Facebook is often an enigma to many authors when it comes to online marketing. I've talked before about social media and how it works for selling books, but I want to use this article to narrow in on Facebook and talk about how authors can take full advantage of it.

1. Use Facebook as the top of the funnel, not the bottom. Over and over the numbers show that Facebook is an awful place to directly sell your books. However, it can be a really great place to engage potential readers. Instead of trying to get them to spend money, invite them to visit your blog or join your email list.
2. Put Facebook into a bigger marketing system. Getting more fans or friends isn't the point, selling books is the point. Come up with a plan to move people from finding you on Facebook to visiting your platform and then buying a book.
3. Harness other people's fans and friends. It's much easier to get 10 people with 1000 fans/friends each to promote your book, blog post, etc than to build your own base of 10,000. Focus on building relationships with a small group of people that will gladly promote on your behalf.
4. Connect to other authors and influencers. If email or other forms of connecting fail, I've often been able to get people to respond to me on Facebook and then a followup email has a much better chance of success.

Marketing on Facebook is a tricky thing but follow these guidelines to get the most out of your efforts on this social media platform.

Image by bfishadow.

"Novels don't help you lose 10 pounds, run faster or make more money, so how I can market them online?"

I've heard this question from dozens of fiction writers, especially romance novelists. Sometimes it can be tough to come up with new ideas to market your book besides just telling people to "buy it" over and over. With that in mind, here are the top 5 pieces of advice of I've given to writers to help them get creative with marketing their romance novel.

1. Give away a tantalizing scene. Whether it's your sample on the Kindle or a downloadable PDF, give away the first part of your book but sure it's a scene that will catch reader's attention. You want people get caught up in the story right away so they'll immediately buy. How can you get the reader hooked early on?
2. Bring people along for the ride. Author Max Barry wrote his book one page at a time and released it to an email list. He get reader feedback along the way and used is as the first draft for his novel Machine Man. What are ways that you can involve your fans along the way?
3. Write companion short stories. Orbit Books has been working with their authors to release short stories based in the world of their novels. Brent Weeks released a 96 page ebook based on one of the main characters in his popular Night Angel trilogy. What if you wrote and release a few short stories and priced them extremely low to generate interest in your longer pieces of work?
4. Write more books. J.A. Konrath and John Locke are two very successful self-published authors and they both offer the same piece of advice over and over... write more books. In a world were Amazon.com drives over 90% of online book sales, you want to make sure you have lots of books available for people to buy. People that read romance novels tend to read a lot! How can you turn a one time buyer into a serial buyer?
5. Build your email list. Invite your readers to join your email list so you can stay in touch with them and let them know about new titles as you release them. This is the #1 way to build a platform that will carry you long into the future.

Bonus tip: When you give away a PDF sample of your book, make sure the last page of that sample includes your bio, book blurbs and links to immediately buy the book.

Use these tips to get creative in your online marketing for your romance novels and you'll start seeing those sales numbers go up.

Twitter is often an enigma to many authors when it comes to online marketing. I've talked before about social media and how it works for selling books, but I want to use this article to narrow in on Twitter and talk about how authors can take full advantage of it.

1. Use Twitter as the top of the funnel, not the bottom. Over and over the numbers show that Twitter is an awful place to promote your books. However, it can be a really great place to engage potential readers. Instead of trying to get them to spend money, invite them to visit your blog or join your email list.
2. Put Twitter into a bigger marketing system. Getting more followers isn't the point, selling books is the point. Come up with a plan to move people from finding you on Twitter to visiting your platform and then buying a book.
3. Harness other people's followers. It's much easier to get 10 people with 1000 followers each to promote your book, blog post, etc than to build your own following of 10,000. Focus on building relationships with a small group of people that will gladly retweet and promote on your behalf.
4. Connect to other authors and influencers. If email or other forms of connecting fail, I've often been able to get people to respond to me on Twitter and then a followup email has a much better chance of success.

Marketing on Twitter is a tricky thing but follow these guidelines to get the most out of your efforts on this social media platform.

Image by Channy Yun

"Novels don't help you lose 10 pounds, run faster or make more money, so how I can market them online?"

I've heard this question from dozens of fiction writers, especially thriller novelists. Sometimes it can be tough to come up with new ideas to market your book besides just telling people to "buy it" over and over. With that in mind, here are the top 5 pieces of advice of I've given to writers to help them get creative with marketing their thriller.

1. Give away a cliff hanger. Whether it's your sample on the Kindle or a downloadable PDF, give away the first part of your book but make sure it ends on a cliff hanger. You want people to impulse buy just to know what happens next. How can you get the reader hooked early on?
2. Bring people along for the ride. Author Max Barry wrote his book one page at a time and released it to an email list. He get reader feedback along the way and used is as the first draft for his novel Machine Man. What are ways that you can involve your fans along the way?
3. Write companion short stories. Orbit Books has been working with their authors to release short stories based in the world of their novels. Brent Weeks released a 96 page ebook based on one of the main characters in his popular Night Angel trilogy. What if you wrote and release a few short stories and priced them extremely low to generate interest in your longer pieces of work?
4. Write more books. J.A. Konrath and John Locke are two very successful self-published authors and they both offer the same piece of advice over and over... write more books. In a world were Amazon.com drives over 90% of online book sales, you want to make sure you have lots of books available for people to buy. How can you turn a one time buyer into a serial buyer?
5. Build your email list. Invite your readers to join your email list so you can stay in touch with them and let them know about new titles as you release them. This is the #1 way to build a platform that will carry you long into the future.

Bonus tip: When you give away a PDF sample of your book, make sure the last page of that sample includes your bio, book blurbs and links to immediately buy the book.

Use these tips to get creative in your online marketing for your thrillers and other novels and you'll start seeing those sales numbers go up.

Image by The Knowles Gallery

With Christmas just around the corner, it's the perfect time of year to do some creative book marketing. Books make great gifts for loved ones, not to mention, after Christmas people will have plenty of Amazon and Barnes & Noble giftcards they'll be looking to spend!

Here's 5 ideas to sell more books around the holidays.

1. Partner to success. Partner with other authors and offer several different books for sale for one low price. It's a great way to introduce yourself to new readers.
2. Offer special bonuses. Give extra content away when people purchase or perhaps send out a signed book plate. Encourage new purchases by providing extra perks to those that buy.
3. An advent series. Just like the advent calendar, give away a piece of your story every day through Christmas. Send it out via your email list or post it on your blog each day. Promote it via Twitter, Facebook and other means.
4. Special pricing. Now is the time to take advantage of the holiday deal shopper and lower your prices.

Bonus tip: If you are driving sales through online retailers like Amazon but still want to do a giveaway, just have people forward you their receipt. You can confirm their purchase and reply to their email with the special offer.

Christmas is a great time for book marketing, so take full advantage of the opportunity to sell more books!

But where does this idea go when it comes time to sell your book?  You truly believe that the more people that read your book, the better off they’ll be, yet you aren’t willing to take that step and tell them to pick up a copy and five more for their friends.

If I was laying on a bed ill and hurting and you were sitting there beside me trying to comfort me and had a bottle of pills that would cure my illness but, since you were the one that happened to create those pills felt like it was just too self-fulfilling to try to give them to me, what kind of a friend and comforter would that make you?

True, writing (usually) is not a cure for the sick, but do you see my point?  If you have something that will truly make people’s lives better but decide against getting it into as many hands as possible, how does that help this world?

Your book is something wonderful and good, so let’s see how many people we can get to read it.

If you’re a writer, my guess is that you didn’t get into this craft to get rich quick.  We all know there’s much easier ways to make money than by selling words on a page.  My guess is you got into it for the love of writing.  For the idea that you can take somebody to a far off place and show them a world they’ve never seen before.  Or maybe you’re writing to change people’s minds.  You want them to see something in a unique and interesting way.  Or maybe you just want to make somebody laugh.

Whatever the motivation, you got into writing to make the world a better place.  Even if it’s merely bringing a bit of joy to someone’s life before they fall asleep at night, your writing is there to help people.  Sure, there are writers out there that have created some sort of system that allows them to throw some words on a page (or pay someone else to do it for them) and easily turn a buck, but I don’t think that’s you.

If you’re reading a book with this title, you’re someone that that is writing to make the world a better place and I applaud you for that.  You’ve definitely made my life better.

Last year Brent released his latest title, the first in a new series.  I preordered it as soon as it was available and, once it was released, neglected my family and responsibilities to read it cover to cover.  I loved it.  Can’t wait for the next one.

Now let me ask you something.  Why did I read that book?  Was it for the author?  Was I focused on supporting him in some way?  Was it my obligation?  Did I feel like I needed to support the struggling publishing industry with my money?

Of course not.  I bought and read the book because I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.  Sure, I like the author and am thankful that the publisher brought his work to the world, but that wasn’t enough for me to pull out my wallet.  I read books because I love them.

The funny thing is, I only knew about Brent Week’s new book because he told me about it on his blog.  Otherwise, I would never have known that I could preorder it.

This “marketing” tactic of Brent’s with his blog and writing publicly about his work wasn’t some smarmy thing he did to trick me into buying something I didn’t want.  Instead, he gave me a way to easily find out about something that would make my life better.

Have you ever stopped long enough to consider what, if any, impact this going to have on book sales?  What are you doing to measure what you're doing?

From my experience with the many authors I've worked with, there's two important things I've noticed:

• People spend way more time on social media than they think.  You may think you check it here and there, but if you actually keep track, you'll notice it's sucking up hours of your day, not counting the context switching problem.
• It has way less impact than they think.  Have you ever measured how many people are taking action with a given update in social media?  Have you weighed that against the impact of other things your could be doing with that time?

Let's take for instance the Twitter following of someone like Daniel Pink.  At almost 200,000 followers, he's got numbers that most authors would kill for.  However, if you look at the publicly available stats for the links he posts, they range from a top end of 1100 clicks to a low end of under 200 clicks.  The average click-through count for a given link is around 650.

That's a 0.325% click-through rate.

With apologies to Dan... by any marketing standard that's a complete failure.  And you're not even trying to get people to buy something.  What do you think the sales rate is going to be when you want them to pay attention enough to buy your book?

And, of course, this is not just Daniel Pink's Twitter following.  These rates are the same for the vast majority of authors using Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to "market" their work.

So what can you do?

• Track how much time you are spending on social media.  Use a service such as RescueTime to see how much time is being sucked up by these platforms.  You may be surprised at how much time you're spending surfing Pinterest instead of writing your book.
• Track the actual impact your time is making.  Is it converting to book sales?  If you aren't marketing your book, is it converting to people joining your email list?  If your follower count is going up, are other measurements going up as well such as click-throughs, email list signups, etc.  A few free tools to use for this are:
  • Bitly - track click-throughs
  • Google Analytics - track visitors from Social Media to email signups or other marketing goals
  • Amazon Affiliates - track how many people are purchasing your book through different marketing efforts

Finally...

I am not advocating that you immediately drop social media if it's not creating marketing value for you.  A lot of people merely enjoy using the platform to interact with friends and fans.  However, what I'm advocating here is to stop calling something "marketing" that is having little or no impact on building your platform and selling books.

What gets measured gets done.  Look hard at the time you're spending on social media and the impact it's having on your marketing platform before continuing to poor huge amounts of time and effort into building your following there.

"Tim, there's two things writers are good at:

1. Not writing

2. Complaining about not writing"

As a writer, I'm sure you can relate to this in some fashion.  Even the great Paulo Coelho, who has sold over 65 million copies of his book, says that when he's on deadline "I start procrastinating in the morning, I check email, I check news, I check everything that I could check just to postpone [writing my book]".

If one of the most prolific writers of our time can't seem to stop procrastinating, how can you even hope to get your manuscript finished?

After talking with a lot of successful writers about their process, a common theme has come up and it all boils down to three simple rules.  But before I give you those, I want you to make a commitment to follow through with trying them.  I give you a homework assignment at the end and I guarantee that if you follow through, you'll be well on your way to finally finishing that book.

Here's your three steps to writing:

1. Do it in the morning.  You are freshest in the morning and this keeps you from being distracted later in the day.  Life happens.  Work goes nuts, kids get sick, you hit a deadline and before you know it, the day is gone and you haven't written a single word.  Or, when you finally sit down at 10pm to write, you're too exhausted to think.  Jean Chatzky says when she's writing a book she gets up two hours before her kids every morning until it's done.  Write first thing in the morning, every morning.

2. Put it on your calendar.  One to two hours a day.  For my writing, I schedule it on my calendar for first thing when I get to the office.  It's on my calendar so I can't get pulled into other meetings or phone calls.  Family obligations don't interfere because I'm at work.  Make it a non-negotiable part of your day that can only be interrupted by emergencies -- someone better be bleeding.

3. Never start without knowing what you are going to write.  All planning for your writing should be done at least by the night before.  Any outlining or research also has to be done prior to the time you've set aside for writing.  When you sit down to work, you should know the topic, scene or portion of your book that you are going to work on.  As soon as you sit down, start putting words on the screen.  It is too easy to get distracted by things "around" writing that feel effective, but aren't.  Get those out of the way first so you can immediately start typing.

Your homework assignment: Follow this advice for a week and then email me to let me know how it goes.

Please don't whine to me about not being able to get up early.  Don't tell me about how hectic your life is and you couldn't possible schedule time every day to write.  If it's important, you can do it for at least a week - I believe in you.  And imagine, a week from now you'll be emailing me to tell me how much writing you've gotten done.

Picture from Drew Coffman