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This is not going to be a clickbaity “How to gain success as…” type of article, nor is this going to be a one size fits all strategy-guide for marketing your work. In this article I plan on giving you just the tips, if you will, so that you may position yourself in such a way as to become more accessible for potential readers to discover your work - by best leveraging the amount of time, money, energy, and effort it takes to do such a thing. Browse this checklist to get some ideas of what you can do to “put yourself out there” as an independent author - before you even consider whether or not you’re ready to “put some skin in the game”. The goal is to show you how all the pieces just kind of fall into place.
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_ Distribution:
How you distribute your work is the most straight forward means for making your work more accessible to potential readers, but there is more you can do aside from signing up for an Amazon Kindle Direct account (or an alternative epub market). If you focus on Amazon, then don’t forget to add some integrity to your work by completing an Author Bio, because this will tie in with the next tip. Some other means of distributing your work, in order to put yourself out there, is to purchase author copies of your book and send them out to bloggers, podcasters, and any other content creator with an audience who would be willing to critique your work. That is really a hit or miss method in terms of sales but if you do it enough then you might be able to build a presence among various reading communities (like booktube). An alternative to this method of distribution is to submit your work on sites that offer ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies).
_ Social Presence:
There are many advantages to using Amazon as a distributor of your work aside from them having the largest market share in the digital space, and that’s through their built in social platform Goodreads. Every piece of work you publish on the Amazon marketplace will automatically become indexed in the Goodreads platform where an audience of voracious readers ready to interact in a multitude of ways can search it out; these are the kind of voracious readers that write reviews and/or have their own blogs and social media presence, which means exposure!
If you created your own Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to add into the mix – then you’re really cooking on all four cylinders now! I cannot repeat this next part enough: supply an ample amount of links to your work! As you build an online audience you may use social media to “socialize”, but first and foremost links to your actual work should never be more than two or a few clicks away. I don’t know how many times I've witnessed somebody who wanted people to check out their book but failed to supply a link to it in their post, so I clicked on their profile and lo and behold - there was still no link to be found... not so much as website, an author bio, a product page, nothing on their profile about it. Supply an ample amount of links to your work! That should be priority number one, on all your social media accounts as an independent author. Hopefully, you can see how all the pieces are all starting to just fall into place.
I like Twitter, because it’s the easiest platform to market on with the use of hashtags (#LFLR), but facebook also provides opportunities for putting yourself out there, with facebook groups. If you’re going to use facebook then I suggest creating a business page that people can “like”(audience building) in order to stay on the up ‘n up with your work, unless you’re comfortable with accepting “friend” requests from strangers. Keep in mind that your personal profile caps out once you reach five thousand “friends” (and that may include all the people who aren’t even interested in reading your work).
_ Official Website/Blog
Last but not least, you can create yourself an official website to showcase all your work and act as like a one-stop-shop for all the previously mentioned ways to put yourself out there. You don’t need to actually sell your work through your website, but you can certainly use your website to catalog all your work with blog posts and build a presence on reputable search engines. This isn’t something that’s accomplished overnight, but in due time your brand will develop a sense of “professionalism” with your audience. When people can look you/website up and see that your work is high in the search results (preferably within the first few pages), this helps with making first impressions with potential readers.
Again marketing aside, a website has the practical use of being a hub for all your other social platforms, as well. Create a blog and then you can share the links of your content on just about any platform in order to put yourself out there; shit - people do a double take when I tell them that they can even find me on Pinterest! I'm not hard to find, baby. You can offer visitors of your website links to all your social media profiles on the “About” page, where you can see that Live Free Live Rich makes use of some social media APIs (application programming interfaces). Each social media platform usually offers web developers a variety of tools that they can integrate into their own website, which presents opportunities for some creative cross platform promotions. So hopefully you can see how all these pieces just fall right into place with one another and make things very easy for potential readers to discover your work. Now go put yourself out there, and maybe I'll see you around. CHEERS!
How you distribute your work is the most straight forward means for making your work more accessible to potential readers, but there is more you can do aside from signing up for an Amazon Kindle Direct account (or an alternative epub market). If you focus on Amazon, then don’t forget to add some integrity to your work by completing an Author Bio, because this will tie in with the next tip. Some other means of distributing your work, in order to put yourself out there, is to purchase author copies of your book and send them out to bloggers, podcasters, and any other content creator with an audience who would be willing to critique your work. That is really a hit or miss method in terms of sales but if you do it enough then you might be able to build a presence among various reading communities (like booktube). An alternative to this method of distribution is to submit your work on sites that offer ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies).
_ Social Presence:
There are many advantages to using Amazon as a distributor of your work aside from them having the largest market share in the digital space, and that’s through their built in social platform Goodreads. Every piece of work you publish on the Amazon marketplace will automatically become indexed in the Goodreads platform where an audience of voracious readers ready to interact in a multitude of ways can search it out; these are the kind of voracious readers that write reviews and/or have their own blogs and social media presence, which means exposure!
If you created your own Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to add into the mix – then you’re really cooking on all four cylinders now! I cannot repeat this next part enough: supply an ample amount of links to your work! As you build an online audience you may use social media to “socialize”, but first and foremost links to your actual work should never be more than two or a few clicks away. I don’t know how many times I've witnessed somebody who wanted people to check out their book but failed to supply a link to it in their post, so I clicked on their profile and lo and behold - there was still no link to be found... not so much as website, an author bio, a product page, nothing on their profile about it. Supply an ample amount of links to your work! That should be priority number one, on all your social media accounts as an independent author. Hopefully, you can see how all the pieces are all starting to just fall into place.
I like Twitter, because it’s the easiest platform to market on with the use of hashtags (#LFLR), but facebook also provides opportunities for putting yourself out there, with facebook groups. If you’re going to use facebook then I suggest creating a business page that people can “like”(audience building) in order to stay on the up ‘n up with your work, unless you’re comfortable with accepting “friend” requests from strangers. Keep in mind that your personal profile caps out once you reach five thousand “friends” (and that may include all the people who aren’t even interested in reading your work).
_ Official Website/Blog
Last but not least, you can create yourself an official website to showcase all your work and act as like a one-stop-shop for all the previously mentioned ways to put yourself out there. You don’t need to actually sell your work through your website, but you can certainly use your website to catalog all your work with blog posts and build a presence on reputable search engines. This isn’t something that’s accomplished overnight, but in due time your brand will develop a sense of “professionalism” with your audience. When people can look you/website up and see that your work is high in the search results (preferably within the first few pages), this helps with making first impressions with potential readers.
Again marketing aside, a website has the practical use of being a hub for all your other social platforms, as well. Create a blog and then you can share the links of your content on just about any platform in order to put yourself out there; shit - people do a double take when I tell them that they can even find me on Pinterest! I'm not hard to find, baby. You can offer visitors of your website links to all your social media profiles on the “About” page, where you can see that Live Free Live Rich makes use of some social media APIs (application programming interfaces). Each social media platform usually offers web developers a variety of tools that they can integrate into their own website, which presents opportunities for some creative cross platform promotions. So hopefully you can see how all these pieces just fall right into place with one another and make things very easy for potential readers to discover your work. Now go put yourself out there, and maybe I'll see you around. CHEERS!
