Online Book Marketing: How to Market Your Book Even If

(c) 2005 Jeremy M. Hoover


What you do after you have written your book is as
much, if not more, important than the actual writing
of it. You can take a great book and poor marketing
and have very poor results. Conversely, I believe you
can take a mediocre book, market it well, and make
very good sales from it. The only limiting factor is
you. You probably think, “I’m a writer, not a
salesperson.” That’s true, but there are some very
simple things you can do to create a website that
sells your book.

1. Create a direct-response sales page for your book.

This doesn’t need to be an extra site, your home page,
or anything extravagant. Devote your home page to
information about you or your most recent work and a
subscription form for a newsletter for your fans.
Create a secondary page, linked to from your home
page, that sells your book. But instead of simply
stating a few sentences about your book, either put up
a full book review or a direct-response sales letter.
Either way, at the end of the review or the letter,
you must ask your readers to buy your book. Put a
direct order link at the bottom of your page. Simply
asking for your readers to buy your book will increase
your sales.

2. Create a “fan list” you can send messages to.

On your home page, and on every page of your website,
create a newsletter subscription form for your readers
to join. You don’t need to send something out every
day, or even every week. Once a month, send out a new
“flash fiction” or microfiction story, or a new essay.
Keep in touch with your readers. Send out a special
notice of a discount for your subscribers. But in
each communication with them, provide a link back to
your sales page and ask them to buy. Don’t worry…they
subscribed because they like your work and are open to
buying it!

3. Write some articles or short stories and give them
away.

You can give these away from your website as a gift
for joining your newsletter group, or you can give
them away from other people’s sites as a way to get
more awareness of your work. Do a search for “article
sites” and you’ll find many sites you can submit your
work to. These are great for two reasons—1) More
people will be exposed to your writing (which means
more potential buyers); and 2) Others may take your
article or story and run it in their newsletter,
giving you even more exposure. Writing and
distributing articles or stories is a great way to
build traffic to your site and confidence in your
writing.

Follow these three steps and you’ll notice an increase
in sales of your books.

Go to Jeremy's site --
http://jhooverwebcopy.com/bookmarketing.htm -- to see
how he can help you.