Once Amazon categories have been sorted out, there then remains the (not insignificant) problem of how to drive traffic from outside Amazon to your book. Whilst it’s true that making best seller lists on Amazon will sort some of this out for you – Amazon collates from its best seller lists for a lot of its email promos – it certainly hasn’t happened for me yet, and I believe the old marketing adage of going out to where the audiences are, holds true. In digital environment, this means finding online communities and sites where readers congregate, or which have large subscriptions of suitable readers.
Goodreads is one, but having done that I’m on the hunt for some more. Having found this post about strategies for authors to find readers, I started looking into the methods suggested. Lots are good, but not all. Weeding out the better ones is tricky.
I’ll be updating this as I go along, but so far I’m planning the following, due to reviews on their effectiveness posted by other authors and my own judgement of the audiences they propose to reach. Later on in the year I’ll post an update on what actually worked.
BookBub – by all accounts one of the best services to post your book promo to. Best used in conjunction with a three day free promo on Amazon. The only problem for me with BookBub is that they won’t promote your book more than once in a 6 month period. As I would like to use a successful free promo for Borderliners on Amazon to drive sales for Split Symmetry (apparently, an effective strategy), I will have to wait a few more months for BookBub.
Whizzbuzz – this one looks really good. With large reader subscription numbers and impressive social media following, they will for £35 promote your book for a whole year. Very good.
Pixel of Ink – not sure about this yet, but it’s supposed to be one of the better promotion services. Again, will report back.
Happy marketing!