By Edward Nawotka
Today’s feature story on “Discoverability and the New World of Book PR” offers several tips on getting the best results from your personal efforts at self promotion. Of course, some means are more effective than others. Which have you found to the be the most successful for promoting your work? (Pick your top three). Take the survey below and offer a short explanation in the comments.
What Tool Is Most Effective for Promoting Your Book? (Pick top 3)
- Book Reviews (54%, 56 Votes)
- Twitter/ Facebook (45%, 47 Votes)
- Blogging (43%, 45 Votes)
- Speaking Engagements (29%, 30 Votes)
- Press Releases (19%, 20 Votes)
- Review Copies (17%, 18 Votes)
- Other (8%, 8 Votes)
- Flash Sales (3%, 3 Votes)
Total Voters: 104
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5 Comments
Unfortunately the poll is not geared to allow you to pick the “top three” but only one. If it’s only one, I picked “book reviews” because I’m a firm believe that reviews, including and perhaps especially from readers (as Amazon has it organized) is really the thing that gets the buzz going and your books sold. But of course, blogging is important and more generally, establishing a presence on Internet and contacts on FB, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc is highly desirable. How well it works in terms of sales, I have no idea.
My top three has to be blogging, speaking engagements and traditional media book reviews. But it’s a cumulative thing -and the time-sucking problem is that you have to do all the social media well to be effective. If your engagement is half hearted or downright clumsy then it’s just a big waste of time. I wonder if publishers should just try to employ someone to do it better so that their authors can put their energies into writing better books. Because ultimately the best way to get noticed is to write a good one. But we’re all too busy tweeting.
Twitter & Facebook should not be lumped in together, although this is a common mistake. Twitter is a great tool for promotion (used effectively), whereas many experts are still very dubious about the effectiveness of FB as a marketing tool for self-promotion.
I’m not sure how anyone can answer this with any degree of accuracy. Neither traditional publishers and most especially self-publishers have no accurate metrics. At best all they have is an anecdotal measure of how sales did after certain kinds of promotional pushes. At worst all they have is a gut feeling about what seems to work best (or what they refer as a happiness index). I’d love to see accurate metrics from someone to indicate exactly how many books were sold after a good book review as a direct result of it (you’d have to ask the purchasers) versus selling a book via a book trailer for example (again, you’d have to ask those who bought the book later if that’s what made them do it. BTW I don’t think people buy books based on book trailers very often — but that’s just a gut feeling).
My new novel was published April 3. Using Google analytics, I found that 73% of the visits to my website came through Facebook. Twitter was second with about 11%. It’s early, so no reviews have been published yet, but I think that there’s no question that reviews are still critical to book promotion. I appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for my last book. (That’s kind of a review, after all).The Amazon sales ranking went from about 350 to 7 overnight and stayed high for some time.
It’s simple match. A review any major newspaper or national magazine gets read by hundreds of thousands at one fell swoop. Aren’t many FB or Twitterers who can match that. And those who can started building notoriety with big mass-market reviews and appearances.