Marketing Your Book

Disclaimer: This is a work-in-progress. Comments and suggestions are welcome. If you have material to add and wish to collaborate on this post, do email us. Your work will be duly credited.

The following are suggestions beyond those normally followed. We have, for example, not delved deeply into the art of drafting and sending a press release. Similarly, we have not discussed the issues concerning distributors. The suggestions listed here are for you – things you can do yourself to sell your book.

General Marketing Techniques

1. Establish good relationships with librarians
2. Interact with, or develop, book clubs
3. Encourage reviews by independent reviewers on their blogs
4. Gift-shops must be developed as a potential source of books (books make great gifts)
5. Invest in promotional material such as postcards and bookmarks with information about your latest releases. Always have your name, address and contact information (including website and email address) on your business card, letterhead and mailing envelopes. Every email you send out should have, as a signature, information about the latest book you have published
6. Arrange with restaurants to have information about your book on dinner tables. Encourage good dinner-conversation starting points
7. It is very important that you start to build a list of contacts that can help you promote your books. Include newspaper editors, TV and radio guest bookers, bookstore owners, bloggers, newsletter publishers
8. While dealing with booksellers, don’t simply give them a book to sell. Sell your book to the bookseller first so that booksellers can speak at length about your book to a prospective customer. Time spent educating the bookseller about your book is time well spent. In fact, pampering the bookseller might be a good thing to do. Remember her birthday and send her a card. Call her often and ask her about sales and any problems she has that you can help address. Meanwhile, ask her to help you too by placing your bookmarks in strategic locations within the store

Book Signings

1. Have book signings during PTA meetings, birthday parties or social gatherings
2. If your book signings are at book stores, “work the store”. Get to know your customers and their preferences. Take pictures with your customers and send them an autographed copy (with information about your other books, of course). In both cases, whether at stores or at homes, leave behind a favourable impression
3. Authors should work on the personal angle during book signings without concentrating too much on the book itself. The book will be read. The author should try to connect with her audience by narrating anecdotes and incidents that will identify members of the audience with the author.
4. Arrange for press releases or a friendly (local) news channel to cover the book signing events. Scour for newspapers and periodicals that will list events for free and make sure your event is listed among them. The Mumbai and Delhi editions of TimeOut, for example, will list such events for free

Using Electronic Media

1. Your website is probably your best bet while attempting to reach out to a large audience. People now increasingly turn to websites to gather information about publishers and their books and it would be unwise to ignore this opportunity. Website development and design requires an entire study of its own but here are some pointers.You will need a basic set of pages for your website. These are:
   1. The Home Page: Introducing your publishing house (or book) and linking to other pages
   2. Pages that list information about your book and reviews of your book
   3. Pages that allow the user to buy your book or that link to pages that will do so
   4. Blogs (explained below)
   5. Contact Pages – that allow your users to contact you by telephone or email

   Other points you need to keep in mind:

   • Write copy that is grammatically correct, free of typographical errors and is brief
   • Organize your site so that navigation (movement from one page to another) is simple and intuitive
   • Ensure that there are no bad links i.e. links do not lead to a page that does not exist
   • Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that your website appears at the top of the list when people search for related topics
   • Keep the appearance of your website simple. Choose a good colour scheme consistent with your logo
   • Swap links. This means you can ask another website to have a link to yours and in turn link to that website yourself
2. Of the many channels of communication to have evolved, web-logs or blogs are the most powerful. These are sites that are managed by people who write on various topics that cover almost everything under the sun – from politics to gardening – and that many journalists, professionals, and consumers regularly visit, to read opinions, follow current events, and uncover information on topics of shared interest. You can use blogs to effectively market your book in two ways:
   1. You can have your own blog and use it to talk about your book and the events surrounding its launch, build interest in the topic or genre of your book, encourage reviews and comments, discuss the book with users and link to your website so that sales can be made
   2. You can develop relationships with other bloggers who write on topics that can be identified with your book. Tell them to post a review of your book and link it to your website so that sales can be made

   Care must be taken to say that postings are regularly made. Viewers do not like reading from a website where the last post was months ago. Make sure the information you post is accurate, complete and current. Respond to queries and comments and keep the language professional.

   You would also do well to monitor the kind of content your users read, the places they reside in and their general browsing habits, all of which can be easily monitored.

   In short, keep your readers interested

3. E-mail newsletters is another way you could use to regularly update your readers about your new releases and related events. Having built a list of contacts, use it to send out a weekly or monthly newsletter. Some publishers have monetized this option by including advertisements in the newsletter. However, some readers may find this irritating. In case you do include advertisements, make sure they are tasteful and advertise “good products”.Through your newsletter, you can distribute press releases, announce upcoming appearances, highlight favorable reviews of your book, and issue other alerts about your book. However, most importantly, you should allow your readers a chance to opt out of your mailing list if they so wish.

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