Marketing Fun 1.2

by Tif E. Boots

          Last month we started discussing easy and non-expensive ways to market your book. Your friends and family can be a great help with this.

If they have read your book and are willing to help even more, they can post reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads, If they have a social media following and, in this day and age, most people have some sort of social media following whether it be Snapchat, Instagram, X, Facebook or TikTok, they can always make videos and reviews of your book there. If they are a little bit old school and uncomfortable or are not sure how to post reviews, they can always email a review to you with their permission to post it on your website or the publisher’s website with their name and quotes. Remember, if they send a review to Shelteringtreemedia.com, they are sent a discount code for either books or single purchase from the publishing house. This in turn could help our other authors.

Social media is also your friend. Unfortunately, the algorithms are not usually helpful. Make the post anyway If you make a TikTok video about your book and only get 20 views from it - that is still 20 views that may turn into readers. If you have 200 friends on Facebook and the 20 people that actually see your post share that post on their feeds, it can trickle down to people on the other side of the country that you don’t know. You can also contact book bloggers; some of them will contact you and offer to make videos or post a review for monetary rewards.  This can get your book seen by many people but does not guarantee sales. The more visibility you have for your book, the better your chances of sales are.

If you are uneasy making videos about your book, remember you do not have to show your face, you don’t even have to talk. A simple slide show of your book and some of the pages will work just fine. Even if you only have 20 people that see it, that’s 20 more people that know your book exists. Once again, this is where friends and family can help out by simply reposting and commenting on your video or post. The more interaction your post gets, the more the algorithm will push it out to other people.

 Have fun with your social media. Be goofy if you feel goofy. Post the pictures, post the videos. You never know what is going to get attention. At this point, all the attention can be good, even if it a bad video, it might stick in someone’s mind enough to look into the book or tell others about it. ShelteringTree.Earth provides you with a book trailer video, use it. You can post the link for it on your website and on all of your social media pages. You can email or text it to every contact you have ever met. Visibility is key, be as annoyingly visible as you can.