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    How to Market Your Books Without Spending a Dime: Self-Publishing Without Spending a Dime, #3
    How to Market Your Books Without Spending a Dime: Self-Publishing Without Spending a Dime, #3
    How to Market Your Books Without Spending a Dime: Self-Publishing Without Spending a Dime, #3
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    How to Market Your Books Without Spending a Dime: Self-Publishing Without Spending a Dime, #3

    By Prasenjeet Kumar

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    About this ebook

    Finally a Book on Marketing that cuts out the Fluff and Focuses only on the Essentials

    Are you bombarded with strange and esoteric marketing advice, to sell your books in 1000 ways, that leaves you baffled, bewildered and terribly confused?

    Do you feel that learning and mastering those complicated strategies have sucked away all the joy you once had for writing?

    Then this book focusing on the bare essentials for marketing your book may just be what the doctor ordered.

    From Prasenjeet Kumar, the #1 Best Selling Author of "Self-Publishing Without Spending A Dime" series of books, comes a book that after discussing threadbare all the fluff and jargon that marketing gurus spout establishes why 'less is always more'.

    At last!

    This book covers the following topics:

    * Should you self-publish at all?

    * Pros and cons of exclusivity

    * The futility of conventional marketing tactics such as hanging out on social media, contacting reviewers, entering Goodreads Giveaways, etc.

    * Mindset issues

    * Effectiveness of Perma-Free versus the Perma $0.99 strategy

    * How to engage and sell your books to your readers via e-mail marketing

    * And much more

    BONUS: Learn How to Evaluate a Paid Advertising Option

    * Which books to promote?

    * Which sites to use?

    * How to avoid fraudulent sites?

    * How to track your sales without the use of any magical software?

    * The best form of promotion.

    And more, without spending a dime as promised.

    So what are you waiting for?

    Just scroll up and hit the Buy button or download a sample now.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPublish With Prasen
    Release dateJan 14, 2016
    ISBN9781524269715
    How to Market Your Books Without Spending a Dime: Self-Publishing Without Spending a Dime, #3

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    • 5/5
      absolutely wonderful book. enjoyed every word of it. Thank You Prasanjeet

    Book preview

    How to Market Your Books Without Spending a Dime - Prasenjeet Kumar

    This book is dedicated to my parents who from my early childhood drilled into me the lessons of this beautiful Sanskrit Shloka:

    Udyamen hi siddhayante karyani na manoratha

    Nahin suptasya sinhasya pravishanti mukhe mriga.

    Meaning: Only by hard work are wishes fulfilled and not by daydreaming about them. Even a mighty lion cannot afford to keep sleeping and hope that a deer will just walk into his jaws.

    Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.

    – Henry Ford

    Part I: The Basics

    Chapter 1: Why Less is More

    THE CONSUMER IS NOT a moron; she is your wife.

    – David Ogilvy

    Let me be brutally frank.

    I believe in plain and simple Essentialism.

    That is, in fact, the underlying philosophy of this Book, as well as that of my entire Self-publishing WITHOUT SPENDING A DIME series of books.

    Do you want to know why? For that, let me start with a little background.

    After a reasonably successful stint in Corporate Law, I started my writing career in September 2013. In just about two years, I have been able to write and publish 14 books (this is the 15th) in three genres—cookbooks (Cooking In A Jiffy series), motivational books for introverts (Quiet Phoenix series) and self-publishing (Self-Publishing WITHOUT SPENDING A DIME series).

    In addition, I could also publish eleven translations of my books into languages such as German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese. Four more are in the process of translation into various languages.

    Like any other writer, I was initially clueless about marketing. So I researched, picked up a lot of business books on marketing for authors and, believe it or not, read all of them. Most books expounded on so many strange and esoteric marketing techniques that they left me baffled, bewildered and terribly confused.

    Many advised writers to blog, podcast, hang out on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Tumblr, Reddit, Stumble Upon, Pinterest, LinkedIn and goddamn any other social media site that they, the writers, could get a hang of. They also recommended to create YouTube Videos and online courses. Some wanted you to pick up speaking assignments, and in addition take the initiative to contact guest bloggers and book reviewers.

    Phew!

    THIS IS NOT THE INTENTION OF THIS BOOK, let me declare it loud and clear.

    I am not going to overwhelm you with 1000 ways to market your books. In fact, I am going to focus on just a few essential things that you need to do to actually sell your books. The rest are optional and, if I may dare, are even serious time, money and energy wasters.

    I firmly believe that your time is better spent in writing, spending quality time with your family, going to the gym or watching a movie, than on those 1000 things that are recommended for boosting the sales rank of your books.

    If you want to understand this core principle of Essentialism, may I suggest Greg McKeown’s best-selling book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less? The book deals with the topic of essentialism in every aspect of one’s life and I have tried to apply the same principles to marketing my books.

    Admittedly, I have personally experimented with and bumbled along a host of highly recommended techniques. I have tried to promote my Facebook Fan page, built my Twitter audience, ran half a dozen Goodreads Giveaways, contacted book bloggers and reviewers, and filled up innumerable forms for FREE and 0.99 promotions. In this book, I shall try to share all those experiences -good, bad and ugly.

    But if the suspense is killing you and if you are dying to know, in one line, if any of the above mentioned techniques worked, then let me admit, somewhat sheepishly, that all these marketing techniques actually turned out to be quite non-essential. I would have done quite well to avoid these from the very beginning. Anyway, I would be expounding on them in greater detail in the second Part of this book under the heading Big Time or Money Wasters-Things to Avoid.

    On the other hand, if you want to know what really works as a Marketer, you can straightaway move to Part IV-How to build and Market Your Book-Step by Step.

    If you feel that you have been implementing all these steps but with little to no results, I suggest that you read Part III—Mindset.

    To repeat, there are very few things that are truly essential, when it comes to marketing your book. Once you know them, you can very easily channelise all your energies in that one direction, than in a million other money and time-wasting ones.

    You will get better sales, your subscriber base will slowly increase and your mailbox may soon explode with countless, exuberant fan mail. Yet you will not be over worked and would have plenty of time to enjoy life with your family.

    So is this book right for you?

    It may, if:

    1. You have written at least one book and are ready to publish it. It doesn’t matter if you have even considered traditional publishing and may already have collected a pile of rejection letters. The important point is that you are now thinking of self-publishing and you now want to know what happens when you publish your book all by yourself.

    2. You have already self-published your first book and in absence of a traditional publisher pushing your book, you wish to understand how you can market your book better.

    3. You have already published a few books, tried out a few marketing techniques but are not really sure what works and what does NOT. You wish to understand how you can utilise your time and money more effectively.

    4. You want to understand Marketing and NOT productivity. I am not going to give you any tips about overcoming the writer’s block, creating a professional looking cover, editing or formatting. If you are looking for any of those answers, please feel free to refer to my book ‘How to be an Author Entrepreneur WITHOUT SPENDING A DIME’.

    5. You are struggling to make sales. This book is obviously NOT relevant for you if you are an author who sells thousands of books in a year (because by now you would have already figured out what works and what does NOT work for you).

    6. You don’t enjoy hanging out on Social Media and feel that your time is better spent writing more books.

    7. Your goal is to make a living from your writing (whatever that means to you) and NOT to become a NY Times Best Seller. This is because it is possible to make a living and have a writing career WITHOUT ever hitting the NY Times Best Seller list. Let me explain this a little bit more.

    Hypothetically, if a book sells 20,000 copies in a week and nothing thereafter, it may still hit the NY Times Best Seller list for that particular week. However, if the same book sells 1000 copies a week, week after week for the next 12 months, it may not hit any Best Seller list. But it would have sold more copies (52,000) than the one which sold a flashier 20,000 copies in one week.

    This is because any Best Seller list is calculated on the basis of sales over a short span of time, usually a week, or even a particular day. Obviously the marketing strategies deployed to get that spike would be different (and costlier) than the ones required to get a sustained sales over a longer time horizon.

    This book focuses on the latter, in the belief that in the long run you are better of being a patient tortoise than a glamorous rabbit that traditional publishing promises to turn you into.

    Some basic principles of Marketing

    Just as every writer is different, so is every reader. So there cannot be one marketing solution that will suit all writers and all readers.

    If you go to a High Street fashion store, you’d notice how the salesgirls there try to upsell a product to a prospective customer. If a customer shows interest in one type of a dress, he or she is to be persuaded to either buy the most expensive design in that category or to buy ten other related products, because they are on SALE or carry a special OFFER just for YOU on that day.

    Same is the situation when you visit a car showroom. The job of the salesmen there would be to try to sell you either the most expensive car you can afford or to add on as many accessories, insurance and servicing plans as possible to the model you have chosen.

    What is not taught to these commission-driven salespersons is that every customer is a human being and is DIFFERENT. Some customers may get excited and happily splurge on ten other related products; in which case the marketing strategy could be termed a success. But (and it’s a big BUT) some customers may be put off by the hard sell and may leave the showroom in disgust swearing never ever to come back. In that case you would have lost a prospective customer forever.

    The simple point is that this one-size-fits-all strategy does not work for everyone. I can’t overstress this point, except to request to please bear this in mind while you read this book.

    If you want to understand how every reader is different, I would wholeheartedly recommend an excellent blog post by author Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

    I fully agree with what she says about different kinds of readers and why one type of marketing strategy does not work for all.

    Just as every customer is different, so is every writer. Some writers are extroverted and love meeting new people, picking up speaking assignments, creating YouTube videos or podcasts (which is a new way to speak to your audience). They may be put off by the advice that they should instead write more than one book in a year and may retort that the pressure of producing more books will only burn them out faster.

    My advice to such writers: Don’t. Neither focus on writing more books in a year nor give up on podcasting or speaking assignments that you apparently love so much.

    However, if you are an introvert, you can’t help but keep a low profile. You may be reluctant to talk about your books, especially in public. You may be even uncomfortable hanging out on social media, beyond a point, but may be wondering whether you should be stepping out of your comfort zone since this is what all marketing gurus advise.

    And then you realise that if you wanted to blog, podcast or create YouTube videos, you have to learn new skills and may in addition have to invest in some new technology.

    If the "complications’’ outlined above are already making you cringe, I have some good news. You really don’t need to do any of this. You don’t need to be pushy and keep on tweeting about your books all the time or sending emails every day or two cajoling your readers, friends and family members to buy your latest book.

    In fact, if you did that, you may be surprised to find that talking about your books all the time puts off many of your readers and fans. An unpleasant result could be that your Twitter followers may unfollow, e-mail subscribers may unsubscribe, and family members may stop replying to your messages, and so on.

    And this is a fact. People don’t like being marketed to all the while. We fast forward television commercials, if our TV boxes allow that,

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