Building a buzz around your book:
Before you start publishing your book, you need to spend time building an author platform, as we saw in the previous posts.
But once you’ve started the process of publishing, you need to focus on building a platform for your book, or in other words building a buzz around your book, so that when it is finally released it will be received by an interested and excited audience.
Building a buzz basically means that you share little pieces of information about your book at regular intervals to make your readers curious and get them interested.
To this end, the first thing you have to do is to gather or develop enough content. Preparation in advance is a must, to ensure that you have enough content to post regularly, even during the times that you’re busy.
Here’s what you have to do:
- Identify a bunch of interesting quotes from your book that will hook your readers in.
- Similarly get a few excerpts from your book that will have the maximum impact on your readers. These excerpts from the book will be like the equivalent of a trailer for a movie. It should capture the audience’s interest and make them want to get more.
- List out the keywords from your book in the order of their importance. Use these key words to create content that you can post on social media platforms.
- Also, gather pictures. A post with pictures will have more impact than just text. So fiction or non-fiction, get some pictures that are relevant to you content.
- Brand your content. Everything should carry your branding (name) or the book’s.
Once you’re done gathering your content, you’re all set to build a book platform.
Task list:
- Post the content that you’ve gathered, periodically. Make sure you tag it with the key words you’ve listed from your book.
- Release a quote or an excerpt at regular intervals. Using social media management tool like Hootsuite will let you execute your social media campaigns across all media platforms effectively.
- Create a character page in Facebook for your protagonist and post from their point of view. This makes the character come alive for your readers and allows them to relate to the character, creating a high level of engagement with your readers.
- For non-fiction books create discussions forums in Amazon, Goodreads, or maybe a discussion page in Facebook. Let people know how your book can help them and what makes it different from all the others in the market.
- Do giveaways. Giveaways can be effectively combined with mini-contests (Like a simple 5 question quiz) for maximum reader engagement.
- Get solid proof of engagement. If you’ve got people reading your posts, give a call for action at the end. Ask them to share the article, post their comments/ questions, sign up for the giveaway contest. Asking questions and soliciting opinions at the end of articles will be more effective in getting you a response than just asking people to comment.
- Get reviews. Solicit for reviews every day. Reviews are what are going to move your books off the shelves. Don’t be shy. If you know someone has read your book, get them to review it. Do giveaways for reviews, do cross-reviews with other authors.
If you’ve done all of this, your book will have a fairly solid presence online. And remember, the internet, like your book, is going to be there forever. So months, maybe, years later, someone who reads a post about your book would go ahead and buy it.
The best investment you can make for your book is time. Do it.