By Bruce Jones: I had a nice question come in about how much time do I spend on the marketing side of my publishing business. I will doing a much more extensive post on this topic but for moment I thought I would answer this questions.
Question: How much overall effort every week (how much time are you spending each week) to promoting?
Answer: Bruce Jones
Thank you for your question. Different books get different amounts of efforts. My music books get an entire website. Take a look at https://www.acousticmusictv.com I took my main book and set up a web page for each of the pages of the book. I then give away that graphic and drop ads around it. Most people don’t buy they just look so I reward people for coming to the site and then give them the opportunity to buy. I also drop music pages into Pinterest and a video for each book on YouTube. It took a while to set this all up, but now I don’t do that much. Maybe .5-1 hr a week. I need to do more and am starting to.
Originally it a couple of months to set each site up. But my plan was to make them flexible enough so that I could add additional books without to much effort. I built my Dreamweaver /website building knowledge watching YouTube videos. If you want the easiest way to build a website for promoting your books I would set up a blog using the Google Blogger platform. It is free and you can have a blog up in about 5 minutes. I have had many little blogs like this for my books or other things. They are really small websites wrapped into a blog. Blogger works great for doing this.
I use the content from the books for my blog posts. If you aren’t doing Kindle Select you can use your content however you want. The Kindle Select program just wants you to have original copy only on Amazon while the program is going on. On the blog have an About the Author page, maybe a Resource page, Video page, keep it simple. Have lots of images.
For the map books I did a lot more work. Again setting up a website and then driving traffic using book ads on the side. You can do this also with a blog so you wouldn’t have to do the programing. I give a lot away to pull in traffic. Again on the map site, https://www.freeusandworldmaps.com it took a lot to set up but now maybe .5-1 hr a week. I am starting though to increase my efforts so I can get more sales. The map site also drives a lot of traffic to my pay map sites that have nothing to do with the books but basically sell the same maps in a different format. I also drop in the coloring and some other books on the map site. I also try to do a quick video or two for each book.
I would say I did a lot of work to set this all up and will most likely go back to a bit of work when I update but once it is up I don’t do all that much. On Pinterest I get a lot of notice for the music books in terms of repinning, the FreeUSandWorldMaps.com site also seems to get a lot of Pinterest traffic but I don’t seem to get notice of those.
I am a firm believer that to be a successful author these days you must work your web, email and social media sites. You can’t rely on Amazon to market your book until it becomes successful. You have to drive traffic to the books. All platforms are important, web, blogs, FaceBook, YouTube, social media, Pinterest, Twitter, email lists. Pick one for the home and then drive everything else there and then give a clear path to Amazon or wherever you sell you books. If I had to pick I would say the websites are the best for traffic. Also keep the websites very simple and very open to Google. I don’t use any database or php driven sites. I just use straight html code. keep it as open as you can.
I would love to hear from you on how you market you books. Do your suggestions in the comment section. Also sign up for my new book on How To Publish Your Book where I cover these topics in more detail.
