3 Comments for Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors, Book Publicity through Social Networking

• 1. Zagiri  |  December 25th, 2009 at 3:33 pm

  One rule of thumb among independent consultants is that they should spend about half their time not just doing the job they do, but schmoozing and hustling the next job. Weber proposes something similar for writers. The craft of writing the book itself is dealt with elsewhere, at length. Weber deals with writing about your book, and about all the other hustling that it takes to get people to pick it up in the first place. He identifies two big parts to this job: selling the book, and selling the writer.

  An unknown writer is in the odd position of proving he has something to say before anyone will listen. A solid third of the book, plus a pervasive atmosphere throughout the rest, talks about creating an internet presence: blogging, social networking, and generally putting yourself where your potential customers will see you. If you want their eyes on your writing, you have to put a lot of it out there, with new content all the time to keep them coming back. (The motto of the internet may be “Yeah, but what about lately?”) Building a following takes time, maybe years, and the day the book hits the streets is way too late. The ongoing effort may seem daunting. If you’re really a writer, though, you would have been writing anyway. Weber’s advice is about putting it where it will do the most good.

  Then when your book is on the electronic shelves of the internet booksellers, a whole new job begins. (A new writer’s share of brick’n'mortar shelf space is just about zero – your choices are the internet or the trunk of your car.) Weber discusses dozens of techniques for directing buyers to your book, centered largely on Amazon. He discusses lists, links, tags, and especially reader reviews like this one. Positive reader reviews may be the biggest thing that sells a reader, once they’ve found your book’s page. Free review copies, like the one I’m reviewing, are one great way to get the first few reviews written.

  Weber is well aware of the line between intense promotion and unethical shilling, including embarrassing cases where writers were outed as authors of glowing reviews for their own books. There are cases, though, where the line is subjective – the difference between eagerness and aggressiveness is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

  There are reams of useful tips here. One interested me in particular: writing your book so as to make the most of the internet sales venue. When I first opened this book, its dense and detailed table of contents took me by surprise – it lists two or three entries for some individual pages. That made sense after Weber pointed out that booksellers sometimes display the TOC or index on the product page. A detailed TOC or index lets the author make as much use as possible of this feature. Well, it’s a new kind of world out there. Weber offers a useful guide to navigating your book through it.

  //wiredweird, reviewing a complimentary copy

• 2. Edgardo  |  December 25th, 2009 at 4:02 pm

  You’ve got your novel all written, proofread, and have even found someone to read it and give a good critique of it, and his suggestions were all carefully considered and where appropriate implemented. Now what?

  For most new authors, what’s next is an excruciating travail of trying to find someone interested in actually publishing it. The process can take years. But then you find a small publisher willing to take a flyer on your book, and you finally hold an actual printed copy in your hands. Your job as the author is done now, right? Surely your publisher will do everything possible to make this book sell, and sell…

  Well, maybe. More likely is that their `marketing’ department will only put out a few announcements, try and set up a few speaking/book signing events for you, and have it on the shelves for a few months only. If you really want to make your book sell, you need to do something about it yourself. How?

  Read this book. Follow its suggestions. Doing so is not a small amount of work, but you’ve already invested a huge amount of effort in writing your book, so a little additional effort is probably more than justified.

  This book has as its main focus spreading the word about your book through various on-line sites and tools. Weber makes the telling point that the network is your friend, that one mention at one place leads to another connection at another site – and readers of these sites, seeing your book mentioned more than once, are far more likely to buy your book.

  The main tool he recommends is this site. For better or worse, Amazon is the 800 lb gorilla of on-line book marketing. Weber details many, many features of this site that can help you sell your book and precisely how you can take advantage of them. Prime is garnering reviews of your book, and Weber does an excellent job of explaining which reviewers to contact and how to get those reviews without coming across as a spammer. To some degree, this review feels a little incestuous, as I’m one of the resources he lists as useful. He also explains the various `tie-in’ tools available to authors and publishers, the Amazon sales ranking system, the benefits and downsides of contracting to get your book pushed up in the Amazon rank system, linking possibilities, and what to do about reviews that appear that you might consider inappropriate or factually in error, along with many other things.

  Other, more traditional methods of promoting your book, and other on-line retailers are not ignored, but they receive a much less detailed delineation, along with comments about how hard most of these methods are for an individual author to actually use.

  The second main tool he recommends is the blog/web site. Once again, the main idea is to get your book noticed by those who care about your subject matter. He details where and how to set up a blog, and gives solid recommendations about what content it should contain, from press-release type material to audio/visual author interviews (and also gives some pretty good estimates of the cost factors of producing such materials). Google page-ranking, click-ads, and other such items relating to how easily searches for your book’s subject material will actually return your book’s title are also covered.

  Third is something he identifies as `social networking’ on places like MySpace. Once again, he offers very specific suggestions on how to go about this without irritating those you are communicating with, a highly important point on today’s net where anything even remotely looking like spam is going to be immediately ignored.

  Now the real question is, do Weber’s recommended actions actually work? The answer to this is a qualified `yes’: in general, it won’t make your book a best-seller, but can get it into the mid-list sales numbers, assuming your book is of general interest and is well written – a point Weber emphasizes, as no amount of marketing will help a bad book. Weber gives several examples of authors who have been successful in this manner, and I know from tracking a couple of authors that I like that things like a well-written blog and good reviews can do a lot to get a book noticed and bought.

  Throughout this book, Weber gives specific web addresses, contact information, and setup instructions. As such things can change with lightning speed on the web, he also maintains a on-line site that has updates to such information.

  About the only thing missing from this was an overall estimate of just how much effort doing all the things he recommends would take. While this is certainly not a minor number, it’s also true that few people would actually try and do everything specified here. A person planning on trying his suggestions should carefully read this once, then go back a second time and determine which particular portions of it are both applicable to his book and are something he thinks he can actually do.

  In all, a very solid, practical book that should be of great value, especially to new or lesser-known writers.

  — Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

• 3. Phineas  |  December 25th, 2009 at 4:07 pm

  I consider myself a mega marketer when it comes to promoting my book, and have earned the nickname of Shameless Promoter in my circle of peers and friends. Over the past 4 years I have tried many strategies to increase my internet “exposure”. Many of them have been small time. Some didn’t work at all.

  Steve and I seem to be ‘on the same page’ when it comes to how important it is to market books online. It’s vital. You can reach millions of people if you know how. If you follow Steve’s advice you will have thousands of people a day finding you and your book. Do you know how many book signings that would take?

  Do you want to see your book make a bestsellers’ list? Get ‘plugged in’. Plug Your Book is an excellent resource and a MUST-HAVE for every published author. I had been doing many of the things he suggests, but not to the extent and without fully understanding why these things work. If you have written a book, if you want to sell that book, then you need Steve Weber’s book. Like any business, you need the right tools. And Plug Your Book! is definitely one of them.

  Cheryl Kaye Tardif
  Author of Divine Intervention

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