So you have an ebook promotion coming up with Book Cave. Now you can just sit back and relax, right? Sure, but if you want to make the most of your promotion and greatly increase your reach, here are a few extra things you can do.
Before promoting
1. Make sure your book has at least 5 reviews before you think about promoting it. If necessary, send the book to people who have read your other books and ask them to give an honest review in return. Amazon usually takes down reviews written by family members or people involved in the publication, so you’ll need to contact people who do not live in the same household or who Amazon does not believe are connected to you.
2. Check the book description on all retailers to be sure it is free of typos. This means checking proper spacing. Use em dashes (-) instead of hyphens ( — ). Make sure the blurb is good, too. Pass it around to a few author friends, especially if you’re new at writing blurbs.
3. Choose a book to promote that will help you sell more of your other books-this is usually going to be the first book in a series.
4. Make sure your website and the book information on it is up to date.
5. Choose a very discounted price. Free and 99 cents are the best price points. If you haven’t given free a try, we recommend doing so, because the interest you receive for a free book may well be a hundred times that of a 99-cent book. That’s a whole lot more people with eyes on your book and potential sequel sales.
Setting up the ebook promotion
6. Make sure the latest revision of your ebook is live at least a day before the promotion.
7. Consider having your discount in place several days before the event if you are discounting for free. This gives Amazon time to match the price (you may have to email them and let them know you are doing a “temporary” promotion, regardless of when you plan to end it).
8. Make sure that the dates and times for your ebook promotion are correct on all retailers. Amazon’s Kindle Countdown default time isn’t early enough for most promotion sites; Book Cave requires books to be discounted by 6:00 am Pacific Time (PT).
9. If your book is free, consider temporarily discounting one of your sequels at the time of the promotion to increase reviews and sales.
10. Consider putting your book on sale for at least three days or even longer to generate sales of other titles and to increase reviews. As long as your book is on Book Cave, you will be getting views and click-throughs.
11. Consider doing a group promotion with other authors, or ask a few authors to share your promotion link in return for you sharing theirs.
12. Make sure your contact information is easily accessible so you can be tagged in posts or so readers can contact you. Too many authors lose sales because they can’t be easily found or contacted. This is the digital age, so get with it!
13. Make sure your author picture and other branding items (banners, etc) are the same or similar across social media platforms and your website. You want to become recognizable to readers.
Letting others know about it
14. Talk about the ebook promotion on social media, on your website, and in your newsletter. Even sharing once can add hundreds or even thousands of views to your book.
15. Let your friends and family know about the promotion and ask them to share the link with others.
Originally published at https://mybookcave.com on January 20, 2017.
