Keywords are frequently referred to as tags.

Readers will often search for a book using the name of a best-selling author or the title of a book, but readers can’t enter your title or name since you and your book have achieved little recognition.  (So far!) 

Keyword searches

Another way readers will search for a book is by using a short descriptive phrase such as ‘fantasy quest’ or ‘Regency romance’.  This is the situation where you want your book to appear in the search results.  To accomplish this, it is vital that you develop a set of keywords that will ensure your book title will show up in the reader’s search results. 

The keywords you want to use are ones that readers in your genre will use when browsing for a book.  These keywords are not necessarily what your book is about: they are the terms a reader will type into a search engine.  Let’s say your book is a fantasy novel filled with elves and dwarfs.  You may think ‘dwarfs’ and ‘elves’ would be great keywords.  They are not.  A reader looking for a fantasy novel won’t use them but instead will search on keywords like ‘fantasy adventure’ or ‘fantasy quest.’  Consequently, it is important for your marketing efforts that you develop a relevant set of keywords. 

Generating keywords

Google has a free keyword planner you can use to help generate your keywords.  You can access it using this link: https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/

Another free keyword tool can be found here:  https://keywordtool.io/

Here is a trick you can use on Amazon.  In the search box, start to type a keyword.  Amazon will auto-complete and show you its most popular keywords.  As an example, type ‘fantasy’ into the box.  By the time you finish typing ‘fantasy’ you’ll see some keywords that may be relevant.  Keep typing and add the word ’adventure’.  Now you’ll see better keyword suggestions.

If you have an AI app, you can query it to generate keywords, Use a storyline or synopsis to let the AUI know what the story is about.

Keyword uses

What are keywords used for?  Once you get a set of keywords, you can use them in a variety of ways.  Besides the packagers and blog posts, you can embed them into your book blurb, your book description and your short and long synopses.  Search engines love this usage.  Keywords are also useful as hashtags in social media posts

Source: Beginner's Guide to Basic Book Marketing

Social media doesn't sell books.  It sells clicks.  A succesful social media canmpaign will deliver vistors (via clicks) to the book's landing page (think Amazon).  The landing page is where the sale takes place (or not).

Sources: Book Marketing Fundamentals

Beginner's Guide to Basic Book Marketing 

Once your book is available for sale or pre-order on Amazon, you can start an Author Page.  If you have a publisher, it may have started this page for you.  In this case, you should look at it to see if you can add content to it.

You’ll find Author Central at:

After you start your author page, you can add your bio and other information to the page. 

 One of the great features of the Author Page is you can add a wealth of information about the book that you couldn’t do when you uploaded it to Kindle. 

The book topics include Editorial Reviews.  These are reviews that Amazon won’t allow to be posted on the book site because Amazon won’t allow paid reviews.  If you receive a review from a prestigious site like Publishers Weekly, this is the place to post it.

Another topic is From the Author.  Here you tell readers why you wrote the book.  Or the problems you encountered in writing it.  Or anecdotes from the writing process.

Taken together, the Author Page is a great marketing tool. 

Source: Beginner's Guide to Basic Book Marketing

Many new authors consider a book blurb to be a short synopsis.  This is a mistake.  Book blurbs and a short synopsis are two different animals, and they have very different purposes. 

Components

Here are descriptions for each of the three elements involved in a book blurb.  Keep the blurb to fewer than a hundred words if possible and no longer than 150 words.

Pitch Line: This is the first statement and it is the hook to grab the reader’s attention.  Its purpose is to persuade the reader to keep reading the other two statements.  It should be simple, one or two sentences at most, and it must make a clear statement about your book.

What's in it for the buyer? This is a statement that explains what the reader (i.e. a book buyer) will get in exchange for money.  This must be explicit.  Tell the reader what benefit he'll get from buying the book.  Think of the statement in this way: if your book is surrounded by hundreds of similar-sized books on a shelf in a bookstore or on a web page, what would persuade the buyer to choose your book instead of one of the others?

What's different about this book? With all the books published every month, what makes your book stand out from the others?

The secret to creating an effective blurb is to keep rewriting and condensing it until it expresses the ideas with a minimum of words.

Example

For example, this is the book blurb for my novel Falstaff’s Big Gamble.

Pitch Line: This novel is Shakespeare's Worst Nightmare.  

What’s in it for the buyers? It takes two of the Bard's most famous plays, Hamlet and Othello, and recasts them into a fantasy land called Gundarland.  There, Hamlet becomes a dwarf and Othello a dark elf.

What’s different about this book?  If that isn't bad enough, these two tragedies are now comedies with Falstaff, Shakespeare's most popular rogue, thrown in as a bonus.

This is the completed blurb:

This novel is Shakespeare's Worst Nightmare. It takes two of the Bard's most famous plays, Hamlet and Othello, and recasts them into a fantasy land called Gundarland.  There, Hamlet becomes a dwarf and Othello a dark elf.  If that isn't bad enough, these two tragedies are now comedies with Falstaff, Shakespeare's most popular rogue, thrown in as a bonus.

The blurb is only 59 words long.

Source: Beginner's Guide to Basic Book Marketing.

.The book description on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or other book seller web site is your opportunity to persuade a visitor to buy your book.  Perhaps the visitor is just browsing or maybe some marketing content of yours caught their attention.  No matter how the visitor arrived at your book page, this visitor has a least a cursory interest in the book.  So now the job of the book description is to close the sale.

 All the visitor will see is a few lines of copy of your book description.  Those few lines must convince the visitor to click on the “Read more” link.

Writing a book description for a fiction book is quite different from a non-fiction book. 

For fiction, the description should attempt to get the visitor interested in the main character and that character’s problem.

With a non-fiction book, the goal is to convince the visitor that your book will solve a problem the visitor has.  After all, if a visitor landed on your book page, that visitor must have at least a passing interest in the problem.

Start the description with the book's blurb.  The blurb's job is to convince the visitor to keep reading.

Source: Book Marketing Fundamentals

Targeting is an important ingredient in any marketing campaign. Promoting a book to the general population is a waste of money since more 90% or more of this population has no interest in your genre or product. To be successful, a social media promotion has to be targeted to the tiny sliver of the population that reads your genre, such as romance or fantasy or mystery.

But it is extremely difficult to target that sliver using popular social media ads since they limit your target optiosn.  Consequently, the money spent on the ad is wasted on people who will never buy your book. 

To be effective, a fiction promotion must be targeted at your specific genre. For non-fiction, it must be targeted to the problem the book is solving, such as plumbing problems or modernizing a kitchen.

If a prspective campaign doesn;t allow precise targeting, it will just waste your money.

Source: Begiiner's Guide to Basic Book Marketing

Your book;s lading page is the most important piece of marketing content it has.  The landing page is where a visitor decides to buy the book or move to different web page.

Landing page components

The components, in the order an Amazon visitor sees them, are:

• The cover
• The ratings
• The price
• The blurb
• The description

Any one of these components can drive a visitor away.  If the components all mesh together, the visitor may be convinced to buy the book.

Landing page checklist

• Cover professional and appropriate for the genre?
• At least 3-5 honest ratings/reviews
• Price comparable to similar books for this author’s status?
• Blurb under 150 words and focused on benefits and differentiation?
• First 2-3 lines of description compelling on mobile devices?

Source: Beginner's Guide to Basic Book Marketing

.ou can’t possibly work on all the marketing tasks your research uncovered, so how are you to decide what to do? After all, life has a way of butting into one’s writing and publishing work.

Obviously, not all marketing tasks are created equal, so the question comes down to this: What marketing tasks should you concentrate on? Which ones should you work on and what ones should you ignore?

Here is my answer to that question. If you have limited time and/or money to spend on marketing, make sure you do the following:

• Identify the customers for the book
• Get a webpage
• Develop a set of keywords
• Write a book blurb
• Join Goodreads
• Join Bookbub
• Request book reviews in a few of the groups on the Goodreads site 

A neat thing about this list is that, with the exception of the webpage, all

these tasks are free. All they require is the investment of your time.

Further, if you have a limited marketing budget these marketing tasks should not be considered:

• Get a trailer (unless you cna do it yourself)
• Do a blog tour
• Hire a promotion company

Source: Book Marketing Basics

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