5 Tips on Promoting Your Kindle Books
It can be scary putting yourself out there and publishing a book on Amazon’s free platform, Kindle. But nothing hurts more than having your book go live and seeing zero sales day after day.
Many people spend so much time learning the ins and outs of Kindle publishing, that they completely forget about the need to learn how to promote their book once it’s live. You won’t have a traditional publishing house with a team of promo experts at your disposal – it will all rest on your shoulders. Here are five tips to help you spread the word about your Kindle books:
Tip #1 – Create a Blog
A blog for your author name (either your real name or a pen name) or the book name is a good idea. If your goal is to put out a series of books, then you can link the readers to your blog where an opt in form resides and capture their name and email address so they can be notified of the upcoming releases.
Tip #2 – Tweet About It
Even if you’re not an avid Twitter user, you should make it a point to get an account for your author name and Tweet about your Kindle release, as well as free promo days if you have them. Twitter still makes the news and the community makes things go viral, so you want to have a piece of that marketing opportunity.
Tip #3 – Create a Facebook Fan Page
Create a Facebook fan page for your book, or for your author name. This gives people a way to communicate with you, but since many people love to share things on Facebook, it gives them a quick and easy way to share your book’s link (with a thumbnail and commentary) with their own friends and family.
Tip #4 – Develop a Squidoo Lens
Squidoo is a free platform you can use to create a book review lens for your Kindle creations. They do have a few off-limit topics, but as long as your topic isn’t on that list, you can create a lens (web page) that includes content modules, Amazon links to your book, and even a guestbook so that your fans can interact with you.
Tip #5 – Join a Blog Book Tour
In traditional publishing, authors go from bookstore to bookstore around the country to promote their book and interact with fans. On a blog book tour, the author makes a stop at someone’s blog to get interviewed (sometimes it’s a live webinar type interview). Sometimes they are given a set of questions to answer in advance from the blogger’s audience. And they may give away a few copies to lucky readers. All of this helps keep the buzz going about the author and his or her books.