What You Should Know About Book Covers

In this video, I will walk you through the important aspects of getting your book cover design right for book platforms like Amazon and Apple. Ultimately, you are the one who must sign off on the book cover design and this information will help you make an informed decision as to whether the cover is the best it can be.

What Are the Costs of Promoting A Book?

What are the costs of promoting a book?

Are you stuck wondering how much to budget for promoting and marketing your book? You’re not alone. Just looking around the internet at ways to do book promotion, it seems you could feasilby spend hundreds of dollars every month. But don’t be fooled – you  don’t have to spend a fortune marketing your book

Since here are so many ways to promote a book judging the cost is difficult. For the sake of this article, I will focus on the costs of what I believe are the most effective book promotion techniques.

Effective Book Promotion

The best ways also happen to be the least expensive if you can do the work yourself. The techniques I recommend are:

  1. Writing articles / blog posts
  2. Video
  3. Press release
  4. Social media

You’re probably not surprised by any of those. Yet, most authors look right past those methods and search instead for the ‘new’ easy way to sell thousands of books. The reality is that those hot new methods are expensive and the results are far from stellar for most people.

Why are these the methods I recommend? First, because the work. Second, because they are cost effective. Third, because they tend to stick around on the internet and work for you week after week, month after month, year after year. You simply have to do the work once and then you have a perpetual book promotion piece doing work for you for years to come.

What Is Required to Support Your Book Promotion

Using the methods outlined above as the guide for what to do I want to talk about the infrastructure you need to put those in action.

Probably the most important tool in your toolbox is a website. You can post articles, blog posts, videos, audios, and even link your social media to a website. Without getting off on a tangent here, I will say that your best off with an author website over a book website. One author can produce many books and why not leverage the traffic from your last series of book promotions to launch your next book?

The other methods don’t require the same infrastructure like a website does. However, you may find that you want professionally designed graphics for your website and other social media presences.

How Much You Can Expect to Pay

For a website you need a domain name (the address of your site) and web hosting. Plan to use WordPress for the site – which is free.

Cost for the site: $10 / year for domain; $10 / month for hosting.

Video is something you can do for free or you can expect to pay for. If you want video but don’t have the budget for it, consider using YouTube’s own video creation tools. All you have to do is log in to your Google account and set up a Channel for your videos (you can have many channels). Inside the Channel page, you’ll see options for recording slide show videos with your narrating or with a musical background.

Of course, you can pay to have video done for you. For book promotion, I do not recommend spending more than $150 on a video. You will see offers that cost as much as $3,500. You don’t need a television quality commercial. Instead, you just need to reach those people that are consuming their content through video instead of reading.

Cost: Free to $150 per video

A press release is one of the most effective tools besides your website. I place it in this list after video because many press release services will let you include a video (or link to your video trailer) in the document. The difference in cost between press release services largely has to do with the list of media contacts they have and who they will send your release to. Basically, the more you pay, the more media outlets will see your release. It is questionable whether you really get more from a book promotion standpoint for paying for a more expensive press release service.

Cost: $30 (Webwire) to $300 (PRWeb)

Social media shouldn’t cost you anything unless you want to pay to have some professionally designed graphics for your backgrounds and headers. Having a professional look is a good idea. But if you are tight on funds, try Fiverr for your design work.

Cost: Free to $100 for design work

The last cost I want to discuss is outsourcing. Not everyone has the time or desire to write articles, blog posts, and social media posts. You may be in that boat too. Don’t worry, it does not mean you will be unable to promote your book. Instead, you should plan to pay someone else to do it for you.

Cost: Articles / blog posts $60 – 100 / month for 4 – 5 articles

Social media: $50 – 75 / month for 20 + social media posts

Summary

There are dozens of ways to promote your book but if you focus your work on the core techniques of writing content for articles, blog posts, creating videos, doing a press release, and using social media, you effectively promote your book without spending a fortune.

 

Where to Begin With Book Promotion

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Wondering where to begin with book promotion?

Spreading the word about your book is an essential part of publishing. And frankly, no one way of promoting your book stands out as the best. But in the following article, I will show you a combination of methods for promoting your book that work extremely well when done together.

Write Articles / Blog Posts

Writing articles and/or blog posts is a valuable way to promote your book. The more of these you write, the better. You really can’t do too many.

One of the tricks with writing is to mix up where you post your work. If you have an author blog or book website, those are great places to post your work. But be sure to write for article directories too.

And probably one of the best (and hardest) methods for promoting your book is to get your article / post published on another popular blog in your niche or genre.

Be sure that the articles / posts you write have a link back to another of your works – whether that be another article, your book sales page, or your video trailer.

Video Trailer

More and more people consume information online through videos. Like it or not, it is a reality. So why not put your book in front of this huge audience?

Imagine the last commercial you saw for a new movie – it is a quick two to three minute “commercial”. Your book trailer should be the same. No more than three minutes long.

And you can leave out the special effects! A simple PowerPoint slide show that is recorded as a video will work fine as a book trailer. The main thing is to get your message across to the viewer. The video trailer should communicate the ‘hook’ that makes your book worth reading.

Make sure to mention the title of your book and a website or article where people can go to learn more about your book!

When the video trailer is ready, post it on YouTube and be sure to create a full channel description complete with a link back to your book sales page or your author website. YouTube will also give you a link so you can embed the video on your website or in a press release!

Press Release

Sending out a press release about your book is probably the most effective method of book promotion in this list. But it is made more effective when you have a great article or video trailer to link to or include with your press release.

A quick search for “submit a press release” will turn up hundreds of websites where you can submit your release. The price varies by site and distribution network. A press release on PRWeb will cost around $300 while Webwire will cost about $30. The difference is in who the release gets sent to. You can release your news free to your local newspaper too and I recommend doing that.

If you are tight on money, go with a press release through Webwire – the main thing here is to get your release about your book out through Google News.

Be sure to include your video trailer in the press release – some will let you directly embed the video with the press release. Others will not let you embed the video – but you can simply link to it.

Summary

None of these methods of book promotion are necessarily more important than the other. But if you do all of these things, they provide a solid overall promotion for your book. And keep in mind that linking these works together will make your book promotion even stronger.

Photo: Madzia Bryll on Flickr