If you are a writer who doesn’t like marketing and selling your books, you are going to hate this. After all, you’ve spent months or years writing your book and polishing it, got little or no response from agents or publishers and so you said “to hell with it, I’m going to publish it myself.” So now you are ready to launch it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Indiebound. But launching a self-published book on Amazon is like dropping your child into the ocean — it just disappears without a splash. Your book/child needs a brightly colored life raft, a beacon to attract rescuers, and an army of searchers looking for it. In the self-publishing world, there are some things you can do to promote your book, attract attention and help make your launch successful.
One way to keep your new book afloat and get it noticed is by building an effective landing page – a Web page devoted to your book. But to be truly effective, a landing page needs eight different features, and to find out what those are, I attended a webinar yesterday, titled “What Every Indie Author Needs to Know About Book Landing Pages,” presented by Joel Friedlander and a team from Booklaunch.io.
You can check out the video link above for the complete presentation, but here’s a quick summary of my notes from the webinar.
Book Cover: First impressions matter. A strong cover establishes as serious offer. The most dominant feature of a landing page is the book cover. It must capture attention instantly.
Headline Copy: Headline copy should capture the visitor’s attention for the next 3 to 5 seconds with a “clear, concise and confident communication” about “What’s in it for the reader?” For a fiction book, that means why your characters and plot are captivating and a must-read. Invoke curiosity, tantalize and leave them wanting more. Drive them further down the landing page.
Call to Action: Don’t go on hoping they will continue reading, provide an immediate call to action – most often an opportunity to buy your book. Purchases are impulse driven. Ebooks, and self-published books are inexpensive and low-risk purchases. Provide a button that is high-contrast where your reader can purchase the book.
Book Trailer Video: Authors are now building movie-type trailers for their books. Here’s an example.
Self-Identifiable Bio: Who are you as the author? When you write your bio make sure you talk about who you are. People buy from people they know and like. Be personal and let people into your world. Provide contact info, email and social network links. Don’t hold off your readers. Be human. Readers want to follow the author and engage in conversation.
Sneak Peek: Give readers a gift, the first chapter or two, or give a chapter that didn’t make it into the final version. People want to finish things they start. Give readers something they can bite into.
Endorsements: Have reviews and endorsements ready before you launch, as they elevate the value. Get people who reviewed your early drafts, etc. to write reviews that you can have ready at launch, and have as many good reviews as possible.
The Network Effect: Allow readers to share their interest in your book. Empower the reader to share the good word. Let readers share in an outward way, make it easy to link to your landing page. Book clubs have congregated around books for a long time. Now in online world, allow readers to do the same via social networking. It is word of mouth.
I’m not an expert on landing pages, and I took the webinar to find out what I needed to do. You may notice that my book link goes to an Amazon.com’s author page, which is OK for now, but I’m going to start building some landing pages and put this data into use. Let me know if you are doing something similar, I’d like to talk over what you’ve discovered.
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