General Book Marketing Advice

Modified on Wed, 17 Jul, 2024 at 3:16 PM

While Marketing your book is up to you, as the rights holder to the work, that doesn't mean it should be difficult. Draft2Digital offers complementary measures far beyond what other services provide such as tools to help with book promotion and reader discoverability that you will find invaluable in the ever-changing ebook industry.

We offer
Free New Release Notification sign-ups within your ebook conversion (which is an easy-mode approach to an author mailing list)
Site-specific Also By pages (end matter)
Coupons for the Smashwords Store
Free pre-made Universal Book Links. (You can find this in the top section of your View Book page)
Universal Book Links allow you to share one link to your book that a reader can use to find the book at her favorite store—whether that's amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, kobo.com, or itunes.apple.com. Anywhere your book is for sale, a reader can find it and buy it from one link.
Free Author pages on Book2Rread to better help you promote and advertise your titles to your fans and buyers.

Draft2Digital Promotions:

Welcome to the Draft2Digital Promotions Form!

https://draft2digital.wufoo.com/forms/draft2digital-promotions-form/

You can use this form to do the following:

Get added to our promotion distribution list - only needs to be done once per D2D user account.
Notify D2D of upcoming author book promotions (ex. Bookbub), first in a series free, price reductions, and/or a preorder.

Please note: Filling out this form does not guarantee promotional placement. It is used to help identify ways in which we can work with you to find you potential promo spots with our partners.

Be sure to whitelist any Draft2Digital email addresses to ensure the promotion emails do not go to your spam.

Smashwords Store Coupons:

With Smashwords' Coupon System, you're able to market your book specifically on the vendor with the highest royalty rate available through Draft2Digital, allowing you to cultivate an audience in the storefront you have the most potential for success!

Whether your Smashwords Coupon is private (Only sharable by you, the author), or the Smashwords Coupon is public (Shown on the sales pages), you may still wish to market the book further by sharing information on the existence of the sale and how your readers can access the Coupon Code!

Some of the options available, but not limited to:

Tell your newsletter! If you have an emailing list or a blog, share the code there and give your readers a direct link to your book on Smashwords!
Promote on Social Media: Often considered by many self-published authors as the best way to get free advertisement, a quick promotional message on your preferred social media service (or all of them), can sometimes reach not just your normal readers, but new ones as well! Feel free to tag us using @smashwords or @findbooks2read!
Ask your friends to share! Sometimes, that little extra word of mouth can play a big part in gaining new eyes on your work. Ask your readers to share it, too! You'll be surprised at how effective just asking your fans and friends to share the info can be.
Get creative! Whether it's a YouTube video or a TikTok short, ultimately how you market is up to you, but don't be afraid to try new things to get your books out there!

Additional marketing strategies that our authors often use include:

Social Media Marketing

Social media is becoming the big buzz. It no longer becomes about how big you are but how much you can relate and connect to your audience in a personal way. To take advantage of social media platforms, I recommend you create an account for Facebook and X (née Twitter) because those are two places that many people use.
If you don't have time to post and engage on X and Facebook separately, I recommend you to use a service like www.socialoomph.com because it is a place where you can send a message to BOTH Facebook and X with one single message, and they offer a free tier.

Email Marketing

Another great way to connect with your readers is to build an email list using an email newsletter platform like Draft2Digital's own Author Email www.authoremail.com. Email services like Author Email allow you to build an email list and send email messages to your list.
The goal is to build a relationship with your list by giving them good tips and value to them. Whenever your next eBook comes out, you can send an email to your list and they will be more likely to buy than other people out there since they know you more.
Again, this is not necessary, especially if you plan to use our New Release Notifications which will keep your readers informed on any new releases you may have. If you have your own website or use services like BookFunnel, this is considered a "must have"

Forum Marketing

Another way to connect with your target market is to join forums related to your topic. Go there and be active in the discussion forums related to your niche. You shouldn't go there to pitch your ebook.
Instead, you want to provide value to the forums by answering questions and giving advice on how to do something related to your topic. This will help forum members recognize that you know what you are talking about if you are really good at your topic. Readers who like what you say will be interested in checking out your eBook and may be potential customers who buy your ebook.

Blogging

Blogging is a great way to connect with your readers. A free way to create a blog is to use blogger.com. If you want to build your own website that is a blog, then I recommend using WordPress.

Press Releases

Another method is to write and submit a press release to multiple press release sites. If you don't want to do this, you can simply go to fiverr.com and hire someone else to do this for around 5 bucks as well.

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