Promoting vs. Marketing a Book – The Promotion Stages – Ongoing Promotion – Part 2 Back to The Promotion Stages – The Book Launch
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Now, your book has been on the market for a few weeks already, the blog tour is finished; the book sales are still counted without a calculator, so, what now?

Well, there are a few things that can be done.

Continue writing posts on your blog about subjects related to your book: In our case, starting series about the history of red socks or the parallel between red socks and galaxy hitchhikers’ towels for example. These are meant to bring visitors to your blog where you already put your book in a prominent place, in the hope that the new visitors will buy it. Regular posting also ensures continued visibility on search engines, making it more likely to  gain new visitors.

Submit your book for awards: There are a growing number of places that grant awards to fiction books, so it is a question of running a few Google search to find them, without forgetting to search for awards in your book genre. This has a double benefit. One the one hand, some of these awards site post a list of participating book, giving exposure, some rely on votes by internet surfers, giving you an opportunity to ask your fellow forum members to vote for you ( they will be grateful for discovering or being reminded of the existence of the award), which provides with a legitimate opportunity to talk about your book and raise awareness about its existence, you might actually win the award, and add it to your book cover, or you might be one of the runners up for the award and rejoice about that on your blog and in your social networks, all of which cast a positive light on your book.

Get more interviews: Many blogs run authors interviews. That means they are hungry for content, so contacting the bloggers to offer yourself for an interview might actually bring some result (tip, if you are sending a mail from a free e-mail account such as hotmail or yahoo, many spam filters from domain run mail services will send your mail straight to the junk box or block it entirely, so in the absence of an answer within a few days, try again from a “legitimate” address.) Again, getting an interview is a legitimate reason to drum the drum in your social networks without actually selling your book.

Organize a Twitterview: A twitterview is an interview ran on Twitter where your followers are invited to ask question. The first step is to create a hashtag for your interview. Let say #alternate_red_sock for example. Then on a given date, block the entire day for the twitterview as you will have to be on Twitter for the duration. Your followers are invited to ask (short) questions using that hashtag and you give answers directly on Twitter. For you, it implies running regular searches for that hashtag throughout the day and remembering that the average time on Twitter by users is 12 minutes, so ideally, you need to answer each question in less than 12 minutes.
Start announcing the twitterview about a week ahead of time through your social networks and on your blog.

Create a quiz about your book: Create a quiz about your book and post it on Facebook and other platforms, ideally with a prize for the winner/s such as a gift card for Amazon, an advance copy of the sequel of your book (best used if your book is already popular), a free Kindle or anything else that might appeal to your audience.

Organize a contest: Again, sadly, the popularity of the contest is directly proportional to the perceived value of the prize. Though followers and fans might get excited about finding the ideal title for the sequel of your book, they already know you, and, presumably, already bought and read your book. It might remind them to recommend your book to friends and family, but adding a prize sucu as a $25 + Amazon gift card or a free Kindle reader sounds much more attractive to those who do not yet know you. This makes it much more likely that they will spread the word and bring over new potential readers.

Throw a virtual Party: There are any number of reasons that might justify throwing a party. The anniversary of you’re the author who inspired you the most, winning or being short listed for an award, the discovery of an alternate universe (that one does not need to be true…), or any other farfetched idea that might draw interest or smiles from your guests. Your guests, of course, being your community members

Come back tomorrow for 5 more tips about ongoing book promotion!

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