Tag: conversion

5 Ways to Use Social Media as Part of Your Book Marketing Plan

Social media is not a marketing plan but can be part of a larger strategy because it is a connection tool. It helps you to find, connect with, and nurture your audience.

It is through these connections that you build the like and trust factor. People believe in you and trust you.

When people believe in you, they buy from you.

Here are Some Ways to Use Social Media as Part of Your Larger Strategy:

Share your journey and inspiration.

Why are you writing this book? Who are some of your favorite authors and their books? What inspired you to write in the first place? What’s the story behind your title? What’s your story?

Follow accounts related to your topic.

Who follows you on social media is less important than who YOU follow. These accounts influence you personally and train the algorithm to show you more of the same.

Engaging with accounts that are relatable to your topic, beliefs, morals, values, and passions will do two things.

First, it will make you aware of trending topics in the news related to your area of expertise, which will help you create relatable content.

Discussing current events related to your book’s genre can be a great way to generate interest and attention while using social media to share your thoughts and insights. This helps build your author platform, authority, and attract more readers to your work.

Secondly, following like-minded accounts and engaging with them will introduce you to more people who might enjoy reading your kind of book.

Center Content Around the Topics/Themes of Your Book

Focus your messaging on connections and themes related to your book. Consider how the post might be educational, inspirational/motivational, informative, or entertaining. Even when I post something silly to TikTok, I make sure it aligns with what I am known for.

My rule of thumb is that the post must have something to do with black history/history in general, poetry, or books in some way. As a result of only focusing on these things, I’ve grown my TikTok account from 3K to 26.1K followers, highest view at 1.5 million, and increased subscriptions to my email list.

Leverage Relationships

Collaborate with other writers, authors, and business people who write books similar to yours or offer a service you can benefit from. Can they get you on their podcast? Review your book? Promote it on their pages? Can they repost/share your book cover? Do they know of anyone who can offer a service related to what you do? As the old saying goes, “closed mouths don’t get fed.” A lot of opportunities to gain exposure comes from simply asking.

Social Proof

We live in a world where most people only believe what they see. Share screenshots of book reviews, excerpts, quotes, and recommendations from others to provide social proof that can help boost interest in your book. This proof can also showcase your writing through blog posts, articles, videos, graphics, and more. Give people a taste of what they can expect from the whole meal. People self-publish books every day so show what sets you apart.

I hope this helps get your 2024 book marketing efforts off to a good start!

Check out more Indie Author Basics articles here.

Preorder Your Copy of Black History Facts You Didn’t Learn in School Here!

http://www.blkhistorybook.com | 2.24.24

An Easy Way to Prepare Your Book’s Table of Contents for E-Book

sample e-book properly formatted (not just converted!)
sample e-book properly formatted (not just converted!)

 

One of the most challenging aspects of Self-Publishing for me, in the beginning, was preparing my book for e-book conversion for proper viewing as an e-book on electronic devices. Of course, formatting and conversion slightly differ (anyone can use the method I am about to show to make ePub and Mobi files, but unless you format the underlying HTML and CSS properly, the result will not look as professional as we all intend as authors like the image above. Often there will be blank lines between paragraphs, no indentations, no TOC (table of contents), links that don’t function, and everything left aligned including headings that were meant to be centered hence, the difference between conversion and actual formatting…. but that’s another post for another day).

So anyway, as I ventured on this Self-Publishing endeavor, I was practically pulling my locs out trying to prepare my manuscript to be accepted by retailers for electronic devices. As we are familiar, manuscripts that are prepared for an e-book has to be done in a way where the electronic device can easily navigate the book. The electronic device easily accomplishes this by utilizing the navigation functions built into an EPUB file to move around the e-book. This is done by properly creating a Table of Contents section or in technical terms, a Navigation Control File. Basically, because your device is not going to be printed like in the old days, it needs guidance on how to move around. Your Kindle or Mobile phone needs to know where each section begins and ends. It does this by looking for Header Styles in your document. While you can either pay someone else to do this or let your POD (Print on Demand) service do it for you, an easy way to learn to do it yourself is to format your manuscript using Heading Styles. Heading Styles are at the top of your Word Document and looks something like this:

styles MS Word

So Below I’ve listed how each section should be properly headed using these Heading Styles to create the TOC. To make this simple, I am only going to assume your book has a few main levels: Title Page, Copyright, Chapter, Sub-chapter, Preface, Body, Epilogue, and Sections:

1. Apply Heading 1 style to the Title and to each line containing a Section name (copyright, prologue, etc.) or section (Part 1, Section II, etc.). Heading 1 style will always appear at the top of the next page.

2. Apply Heading 2 style to each line containing a Chapter name or number

3. Apply Heading 3 style to each line containing a sub-chapter / subtitle or subsection.

That’s it! Pretty simple huh? I know most of you already know how to do this, but you never know who else may be pulling their hair out :). In most cases, your POD distributor will not reject your manuscript if you use this format.

(Don’t use additional Heading styles (Heading 4, Heading 5) to denote chapter or section breaks, as these will not generate most TOC *Table of Contents* entries. Most readers will not be able to navigate to these chapters resulting in retail distribution partners, such as Amazon Kindle and B&N, to reject your e-book).