“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.
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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.
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