.
