13 Ways to Find New Readers for Your Books

In today's guest post, Laura Pepper Wu discusses 13 ways to generate publicity and find new customers. These tips are excerpted from her book, 77 Ways to Find New Readers for Your Self-Published Book.  

1. Guest post on other non-writing/ author sites. Try lifestyle blogs, specific interest bloggers and other sites that your ideal readers may well spend time on.

2. Blog, blog, blog. Stick to a few topics that somehow relate to your book or book’s target audience and create content regularly and consistently that will engage and interest these potential readers.

3. Change your Amazon pen name (e.g. Laura Pepper becomes “Wedding-book Author Laura Pepper” or “Wedding expert”) and write reviews on similar books. Browsers on Amazon may well click through to your book. Learn abouto Amazon pen names here.

4. Participate in a GoodReads giveaway (Paperback only). Even those who don’t win will be exposed to your book and may buy it anyway.

5. Try a LibraryThing giveaway (eBooks and paperback).

6. Create lists on Amazon that feature your book – and tie you to other books in your genre/ field. These include Listmania and So You’d Like to… listings.

7. Post your blog posts on Reddit.com. You can get a ton of traffic from sites such as Reddit, but be sure that your post is posted in the right group (or ‘subreddit’) and is not overly promotional otherwise you’ll get a very negative reaction from the community. Users tend to be, ahem, opinionated!

8. Submit a blogpost to Digg.com.

9. Start a YouTube channel – if you’re a-okay with being on camera, consider talking about something in your niche online. YouTube has a huge number of browsers just waiting to be entertained. Speaking on camera is a great way to connect with new readers. (Find my YouTube channel here – please subscribe if you’d like to see more interviews!)

10. If you have a non-fiction book, publish your full table of contents on your website, and make it as key-word rich as possible! When people are searching for the answer to a problem or a solution, your book will rank higher in search engines.

11. Which reminds me, be sure to implement some form of SEO to your blog or author website. If you can’t afford a professional SEO consultant to do a few hours of work optimizing your site, learn the basics yourself. There are tons of eBooks on this, including free ones. Be sure to add a plugin to your WordPress website such as All-in-One-SEO and learn how to use it. It will improve the ranking of your site in Google’s search results significantly!

12. Are you a children’s author based in the United States? Check out America Writes for Kids! and ask to be included in their list of authors.

13. Upload your posts, articles and first chapters to open-submission platforms - sites that describe themselves as reader-writer communities and allow users to publish and discover writings. They tend to get a ton of traffic each day, and are therefore a great way to “grow your platform” and drive more traffic to your blog. There are several out there, but include Scribd, DocStoc, Wattpad and Open Salon.

About the Author

Laura Pepper Wu is the co-founder of 30 Day Books: a book studio, and the author of 77 Ways to Find New Readers for Your Self-Published Book.  

Comments

[Latricejones2001]

Another good book on that topic is Shelly Hitz's book " 21 things you can easily do for free to get more exppsure and sales". it is a really great book for those who are promoting your book. It gives you by step instruction on keyword optimization ( which use to baffle me ) and so much more.

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Thanks Latrice – Shelley Hitz definitely has some great marketing tips for authors.

[Moulton A. Mayers]

There is a lot of glib, easy believism about book marketing that just does not go deep enough. The indiscriminate emphassis on online marketing at the expanse of encouraging writers to creat their own inventive approach to selling their books has done much damage to potentially good writers. This is not at all to invalidate or minify the awesome power of the Internet; the overemphasis on this single marketing machine has robbed writers of the truth of their responsibility to sell their own books. It is very unfortunate that many Internet marketing approaches do not really work and flush with moral thieves who fail to bat an eye to rip budding writers off. All ideas about Internet marketign are wonderful; but a broader and more comprehensive, inventive system of selling books is needed because many of these book-selling avenues have been saturated; in addition, there are far too many people writing books who have not been called to the profession of writing: This has greatly complicated the sorting process--every hot and tot on the block now is a writer. This has tremendously diluted the real value of literary virtue in the world.

Everyne has a spark of greatness, but that spark is not writing--it is unique and person sensitive. Thus, everyone has greatness in him or her, but messing around with the royal talent of writing has greatly damaged the writing profession. Writing is a very spiny, gritty, thorny profession that requires tremendous effort and patience and determination--and sad to, most people who are writing books just do not have that kind of "Read the book twenty times before you publish it" determination. Good writing takes time--plenty of time. No one has any business publishing a book that does not approach masterpiece status. Good writers have to be baked in the oven of time and their talent has to rest for its perfection. Real writers are willing to knock on doors to move the masterpiece that they have produced: And when you write at that level, you will not knock on too many doors before things start happening for you. You may want to take a look at my website where I am working on long-running series on book marketing. Just some food for thought.

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Thanks for your note Moulton. This article contains 13 tips excerpted from Laura's book, but of course there are many other ways to promote books. The most effective marketing strategies for any particular book will depend on the type of book and the target audience. Most authors rely heavily on online promotions because it’s an efficient way to reach a large audience, but a good book marketing plan should include a variety of promotional tactics. I also advise authors to consider their own strengths, time constraints and budget in developing their marketing plan. I completely agree with you that it's important for authors to have their work edited.