Piper Nuelle

Writing a book is sometimes seen as the easiest part… It’s what you have to do once you have published or self-published the book that is the tricky part!!! It’s not all fluffy clouds and happy rainbows… Keeping your book making sales, getting it noticed and seen by potential readers is damned hard work. And sometimes it can feel like it gets too much and can be the thundercloud and the hammering rain that brings your spirits down. But there are something you can do to try and help your book be seen, remain relevant and hopefully gain some sales and traction, but ultimately there is no magic wand or we would all be famous authors by now… But it is all about hard work, patience and luck.

Here I have some useful tips to try and help you;

• Pre-launch – try and make some traction for your book before you have even pushed the publish button. If no one knows you or that your book is coming into existence it is hard to then try and make sales. You need to make sure you have social media accounts, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Youtube etc… Then a few months before the release start leaving hints, easter eggs, snippets to entice potential readers in. Take interesting photos, make videos, start up a blog, get people noticing you so it makes it easier when your book drops. I learnt this the hard way. I didn’t have a social media account when I was first writing, I got one pretty much too close to my release date and growing a following is hard, I don’t have friends to help me advertise it or share it by word of mouth. But I have learned these things during my writing process.
• Do a book launch – Get people excited, do a special day to celebrate it, give away signed copies.
• Make up some unique marketing and promotions – If you publish via Amazon you can use their advertising and pay for them to promote your book. You could have business cards made for you and your book and give them to people you meet, do it organically though, don’t force people to take one and buy your book, but do it as the conversation flows. Don’t be afraid to sell yourself, people like confidence, people like it when they are told why something is good to buy, so become that person, be confident and be your own biggest cheerleader, sell yourself and your book. Have leaflets made and post them around your local town to try and garner interest. Do a book signing event or at special events have a market stall to try and sell your book and then sign the books for your customers. Have magnets made for your book for your car to drive around advertising it, some people have even managed to create QR codes people can scan that takes them directly to the site to purchase one. Do random acts of book kindness and leave signed copies around your local town to cheer unsuspecting readers up. Think outside the box, make it so people can see and find your book.
• Get people to connect with your book – When advertising it don’t just say or tell people to buy your book. Make them connect with it on a personal level. Give them a brief overview, do an interview with the main character, make them connect and want to know more about your book.
• See if you can find other authors or bloggers to share your book with and do book review exchanges, they read yours, you read theirs, and you both promote it and leave a review.
• If you have family and or friends ask them to review it. But not everyone has this, I don’t have anyone which does make those first few reviews hard to get, but don’t give up, your book will eventually find its readership but you do have to keep pushing it.
• Keep up to date with your books progress, check sales reports. Is there a day of the week, or a time of the month it sells more than other times? Can you do anything on its slow times? What are you doing differently at those higher sales times?
• Keep your social media up to date. People like to connect with the author and see that they are not a robot. Keep up to date pictures, life updates, connect with your audience.
• Be yourself, and be kind to yourself everyone is unique and it is hard to not compare yourself to others. Especially when your book sales are low and someone else’s is high. But it all depends on their book and story, their cover, their promotional and marketing skills, whether they are traditional or self-published, luck they may just be lucky, they may have a large following already that laps up everything they write, they may have family and or friends to help them promote and get the book out there with word of mouth. So many things cannot be comparable because everyone’s life and experiences and support networks are different. Just don’t give up.
• Stay passionate – Once you lose that passion, that spark and that energy, then you stop promoting and stop trying and your book will fall into the void and not be seen. It is very rare that a book will be found without some form of promotional and marketing aid.
• Keep writing – The more books you have out there in the book world, the more chance you have of being seen. But remember the rule of Quality over Quantity!!! You don’t want to ruin your reputation with bad quality books. Whilst you need more to be seen, you need to write your best work every time.
• Grow a thick skin – Authors can be bitches and trolls. If someone has a book that is good but they want their book in the same genre to do better, they will use shitty bitch tactics. They will give fake bad reviews to your book to bring it down, they will report it for having errors when it doesn’t, they will bad mouth you or put you down. But it is all down to jealousy. Grow a thick skin, and when it comes to reviews take them with a pinch of salt and don’t take it to heart. During editing your editor should have picked up on any errors or drastic mistakes, so sometimes when people give it a bad review it is just to be mean or to cheat and make their own book look better.
• If your on Amazon and have an eBook and it’s enrolled in KDP Select then you can do FREE book promotions to try and interest and garner more reader attention.

These are just some of the steps you can take once your book is published to keep momentum up and keep it current and wanted. I hope these help you along your own author journey and if they do, please let me know in the comments.

xo Piper xo