Targeted online article placements are an author’s ticket to success — the quickest, easiest, and best way to boost a book publicity campaign. Especially en masse, they help build awareness, momentum, and social media traffic better than any other strategy.
These are difficult times in America. The coronavirus has given way to a series of historic, cascading crises: a lethal once-in-a-century pandemic, Depression-era levels of joblessness and economic despair, and glaring racial disparities and health inequities afflicting communities of color, only to be exacerbated by the continued killing of Black Americans like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police. It’s no wonder that people of all stripes are living with unthinkable angst and uncertainty.
In a crowded, hypercompetitive, and oh-so-noisy marketplace, book publicity isn’t getting any easier. To succeed, especially at the highest levels, it’s important to know why a book matters.
I’m not talking about peppy platitudes, gross generalities, or heaven forbid, shameless self-promotion. I’m talking about current, concrete relevance — in the here and now, in the real world — preferably communicated in a sentence or two.
I call this “the so-what.” And in respect to every media decision maker — whether in print, broadcast, or digital — it answers an all-important question: Why should I care?
By any measure, content marketing is the new and ever-expanding ‘it’ in business and branding circles everywhere. Regardless of type — consumer or B2B, digital or traditional — marketing campaigns now run on content. Today, even Coca-Cola spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.
For authors, book publicity and promotion is no exception: Content is king — if you never run out of ideas. For articles, blogs, podcasts, videos, social sharing, media interviews, and more, you need a constant pipeline. Or as one content marketing expert put it, “you need to keep feeding the beast.”
But how can you keep the ideas coming? Here are seven surefire ways to ensure you never run out of content.
As a leading book publicist for over 25 years, I have booked my clients on literally thousands of radio interviews. Today, I know one thing for sure: radio sells books. First, however, an author must be ready and able to maximize the opportunity. Whether a “phoner” or in-studio interview, I ask my clients to use these 27 foolproof tips.
Congratulations: your nonfiction book is coming out. You’re ready to hire a PR agency that specializes in book marketing — a firm with a great reputation, experience and a strong track record. You’re looking forward to getting off and running.
You and the firm will forge a digital marketing strategy, building a brand, creating (or refining) a website and social media channels, establishing a tone and continuity for your messaging, and adding appropriate, appealing images, videos, interviews, and other relevant content. There will be a timeline established, with targets, and all the material will have to be maintained so nothing goes stale. The website will have to be updated; the blog refreshed regularly with resourceful and informative content; social media properties vibrant with daily posts, engagement responses, and updates. If you’re incorporating digital advertising, additional appropriate content will be created for that, including images, videos, cinemagraphics, and copy.
Ads on Facebook are creating amazing successes for many different types of products and services. As a way for an author to connect with the desired audience, these ads are a great tool and well worth considering. The social network has been deeply mining data for years — on what people like, find amusing and interesting, along with users personal information and demographics — and the result is a gold mine for hyper-targeted advertising. Costs are flexible, options are infinitely customizable, and the results generate powerful data in real time that’s easy to track and work with.
Q & A with Julia Schopick, Amazon.com bestselling author of HONEST MEDICINE: Effective, Time-Tested, Inexpensive Treatments for Life-Threatening Diseases.
Is TV a better platform than radio for selling books? Many of my authors ask me. So I asked Julia Schopick, bestselling author of the book HONEST MEDICINE, to talk about WHY she feels RADIO is the best way to promote and sell books. I think you’ll find her answers fascinating.
Digital marketers seek every opportunity to connect their clients with the desired audience in the best and most engaging way. The social media landscape is much different than it was just last year, and it is certainly a full-time endeavor to remain current in tactics when marketing online.
Any Author Can Learn Social Media Marketing!
If you’re an author, YOU are the one who has to have the overview of what the social media marketing capabilities are for your brand. That brand is YOU, and everything you do.
With effective book promotion, your great ideas will fly.
Authors who’ve just finished their book often experience a rude awakening. After spending a year or more writing their book, and several more months shepherding it through the production phases of editing, proofreading, and design, they wonder, “How do I get the word out?” Assuming you, the author, have figured out the bookstore distribution piece of the puzzle, and have your book up on Amazon and the other online sellers, it’s now time to put your energies into the next stage: book promotion.
Targeting the Three Pillars of Book PR
Book promotion can be a full-time job–as much work as writing the book itself–depending on how much time and energy an author wants to devote to it. That’s why it’s often a good idea to hire a book publicist to help you. Here are three elements of effective book promotion that you and/or your publicist will target.
Speaking engagements are ideal venues for book PR.
You worked long and hard to write your non-fiction book, and you were driven by passion. Now you have a very expensive business card—your book!—that can open all kinds of doors for you. We’ve talked in the past about how to get good media placements to help you promote your book. Now let’s look at how to use speaking engagements to promote you, your business, and your brand—and sell books in the process.
In Part I of this three-part series on search engine optimization (SEO) for non-fiction author websites, I explained the importance of understanding how the Google algorithm indexes your website—determining whether your site will appear on the first page of a Google search or the tenth.
Here, Part II features 13 insider tips and strategies that will help you get your author website to show up near the top of Google searches. This translates into more visitors to your site, more publicity for you and your book, and hopefully more book sales, speaking gigs, new client acquisitions, and fresh publishing opportunities.
Follow these tips to make Google SEO work for you.
Some Basic Google Recommendations for Your Book Author Website
For good basic SEO for your website, follow this logical concept. Google has to totally understand what your website is all about, determine the focus of the site as well as what each page is about, and evaluate the content as credible and resourceful information that is appropriate to show people searching for exactly what you are offering. That sounds like a relatively simple thing—but you’d be surprised how many websites do NOT do that!
Here are a dozen tips for your SEO that will help focus your website better:
The most crucial time for marketing a non-fiction book is just before and right after it is released. You don’t get a do-over! It’s wise, therefore, to bring in an SEO specialist several months in advance of the release so they
A smart SEO professional can help promote your author website–and help you sell books.
can create a digital marketing strategy for your new book. In Part I of this series, you learned why SEO is important for non-fiction authors. In Part II, you learned some of the most important tricks and traps of using SEO to promote your book.
Below are 7 tips for finding the right SEO specialist to help you generate media attention for your book, which could translate into book sales; radio, TV, and print interviews; speaking gigs; and new clients and business opportunities.
In some ways, it’s best to think about the finished product before you start writing the book. Every successful non-fiction book can be summed up in one sentence. That’s your big idea. It’s like a 10-second pitch that would “hook” a reporter on the spot — or a book publicist! Once you know your big idea, create a structure that can be grasped at a glance. This will become your table of contents. 10 Steps. 5 Strategies. 7 Lessons. In this age of short attention spans, you need to create a skeleton that has an internal logic that can be easily understood before you flesh it out.
A skillful novelist can take us on a journey so compelling that we keep reading without any mid-chapter temptation to insert the bookmark and go to sleep. We get completely absorbed in the novelist’s imaginary world of intrigue, romance, adventure, betrayal, or beauty. The images and emotions we create in our brain bond us to the work like a powerful magnetic force.
Photo by anankkml
Is Writing Non-Fiction a Completely Different Experience?
In many ways, it is exactly the same. Like a novelist, a good non-fiction writer needs to be involved with the reader’s emotions. Her words and ideas have to create that same feeling and experience of connection in the reader. The non-fiction writer wants her reader to be thinking, “This book speaks to ME.” Whether it’s a self-help book or a business book filled with new strategies for success, a writer’s aim it to move and inspire the reader.
In the past decade, business has become mainstream. The average person now has knowledge of stock market trends, corporate takeovers, and competition within global industries. From a book publicist’s point of view, this means that there are more “business readers” than ever.
On the one hand, this is good news, because the universe of media venues that need business content has grown. On the other hand, serious business readers now have to be more choosy about the content they consume.
For Best Book Promotion Results, Target Top-Tier Business Media
For this reason, we like to target top-tier business media whenever possible. Why? Because when we’re trying to move and motivate leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs—and hopefully get these readers to buy a business author’s book—we have to go to the media places they frequent. We also always have to be agile and creative in our approach to book publicity. Every book has its unique promotional challenges and publicity opportunities to define, explore, and make happen with great success.
We love parenting books. We’re happy to promote parenting books that are well written and offer lots of fresh, practical advice that’s based on solid science or the author’s well-credentialed expertise in a discipline—such as pediatrics, pediatric psychology, pediatric nutrition, or child development, to name a few.
Here are some of the common questions parenting authors ask us.
What Type of Parenting Books Are Most Successful?
Our decision to take on a parenting book is based on some of the same criteria we use for all our books and authors. Primarily, the reason we choose one book over another often comes down to where we’re going to place it. For example, when we took on Dr. Charlotte Resnick, a child and educational psychologist, author of The Power of Your Child’s Imagination, we were wowed both by her credentials and the originality of her strategies to help children solve problems using their imagination and creativity. We knew her upbeat, interesting ideas would be perfect for daytime TV, which is dominated by female viewers. We got her appearances on Good Morning America Online and the ABC morning show in San Francisco. She landed many high-profile print placements as well, from Good Housekeeping to USA Today.
