book expo america – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

SFFMP 34: Facebook Marketing, BookBub, and Tips from Book Expo America

June 9, 2015 SFFpodcast Group Discussion, Uncategorized

We talked among ourselves tonight, discussing a lot of the news and tips Jo brought back from Book Expo America. He went to panels on Facebook marketing/reader engagement and talked to the Bookbub people about what it takes to get listed and about some of the best practices. He also picked up some links to cool resources that you may want to check out.

Here’s a run-down of his notes:

Using Facebook to the best effect:

· Facebook will always do its best to decrease the impact of non-paid advertising.

· If you want to get the most bang for your buck, use whatever Facebook’s pet toy is. They will reward you with greater reach for free. Until they don’t.

· Currently their toy is video. A 15-30 second video will get a much bigger push than post with any other media, or no media at all. (Don’t try to link to a video on another platform; you need to upload the video directly to Facebook to get their loving.)

· A site you can use to create videos without a lot of tech savviness is Animoto

· You can put a link at the end of the video, to actually get some use out of it.

· Also, ask questions, because engagement amplifies reach.

· And if you’re going to pursue something pursue shares. They expand your reach by the most.

Book Bub:

· I talked to BookBub and asked for advice on how to make your book more likely to be chosen.

· As expected, there’s a strong emphasis on a good cover and strong reviews.

· The role that price point (and how much of a discount you offer) plays

· Whether being in KDP Select puts you at a disadvantage to books available on a wide variety of platforms.

· The reviews are by are the most important. A book with a great cover and a dozen decent reviews will probably lose to a book with a mediocre cover and fifty great reviews.

· However, even if your book is flawless, with a perfect cover and hundreds of reviews, you might not get picked.

· This is either because they were fully booked for the available period, or because your book is in a genre that has historically gotten poor click through.

· In neither case are you doomed, they CAN still promo your book, but you’ll have to be persistent. New openings occur every day, and there’s always the chance your non-favored genre book will have no suitable competition for a given period.

· They also gave advice on how best to promote your books depending on your goals.

Shooting for a Best Seller:

* Discount the most popular book (if you’ve got one with over 100 reviews, use that).

* Discount to lowest price possible. (99 cents, since free won’t count)

Marketing a Series

* Discount first book.

* Free if possible.

* Discount for three or more days.

* Link to series in back matter.

Products that caught Jo’s interest:

· Note: We aren’t being paid to mention these folks; Jo just thought they were interesting and potentially useful.

* PiracyTrace: https://piracytrace.com/

* Service that proactively searches the web for plagiarism of your work.

* BookMarq: http://bookmarq.io/

* An iOS App that is looking to be a slicker, dedicated mobile alternative to goodreads.

* Slicebooks (https://slicebooks.com/en) and YaBeam (http://yabeam.com/)

Slicebooks is a service that lets you chop your book into chapters for distribution purposes. More useful for nonfiction, because users can create mix and match derivative books by taking an assortment of chapters from different books and share the result.

YaBeam is a service that uses the iBeacon feature of iOS to advertise to people by causing a notification when they walk by a YaBeam beacon. IE stick one at the door of a book store where you are doing a signing to offer passers by a heads-up that you’re in there and a free chapter to entice them.

* Lithomobilus: http://lithomobilus.com/

Think of this as choose your own adventure, or DVD extras for books. It uses the epub 3 enhancements to allow you to link to alternate scenes, fan art, etc that tie in to the current portion of a text. And of course, you can SELL this additional content.

* Vellum: (https://180g.co/vellum/)

This is an ebook formatting software for Mac that creates BEAUTIFUL template based ebooks in epub 2, epub 3, and mobi. Super user friendly, built in previews, etc. Like Scrivener if it was focused on publishing a book rather than writing it. (Though you can write in it too.)

$30 for single use, $200 for unlimited.

* Dropcards (http://www.dropcards.com/home/)

* Enchanted world of Boxes: http://enchantedboxes.com/wholesale/catalog.htm?line=19