Publishing A Book Sucks (Part 4)
So, my book was finally published and I was living on Cloud 9 honey!
My job threw me a surprise release party and that made things all the better. My fellow employees had bought copies they wanted me to sign, in addition there were some that wanted to buy a book on the spot. Luckily, I had a box of books in my car. So, my sales were flourishing, but that was because of my family, friends and co-workers.
When you finish reading a book and you enjoy it immensely, what is one of the first things you do? Find out more about the author! You go to google and you are trying to find any and everything about the beloved author. And Woah and behold! You end up on their website.
First thing, I didn't have a website. Where would my readers go to find out about my books, upcoming projects and who I was as an author? Again, I should have been had this up, but I was a newbie!
So,I went back to my favorite website Fiverr(I mentioned this website in my earlier post about designing my cover) because I couldn't afford to go the normal route of getting a website created.
And let's be clear I did try to create my own website on Wix, but remember in my post about my cover how I said I don't have a creative bone in my body besides being able to write? Yeah, so that creation went to hell within five minutes and I ran over to to Fiverr.
Fiverr has a great option, where you can post a request stating what you need and freelancers can respond to your post. When you do this you get a lot of responses! You have to comb through the responses, ask questions, look at profiles and determine who is the best fit.
I finally settled on "the creative guys". https://www.fiverr.com/thecreativeguys
Joe was amazing and most importantly, he was patient. Just like with my cover, I had no idea what I wanted, but the ideas started to flow once I started brainstorming with him. We decided to have him reinvent the site I had previously tried creating on Wix. He did an amazing job as you can see! He finished it within three days and I immediately posted my site on all of my social media sites.
Then I sat back and waited for people to visit my website.
To my surprise, no one freaking visited! That's when I realized this book wasn't going to sell itself and neither was my website. I began researching and looking for book bloggers in my specific genre,Young Adult fiction. I emailed them and asked them to review my book. Again,this should've have been done well in advance using ARC's Advance Reader Copies. I also encouraged my readers to post their reviews on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads,iTunes, and KOBO. I purchased ads on Facebook and Instagram,and setup giveaways on Amazon and Goodreads.
I constantly posted about my book on Instagram, because I learned that is where my audience resided. This is VERY important. Learn who your audience is and what social media they use. If your product caters to middle aged adults, Instagram or Snapchat probably won't be the social media to use. You get my drift?
I marketed like this for a couple months, when in reality I should have never stopped marketing. Writing the book is the easy part, getting people to read it is the hard part! Never stop marketing!!!!!
Even though self-publishing a book sucks, the end result is so worth it! No one else reaps all of the benefits, but
I hope that this helps you so that you don't make the same mistakes I made and self publishing won't suck for you!
