Want To Sell More Books? Here’s How.

If you choose to go down the self-publishing route, it can be difficult knowing how to market your book and increase sales. Just putting it up on big online bookstores such as Amazon and hoping it will take off is unlikely to see sales rise.

The most successful self-publishers are willing to put time effort, and sometimes money into promoting their book, creating a buzz about it, and ultimately, selling more copies.

There are, in fact, plenty of things you can do as a self published author to help increase your book sales, and having a robust marketing plan before you publish your book will mean you are well prepared and ready to do everything you can to make it a success. Of course, there are no guarantees, but if you are serious about increasing your readership, try these 5 things.

Comment on high profile blogs

Research high-profile, relevant blogs and start to build a relationship with them. Successful blogs that already have a dedicated following and lots of traffic are the ones to go for. However, make sure they are relevant to your work otherwise you’ll be targeting readers who aren’t necessarily interested in what you have written.

You need to build good relationships with these bloggers. Read their work and make insightful comments, the more interesting and useful comments you make, the more likely it is that the blogger will sit up and take notice, and along with it their readers. The key here is to make your interaction regular and interesting. Don’t just post empty comments - think about the piece and write something intelligent and engaging. You can also blog, tweet and share their work on your own social media accounts to show you are willing to promote them - if you do this, in time, they may well be willing to return the favour.

Offer your book for free

While we know this may seem counter intuitive, doing a free book promotion can actually really help boost sales. It is easy to set up a free book promo through Amazon Kindle - it costs you nothing and can really help readers take notice of your book.

There are plenty of high profile websites which will happily promote your free book too. Selling your book for free might not make you any money but the peaked interest should have a knock on effect when you end the offer and therefore you should see an increase in sales well past the end of your freebie promo too.

Create a Facebook advert

Creating a Facebook advert about your book can be really powerful in helping reach out to potential readers you might otherwise have been unable to reach. The good thing is you don’t have to spend a lot to reach thousands of people, and Facebook let’s you filter your target audience so you can make sure only the people that are likely to be interested in your book will see it.

Do a press release

Getting your book in a paper or magazine will expose it to thousands of readers. Send out a press release about your book. The key to sending a great press release is to make it about more than just you. If you are a relatively unknown author it can be difficult to get bigger newspapers and magazines to take interest.

Think about clever ways to get your press release picked up. Pitch to local newspapers and magazines stressing you are a local author. Team up with a charity and donate some proceeds of your book sales to them - this will make your story far more interesting to publications.

Offer sale or return

If you want to see your book in print then offer it to bookstores sale or return. They will buy your books off you, but on the condition that if they don’t sell, they can return them to you. It’s no risk to you (providing you don’t spend all the cash) and seeing your book in a bookstore window makes for a seriously proud moment.

These 5 tips should get you started and well on your way to seeing your book sales increase. Seeing your book sell more, receive great reviews and get positive attention is the best feeling for an author, and if you are willing to put the effort in, there is no reason why it can’t happen for you!

Bethany Cadman -author of 'Doctor Vanilla's Sunflowers'

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