Online Book Marketing Strategies

Some of the best book marketing ideas are ones authors “should” realize themselves.

I was reminded of this when I read Steve Scott’s book 61 WAYS TO SELL MORE NONFICTION KINDLE BOOKS. Scott’s ideas are excellent — and I admit I should have thought of some of them myself.

I didn’t, so I’m implementing these ideas now.

One such idea is putting an excerpt (not just a link) to another of your books at the end of each of your books. This is an excellent strategy for both fiction and nonfiction authors. (Scott’s book is equally valuable for fiction Kindle books.)

I have just put an excerpt from my cozy mystery CAST THE FIRST STONE on my romantic suspense spy thriller CIA FALL GUY.

(While I have another thriller — LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS — that I could have excerpted, I felt the particular story of CAST went better with CIA FALL GUY.)

Another one of Steve Scott’s ideas is to use a redirected URL to your Amazon Author Central profile. Yes, I have a customized URL for this profile from Amazon — www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller, but it is long and includes my first name, which many people find hard to correctly spell.

(I just got www.ZimblerMillerbooks.com — using my Twitter and Pinterest username of ZimblerMiller — to go to my Amazon Author Central profile.)

A third idea of his (that I am in the process of doing) is to add at the end of a book’s Amazon description a call-to-action of scrolling up to buy the book. Another “obvious” idea I needed to learn from this book.

In fact, reading Steve Scott’s book is a reminder to authors that we have to keep learning — we rarely can know everything ourselves.

Besides this book, I would also like to recommend the new book GOODREADS FOR AUTHORS: HOW TO USE GOODREADS TO PROMOTE YOUR BOOKS by Michelle Campbell-Scott. (These two authors are NOT related.)

I have been a member of Goodsreads for close to five years, and I will admit that I am not taking advantage of the opportunities. In fact, I find the site difficult to navigate.

With Campbell-Scott’s book as my guide, I hope to participate more effectively on Goodreads. (I have finally managed to get the new cover of CIA FALL GUY on the site.)

As she points out, Goodreads is a site for book readers, so book authors should want to be active on this site. One advantage of getting an author account on Goodreads is that you can bring in your blog feed to your Goodreads author profile. (For an example of this, see http://www.goodreads.com/pzmiller)

And there are book reader groups in many, many genres. The only problem is finding the time to be active on these groups!

Now I’m off to work on implementing more of the ideas of the above two books.

© 2013 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks, including TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO PUBLISH AND MARKET YOUR BOOK IN THE AGE OF AMAZON and the romantic suspense spy story CIA FALL GUY.

Click here to visit her Amazon author page at www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller

She also has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com