Writing a book may not be easy, but if you ask marketing professionals, they will tell you that selling them, is way more difficult! While, people do not value things that come for free, it is almost impossible to make them shell-out a single penny, to buy something that does not interest them.
A book cover design can help you attract buyer interest! The reason being, that before book buyers purchase your book, it needs to be able to call out to them from the book store shelves, on which they are displayed.
Book Cover Design Plays a Crucial Part in Selling a Book
Unless you are a well-known writer, book buyers will buy your book primarily based on whether they find your book cover design fascinating or intriguing enough.
If they do, they will proceed to pick it up, flick through its contents and make their decision! Considering that, book buyers do not spend the whole day in a book store, but in fact just a few hours, your book needs to compete with scores of other books for this to happen! So, only if your book cover design can attract attention, generate interest and convince the book enthusiast to buy your book, will it sell even a single copy!
Strategies to Market Your Book Right and Increase Your Sales
As the above arguments have established, where marketing a book is concerned, its cover design plays a crucial role. While marketing a book is definitely not the same as marketing other products and services, similar marketing techniques and strategies can be employed for the purpose. Winning strategies do exist, that when applied, translate into book sales, revenues and profits! Read on, to know what they are…
1. Take Help from the Professionals
Without a doubt, you are the one who has written the book! You are the author, and full credit goes to you for that! But before you decide to multi-task with creating a cover design for your book and handling its marketing, it is time you did a reality check. Do you have the time, experience and skill-sets required to design or market your book optimally? If not, then leave both jobs to the professionals.
Experts in cover design and marketing, know exactly what it takes to design and market a book effectively. If you can afford it, then hiring their services saves you time, effort and costly mistakes! Mistakes that could be the difference between your success and failure!
2. Understand Your Target Market
To be a successful author, it is imperative that you thoroughly understand the target audience you are writing for. If you are fully aware of their mind-set, inclinations, struggles, attitudes and approaches in life, you can connect much better with them through your writing.
Likewise, your book cover design, must catch their eye and hold their interest long enough for them to walk over, go through your book and buy it! Finally, your marketing strategy must use those channels of communication that are popular with your target readers.
3. Develop a Winning ‘Marketing Pitch’ or ‘Hook’ that Generates Interest in Your Book
The cover design of your book conveys what your book is about! Readers gauge the genre, theme and storyline from your book cover design; and more often than not, base their judgments on it. Just like a book cover advertises what a book is about, similarly, ‘book marketing pitches’ also called ‘hooks’ help convey the essence of your writing, in a few brief words.
Marketing hooks are catchy phrases that attract buyer attention. Creating a marketing hook for your book and using it in all your marketing communication, can make target buyers more receptive!
4. Use Social Media to Market Your Book
In a highly digital age, when almost everyone is connected in some way or the other to the world wide web; it definitely makes sense to use social media channels, to market your book! Whether it is Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google ++ or Tumblr, besides others – using your ‘book marketing hook’ on these channels, could help you connect with a large number of readers. Readers, who could later on, get converted into book buyers and even fans!
5. Use ‘Free Books’ and ‘Giveaways’ to Create Interest
Important as it is, to promote and market your book, it is also essential to ensure, that your book is easily available on online stores and at brick and mortar outlets. If at first, your target buyers are not willing to buy your book, you could try using ‘FREE books’ or books as ‘giveaways’ to generate an interest among them.
Doing so, would also help you assess what readers think about your book and simultaneously, such exercises could generate valuable word-of-mouth publicity for you!
This article was written by Juliet. Fillomina Francis, a self-published author, according to whom an attractive cover design, can translate into more book sales for you.
