Outsourcing Your Book Marketing

Outsourcing your book marketing tasks can help you from feeling overwhelmed. Here are a few tasks you can outsource.image for outsourcing book marketing post

Newsletter

Hopefully you’ve already set up a way to capture emails on your website and have a list of people waiting to hear about your book launch. A virtual assistant can put together an email template, add your content, and make sure it gets sent out.

Social Media Content & Activity

Hire a social media professional to design images branded to match your book cover image. The professional can also make sure your social media presence is active on a regular basis. The professional can do this by retweeting and sharing content, scheduling posts, and following appropriate accounts. Be sure you take an active part also in social media, even if it’s just 10 minutes a day.

Website & Blog Posts

Hire a professional to create or polish up your website. A virtual assistant can use book excerpts to create and schedule blog posts for you.

Visual Assets

You want to be sure to have a stock of visual assets to include book cover images, your headshot, an inventory of visual images for social media and any ads you plan to run. Visual assets may include video for a book trailer and book promotion and a virtual assistant to edit and post them to YouTube.

Publicity

You will want to reach out to influencers, media, book reviewers, podcasters, and others about your book. These efforts can be managed by a publicist or marketing agency.

If you need any recommendations on who to outsource book marketing tasks to, I would be happy to see how I can help you or refer you to the right person.

Get Noticed With More Publicity Using HARO

Nonfiction authors who want their book to get noticed and who are looking for more publicity are using HARO. What is HARO? It stands for Help A Reporter Out. It’s a free service to connect journalists with relevant expert sources. You may just be the source they are looking for!

I had a recent email exchange with a client and her editor discussing HARO. The editor, Candace Johnson, and I have shared several clients over the years and encourage our clients to use HARO as a way to get publicity and grow their author platform. Candace gave me permission to share some of the information from that email exchange.

Many of Candace’s clients have enjoyed great success with responding to HARO requests. Here are her best practices for HARO in a nutshell:

  • Don’t wait till the last minute to respond. Reporters get many responses, and the earlier the better.
  • Submit what they ask for in the format they request.
  • Tailor your statement to your expertise—you don’t have to have an answer for every question they ask.
  • Don’t send unrelated content; they don’t have time to spend reading a novel.
  • Use grammatically correct soundbites when you can. That makes it easy for them to spot the gems they’re looking for.
  • Include a link to your book and social media in your brief bio.

Candace also provided links to additional information to help craft a great response.

https://buildbookbuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/How-to-respond-to-HARO-queries.pdf

http://janetabachnick.com/7-must-haves-for-a-successful-haro-media-pitch/

HARO requests can also be used as prompts for blogs and you can link back to the article the reporter writes. Links like that are very helpful to SEO.

Candace wrote a blog post about HARO I encourage you to read. Candace and her two daughters have been quoted in articles after responding to HARO requests. I too have responded to HARO requests and been quoted in articles. So we know it works to respond to requests – if the pitch is good.

Start your path to get noticed with more publicity using HARO. Sign up as a source!

Leverage Book Awards

There are a variety of book contests and award programs for nonfiction authors. Some provide specific feedback that may be helpful to make your book even better.

Once your book has received an award, use that in your book marketing. Here are some ways to leverage your book award.

  • Add “award-winning” to your book cover, bios, Amazon book description
  • Create and send out a press release to local media
  • Contact local book stores to see if you can do a book signing
  • If an in-person event doesn’t make sense, host a virtual event to celebrate
  • Announce your book award to your email list and on social media
  • Host a giveaway to celebrate!

Winning a book award can lead to a traditional publisher (if that’s what you want), speaking engagements, and more book sales. For more information read our post about some quality award programs.

Using a Press Release for Book Promotion

A press release is a great book promotion tool for nonfiction authors. It lets the media know why your book is timely and practical, and can help you get publicity for your book. It’s perfect for announcing your initial book release. However, you can also use additional press releases for your book any time you can tie in your book’s topic to a current event or topic.

As an example, my client Deborah Olson sent out a press release around Friendship Day because it tied in with the topic of her book The Healing Power of Girlfriends: How to Create Your Best Life Through Female Connection.

Press releases can be submitted online and to local media people. For the best results, take time to research how to write a press release and when it’s written, proofread carefully and have another set of eyes proofread again.

Your Book Publicity Menu: Dessert, Media Contacts List

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Book Publicity Mini-Course

We’ve discussed your three-course book publicity menu: website, mailing list, social media. Now time for dessert.

Just as a very special dessert may take a lot of time and attention to detail, so does creating and maintaining a media contacts list.

Start in your local area by gathering local media names and contact information. Keep a spreadsheet with all that contact information and track when you reach out and the response you get. You can get a lot of contact information by doing a Google search, such as “Phoenix radio stations” or “Houston newspapers”, etc.

Once you’ve had a positive response from a media person, send a thank you and stay in touch. Develop these relationships. They are gold in your book publicity efforts.