This week’s guest post comes from Dr. Cathy Goodwin, a copywriter and web site marketing consultant. She addresses an important book marketing strategy that most authors have no idea how to get and use–book reviews.
Are you an author who just finished writing a book? Congratulations: you can take pride in a major accomplishment. But after you mail your final chapters to your publisher, you now face an even bigger challenge: finding readers who will be eager to buy your book.
These days, every author needs to be a book marketing expert. Even if you are published by a big New York house, such as Random House or Harper Collins, you will most likely receive limited funds to help with your marketing. I once met an author who reported, slightly stunned, “Even though they gave me a 6-figure advance, they didn’t help with marketing the book. You would think they’d want to protect their investment.”
When you self-publish, you won’t have an advance to use for publicity and marketing. Your book will not be included in catalogs and may not be picked up by distributors. Therefore it will be even more critical to use your marketing resources for maximum effectiveness.
In any case, book tours today are exhausting. You have delays, long lines in security, and impersonal hotel rooms. Even when you reach your destination, you might find yourself talking to just a few people, especially if the weather just turned cold.
So what do you do next? Your marketing pro, publicist and/or publisher probably gave you the same advice: Get some book reviews on Amazon. They were right.
Your first question should be, “What do reviewers expect from books on this topic or in this genre?” Plan to look at several dozen reviews in your genre. Reviewers (perhaps unconsciously) evaluate your book based on consistency with genre.
Your genre is the category of a book. Mystery, self-help, romance, memoir, literary fiction, biography, science fiction and religion are examples of genres. Within each genre, you find authors specializing in sub-genres. For example, mystery sub-genres include the amateur sleuth, private detective, police procedural and cozy.
One of the biggest mistakes authors make is mixing genres. Often they think they can illustrate a self-help book with extended stories from their own lives. Alternatively they write a memoir with “lessons for readers” after each chapter. Reviewers, like any readers, tend to want one or the other.
Some topics tend to be associated with specific genres. For instance, one popular author interviewed a few dozen people about their careers. He specifically stated his book was not intended as self-help. Still, reviewers tended to be puzzled. They were programmed to view “career” as “self-help.”
Book reviews can promote your book but most authors don’t know how to get not just reviews, but reviews that lead to sales. Dr. Cathy Goodwin, a published author and prolific online book reviewer, gets requests from authors nearly every week. She shares secrets of getting reviews (and 5-star reviews) in a FREE e-book you can download immediately. Visit http://www.BookMarketingWeb.com for immediate access.
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