By Books Author Denise Turney

Book marketing is tireless work. It starts with writing a page turning novel or a hard hitting, informative non-fiction book. Kudos to you if you have not only invested the thought required to map out the contents of a book but, also sat down and written a book. Honest, what you just did is quite an achievement. Take time to celebrate your achievement. Then, roll up your sleeves and prepare to work on announcing to readers  that you have books for sale.

Taking the Book Publicist Route

 If you want to punt book marketing efforts to someone else, you could pay a marketing agency or an individual to do to that work for you. But, taking that route could cost you. In fact, Writer’s Digest shares that the average book publicist rate is $100 an hour. Also, to get traction from a book publicist’s work, you may need to hire the publicist for three to four months prior to book publication and another three months post publication.

On average, you can expect to spend $5,000 to $10,000 for a book publicist. Take this path, and you’ll definitely want to vet a book publicist or a book marketing agency thoroughly. After all, you want to get your money’s worth from every book marketing effort that you invest in.

And, if you do pay for book marketing, check to see that the book publicist or book marketing agency that you partner with has deep experience marketing books. For instance, check their references. Even more, check that they have important media and book industry contacts. This may help them land you newspaper, magazine, radio and television interviews.

Free Ways to Announce Books for Sale

Ensure that they have already gained 5,000 or more sales for other books that they’ve marketed. At the minimum, an effective marketer should have generated 1,000 book sales in a year. If not, the marketer may not have the best contacts. Before you sign a book marketing contract, speak with authors who a book publicist or book marketing agency has worked with. Do your homework.

That’s a good first step if you choose to pay someone to announce that you have books for sale. Just don’t miss out on tools that make it free for you to announce your books for sale. So, are you ready? I’m going to share several ways to announce that you have books for sale, marketing efforts that won’t cost you a cent.

Fortunately, you could knock out a few of the below steps over a few weekends. That, or you could start completing these book marketing steps early in the morning or late night. I didn’t add this one to the list because it’s not free. But, you definitely want to have a sharply designed official author website. Media contacts will visit your website to learn more about you and come up with interview questions. So, again, consider build a sharply designed author website.

Book Marketing Tools for Free

In fact, add your website URL to postcards, rubber automobile stickers, your email signature and all printed material that you send out that’s related to your books. Also, look into the below free ways to introduce your books for sale to readers.

• Add a book blog to your official author website – Create a book blog page. You could use a CMS like WordPress to do this. However, if you do add a blog to your official author website, update the blog weekly, if not more. In other words, write and publish a new blog article each week.
• Schedule podcast interviews – Check directories like Interview Guest Directory (interviewguestsdirectory.com) to find podcast that interview authors for free. Schedule interviews with these podcasts. iTunes, Google Podcasts and Blog Talk Radio are other places that you can look for podcasts to interview on and let listeners know that you have new books for sale.
• Get on the radio – Similar to podcasts, reach out to radio stations that interview authors. As a tip, contact DJs who cover topics similar to the topic that your book centers around.
• Use television – Share content from your nonfiction books with viewers at your local public broadcasting station. Also, reach out to local, regional and national television stations if your book has a holiday theme, relates to current events, etc.

More Book Marketing Tools for Free

• Take advantage of author newsletter book ad swaps – Exchange book ads with other authors. For example, you could advertise an author’s book in your newsletter and, in exchange, have that author advertise your book in her or his newsletter.
• Share book designs on social media – Use free book design services at places like BookBrush (bookbrush.com) to create designs to share on social media. Also, post to social media to build your audience of potential book buyers.
• Work with book directories – Add your book to book directories. This book and author directory has free and paid listings (https://www.selfpublishingreview.com/2014/07/author-directory-sites-the-complete-list)
• Start your own books video channel – Launch your own author video channel on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Akin to operating a book blog, update your video channel weekly.
• Launch your own literary newsletter – Tools like Constant Contact, MailChimp, Emma and Benchmark make it easy to create and distribute literary newsletters. While these tools aren’t free, they do cut down on the time that it takes to create and distribute newsletters. Yet, you can also create a literary newsletter using Word or PowerPoint and distribute manually to your email list.
• HARO (helpareporter.com) – Help a Reporter Out (HARO) list websites and media outlets that are looking for people to interview for articles, etc. Some HARO contacts will include books in their catalogs.
• Search paid book marketing sites – Some paid book marketing sites offer free marketing services. You might have to look for them. For example, BookDoggy (bookdoggy.com) will feature your book in their newsletter and on their website for free. All you have to do is include a BookDoggy ad in your literary newsletter. Also, your newsletter has to have 3,000+ subscribers.

Stay Encouraged

Whether you’re marketing books to see your work included in the list of New York Times best selling books, Essence top selling books or Amazon best selling books, you’ll have to invest time. The same applies if you only want to sell a few thousand copies of your book.

The point is to keep introducing your books for sale to new readers. But, that’s not all. To increase your book sales, you’ll need to keep your book titles in front of readers who are already familiar with your work. And, there’s where actions like blogging, starting a podcast and creating a literary newsletter come in.

Another way to grow your book sales without spending a lot of money is to write new books. In fact, authors with 12 or more books in their catalog tend to sell more books than authors with less than 8 published books. Stay encouraged. Keep advancing.

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