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First of all, book bloggers who review books on blogs are just as legit as book reviewers in magazines, so treat them with the same respect (yes, I know they don’t have to go through the same gatekeepers that magazine and newspaper writers do, but they should be treated professionally).
1. Contact relevant bloggers only. If your book is about shopping, don’t pitch your book to the blog that clearly only ever reviews books on heavy metal. You don’t have to be a subscriber necessarily (though if you are, it’s nice to say that you’re one of their readers), but do have enough of a look at the blog to know whether contacting them is a waste of your time.
The key to finding a reviewer is finding the perfect match. It’s a lot like landing a book deal. You don’t want necessarily just the only publisher who will take your book (tempting as it may be). You want the right publisher. So don’t go pitching to every book blog in existance–they don’t all review your kind of stuff. Pitch the ones that are right for your topic.
Remember also that you’re not just looking for book blogs, but blogs on your topic that might be interested in reviewing your book or even interviewing you or running an excerpt. One way to find blogs by topic other than the typical google search (or searching on Technorati.com) is looking at who’s talking about your topic on Twitter. If they seem to know what they’re talking about regarding your subject, look at their profile and see if they have a website or blog. They may be interested in reviewing your book or posting content from it on their site.
How do you know if these blogs have any readers? Sometimes they will tell you in the sidebar how many people have subscribed to this blog. Other times, comments are enabled, so if there are a lot of comments under each post, there are a lot of readers. A lot of times it works the other way too: no comments means few readers.
2. Unlike some larger book reviewing publications, sending unsolicited copies is a bad idea. Unless you’re using a database, you may not find their mailing addresses anyway. It’s best to send them an email. A personal touch is always nice and increases your chances, but copying-and-pasting your press release is fine if you’re tight on time. If they are interested in the book, either way, they’ll email you back and ask for a review copy. Some blogs even do Q&A, exclusive excerpt, or get original content from the writer.
3. Send the cover image, whether they ask for it or not. Do not send this out in your pitch because often people will not open emails from people they don’t know if it has an attachment. But if they’ve asked for a copy sent to them, feel free to email them a hi-res jepg they can use, because if you don’t, they won’t use a picture, or they’ll copy a low-res one from the internet, or they’ll try to take a picture or scan themselves which don’t always come out looking good. You may also want to include your author photo. Only include an interior image if you have permission to use images from the book as part of the publicity efforts. Don’t forget to include a credit line for author and interior photos.
4. Give them time. If you don’t hear from the blogger a month after you’ve sent the book, email them and say that you’re just checking to make sure they received the book, and if they did not, you can send a replacement. A month is a good time because if you write too soon, the mail might not have delivered it yet. It’s also a long enough time where they may have set it aside, meaning to get to it later, and put it out of mind for a while. A month after shipping, this might be a good reminder and spark a new interest in them to pick up the book. Remember, book bloggers have lots of other books to read, but they also don’t like to be hounded: “Have you read my book yet, are you going to do a review, how about now, or now?” If they say that the have received your book and plan to review it, it might be another three to six months before they do. This is normal and to be expected.
If you have a YouTube channel, you will want a high number of video views. But you also may want people to subscribe to your “channel.” This means that when they log onto YouTube, any new video you’ve posted that they have not watched yet will show up on their main screen.
1. Content, as always, is king. If you don’t have high quality video and high quality content, then all else is futile.
2. Post your videos to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, etc. Put your videos on Facebook, Twitter, and wherever you think your potential viewers hang out.
3. Invite your YouTube friends to subscribe to your video if they haven’t already. And don’t be ashamed to invite your favorite YouTubers to subscribe to you if you’ve subscribed to them.
4. Title your video with something not only relevant to the video’s content but also interesting, shocking, mysterious, or controversial. Also use Title Case and don’t make it a long sentence–get to the point.
5. Use keywords not only in your title, but in that handy keyword box YouTube has you fill in. Be specific, often using multiple words or even short sentences as keywords if you think people will be searching for that exact phrase or sentence. If you have a video on how to play the harmonic underwater, if you just put “harmonica” and “underwater” your video will appear on all searches for “harmonic” or “underwater” but because they are popular phrases, your video could be at the very bottom. If your keywords are “harmonica underwater” and “playing harmonica under water” your video is more likely to be number one on the list for when people search those. You may also want to include things like “strange talents” and “weird instrument.” Also use keywords in the description, but avoid key word stuffing.
6. Don’t make the description too short (or too long for that matter). Include any relevant links. Ask them to subscribe.
7. You can even embed a little “subscribe” or “click to subscribe” button into your video once you’ve uploaded it, so it will actually show up on your screen. Some people like to pick out something that is talked about and focus on that to get people to either subscribe or thumbs-up their video. (The thumbs up gives the video a better rating and gives it a chance at being featured on YouTube’s front page or at least being higher on the searches, so you might want to ask your viewers to do this if they are not ready to commit to subscribing.) For example, if in part of the video you talk about zombie caribou, you might embed a little thing that says “Click thumbs up if you like zombie caribou!”
8. Be part of the YouTube community(communities). Subscribe, comment, and friend. People often will look at your channel if you are talking to them on YouTube or have requested to be their friends. But don’t be a spammer!
9. Be consistent. Let people know what to expect from you. Doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind later on if you want to have a new feature that posts every day for a month and then goes back to posting just once a week on the old feature, but let your viewers know this is going on. Don’t disappear off the face of the Earth for four months and then come back to YouTube expecting everyone to remember you.
10. Be a YouTube partner. You get to pick your thumbnail, which is important for when people are scrolling through videos (otherwise, try to put your select thumbnail at the halfway point of your video). You also get a nice banner on your channel and lots of other fun stuff that lets you stand out.
11. Don’t use copyrighted material. If you’re using a song, for example, owned by someone else, YouTube could prevent you from having a high-ranking, delete the audio track to your video, or delete your video all together.
12. Some people disable the comments and rating ability, which is maybe because they don’t want to have to answer questions and delete spam, etc., but if you don’t want to answer questions, then don’t answer questions. It doesn’t mean you can’t let your fans post comments and talk among themselves. Allow them to build a community around being your fan. However, the more you are involved and respond to your viewers, the more affection toward you they will have.
13. Instead of leaving comments, you can leave a video comment. Try leaving a video comment to similar videos or creating videos in direct response to someone else’s video.
14. Best face forward. On your channel, the default will show your most recent video in the player. But you can change this. Pick the best video (you can use free YouTube insights to see which video has the most interest or you can just look at number of views) and put that on the front. Or maybe you have an introductory video. You can also choose to have the video automatically start playing. Personally I find this annoying but it probably has its advantages too.
A lot of people will buy software that will generate comments and views on your YouTube videos. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But either way, I personally find this to be a dishonest way of gaining interest. If your videos are good and you know how to market yourself well enough using the tips above, you shouldn’t have to stoop that low. But you will need patience. It usually doesn’t happen over night. Don’t expect to be a viral hit. Just aim for having loyal followers.
Useful Links:
Top Tips to Get More YouTube Subscribers (Squidoo)
So you know you’re supposed to be on Facebook for marketing purposes, but you’re afraid about your information leaking onto the internet. There are two steps to take.
1. Don’t put things on Facebook you don’t want the internet to read! It’s as simple as that.
2. Change your Privacy Settings to limit who can see what information.
Useful link:
Making Yourself Almost Invisible on Facebook
The Facebook Settings You Should Change as Quickly as Possible
Blog Carnival
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I’ll be upfront. I’m new to this idea. But so far, I think it’s brilliant. The idea is blog carnivals, which you can learn more about at blogcarnival.com.
It works like this. Let’s say that you and Bob both have blogs about oil painting. Bob has decided to host a carnival about different painting techniques. He’s going to call it The Oil Painting Technique Carnival. Over the course of the next month, people who have blog posts about oil painting techniques are going to submit their posts to him. Let’s say you did a post back in June about a new technique that you learned about, and you submit yours to him as well. Bob is going to pick the handful of best posts of the month and put them in a post on his blog. His post will be a bunch of links with some descriptions of why these posts are good. And you can take a sampling of the internet’s best oil painting technique posts by browsing the links Bob has picked out for you. Hopefully your link made the cut! Next month, Bob will do the same thing and pick some new articles that people send his way.
For an example of what a post would look like, here is a carnival edition that someone did about audio. The carnival is about creating audio, whereas the entire blog is about using your software, so the blog doesn’t have to be the same topic as the carnival. The carnival can be a subset of the topic. For example, let’s say you want to create your own carnival now. You’ve got a blog about live music/concerts. Your carnival doesn’t have to be so broad as to ask people for entries about concerts in general. You could ask people for articles about concerts in New York City. Then, each month, you’d ask for more articles about concerts in NYC.
There are also traveling carnivals. Maybe you and Bob team up with Jenn and Phil, who each have their own painting blogs. In March, Bob posted his carnival edition about oil painting techniques. In April, you post another carnival edition about oil painting techniques on your own blog. May, Jenn hosts a carnival edition about oil painting techniques on her painting site. June, Phil does on his.
This is still new to me, but I think it’s absolutely brilliant.
Grab your stealthiest coat and binoculars. I’m going to teach you some tips on following people.
When you first join Twitter, you have no followers. The best way to gain followers is to follow other people, preferably people who are in your field. If you write books about flying planes, you’ll probably want to follow people who write and publish books, who use social media, who fly planes, who make planes, who teach aviation courses, etc. But now you have hundreds of people in your feed. (Your feed is what you see on your front page of Twitter when you are logged in. You see the most recent posts of all the hundreds of people you are following). You have gained followers, but how are you ever going to make sense of all these posts? There are probably many of them who only tweet about how they are going to make fish for dinner or are dreading cutting the lawn. You could unfollow them (they aren’t likely to notice)…or…
Twitter Lists
You can create as many lists as you like. You can also follow other people’s lists. (You can also create private lists that only you can see.) You might want to make a list of book people you like, another for people who give good tips on social media, another on people who work with new plane technology, another for aviation educators, another for pilots. Then if you use something like Hootsuite or TweetDeck, you can line up all your lists and browse with ease.
You can also just pull the tweeters you actually want to follow into a list of your favorites. Maybe this includes your friends and family and your favorite bands who you like to follow in case they announce they’ll be playing in your town. Once you have this list, instead of checking up on the people you follow by going to twitter.com, you can go to
twitter.com/[yourtwittername]/[yourlistname]
As an example, I am following 714 people, but I only want to read 35 of them, so I created a list called “besttweeters” and now instead of going to Twitter.com, I go to
twitter.com/milohtomb/besttweeters
So, how do you create a list?
Here’s one way. First you find a person who you want to add to the list. Let’s say you want to add Jim Keats. Here’s what his page looks like (twitter.com/jimkeats):
On the left, under the name “jimkeats” you’ll see the Follow button. On the right, you’ll see two more buttons: one that says “Lists” (big green arrow pointing to it) and the tools button that looks like a gear. Now, if you click that Lists button, it says “New list.” Click that and it will prompt you to name your list and give a description. Once you’ve done that (and chosen if you want it public (anyone can see it by putting in the URL) or private (only you can see it and only when you’re logged in)), you have created your first list. Congrats. To add other people to the list, start the same way by going to the person’s page. But now when you click the Lists button, you are given the choice to add another list or check mark the box to make this person go into the list you just created. Your new list will basically be like your front page feed (showing all the most recent tweets) but only of the people you put into the list.
Following other people’s lists
Sometimes creating a list is a lot of work, especially if there are people who have created better lists that suit your needs. Looking for a list of social media gurus? You could either seek out all those people yourself, or you could just follow http://twitter.com/ApplauseBooks/social-media
To follow it, you can:
A) Bookmark http://twitter.com/ApplauseBooks/social-media
B) Insert this list into your TweetDeck, Hootsuite, or any other tool you use to follow people
C) Click “follow this list” (which may be a bit messier)
The wonderful thing about Facebook ads is that they don’t have to cost you as much as any other online ad (and definitely not as much as print and broadcast ads) and they are actually much move effective (that is, proven to have a much higher click through rate–how many people click on your ad).
Here’s how it works:
You decide:
1. How much money you want to put into the ad daily (Facebook will automatically stop showing your ad after you hit maximum for the day and pick up again the following day).
2. Whether you want to pay per click or pay per thousand impression (Try it both ways and see what works best for you. Every project is different.) More details on CPC and CPM here.
3. Who you want to see your ad.
This means that if you want to only spend $20 on your ad, at $2 per day for 10 days, and you want only a very specific group of people to see it, you could end up getting your ad in front of tens of thousands of exactly the sort of people who would buy your book.
Another thing you have to decide is whether you want the ad to be your book with a direct link to Amazon (where most people already have an account and are more likely to buy on the spot) or to link the ad to your Facebook Fan Page to increase brand awareness and build followers.
If you can afford to give a small amount of cash into experimenting with this, using different ads, different targets, etc., I say go for it. It’s probably the most effective ad tool out there.
Tip: I know it’s tempting to want to broaden your market, but trust me: make the audience of your ad as specific as you can to the point where you’re convinced that every person on the list will want your book. Facebook is helpful here by telling you how many people it will reach. If it says 15 people, then you’re being too specific. You can choose based on their interests, their location, age, gender, and occupation.
Tip: Instead of using your book cover, which will appear so tiny that it won’t be legible, why not go for a more enticing and detailed graphic? Pick something that would be irresistible to the type of people who would like your book.
Useful Links:
How We Got to 40,310 Fans in 4 Days (All Facebook)
Facebook’s Guide to Facebook Ads (Facebook)
Warning: A Community Page on Facebook is different from a Fan Page (aka Official Page) and different from your Profile Page and different from a Facebook Group.
A Profile Page is the profile of yourself as a person that you automatically get when you join Facebook.
A Fan Page (aka Official Page) is a manmade page for a business, brand, celebrity, etc. that was created by the person who is actually in charge of that business, brand, or celebrity in real life.
A Group is a manmade page for absolutely anything you want from “I hate purple Skittles” to one about your favorite celebrity even though you’re not that celebrity or publicist.
A Community Page is not manmade. It is generated automatically from two things: Wikipedia and posts that other people have made. For example this is a community page. There are three subpages (look under the photo): Profile, Related Posts, and Wikipedia.
The Profile subpage is simply a little piece of the Wikipedia entry and a little piece of the Related Posts page. The Wikipedia subpage just automatically feeds whatever is on Wikipedia about that topic right here onto Facebook. The related posts is just an aggregate of posts based on a keyword search for that topic.
To change what’s written here, you have to change it over on Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia maintained by the masses, you have the right to do this as long as it’s accurate (There are people who work at Wikipedia who will delete anything that can’t be backed by evidence and sources).
If you happen to own this topic, say you’re the producer of this TV show that the page is about, you have the option of clicking “Is this your page” at the bottom.
How do you use video with social media for your book. Should you use video?
The short answer is don’t use video for the sake of using video. But video is a massively growing online medium. In fact, it’s one of very few activities online that’s gone up over the last year. So if you feel that your book lends itself to video, then use it. But! Make sure what you’re putting out is decent quality. It’s better to put out no video at all than video that’s going to turn your readers away and make you less of a credible source.
Things to use video for:
- A book trailer. This is essentially a movie trailer, but for your book. There are many ways to go about it. One way is to get actors and shoot it like a movie trailer such as with Guillermo Del Toro’s book The Strain. Or use stock footage or photos like Guitar World.
- Interviews. If your book was compiled from interviewing people, you can use any video that you took as a special feature.
- Welcome. Maybe you want to have a short clip on the homepage of your website welcoming your readers and telling people a little about your book and your site. Don’t make it much longer than a minute though–you want them to actually get into the site and look around.
- Instructional. Is your book a how-to or self-help? Show the readers how to do one of the things from the book.
- Interact with the text. See my post on Interactive Books to get some ideas of how to make your video a part of your book.
Things you will need:
- A video camera or webcam (most laptops these days come with a webcam)
- Video editing software. I like Sony Vegas, but whatever floats your boat. Your computer probably comes with one like Windows MovieMaker, for example.
- A YouTube account. Or if not YouTube, then your own server, Facebook, or other video site like Vimeo.
Where to put your video:
- Your website
- Your Facebook Fan Page (you can upload it directly to Facebook or link to it on YouTube. You can also embed it on one of your tabs by using the FBML code found here.
- Your blog
Here’s a great blog post that gives you lots of ideas:
Social Media Examiner
Let’s get the creative juices flowing. So you’ve got the cookie cutter stuff–the frequent posts to your Facebook wall, the regular posts to your blog, the incessant tweeting. But everybody does that. How can your voice be heard?
photo by S. Schleicher
Let’s break it down to the most simple question: What makes your product (your book, your genre, your topic, your character, whatever is the most unique) unlike every other book out there? Got that figured out? Now what does that unique thing have to offer that no other book can? And if you don’t know that, then you don’t know why your book should even be bought, so you need to go back to basics and figure out what your book is bringing to the world in the first place.
I’m going to assume that you have that figured out. Now start brainstorming to get to ONE fun thing that you can give to the web world. Is it a funny Old Spice spokesman? Is it giving your readers some kind of internet fame? Do you let them show off their talent in some way? Or do you help one of them directly? Do you give them something for free? Social Media Examiner talks about how to create a Facebook Experience. This is a great article to give you insight on how to connect to your fanbase in unique ways.
Once you have your one idea and you’ve launched it on the world, let that simmer a little, check your responses. This is a learning experience. By the time you get your next brilliant idea, you’ll know how to tweak it to make it better.
So you’ve made your blog. You have some ideas. But how are you going to be able to blog consistently for months in a row? Here’s some ideas to get you started, but please think beyond this list.
You may want to come up with a schedule or at least a large list of topics to blog on. Or you may want to wing it–write whatever you feel like in the spur of the moment. It depends on what kind of writer you are. But try to give it variety.
- Post excerpts from your book, but don’t give your whole book away
- Include good content that got left on the cutting room floor when your book was edited
- Interview people in your field
- Answer questions from your readers on the blog (without corrupting privacy barriers)
- Post any news or information related to your field
- Host a contest or give-away
- Have a weekly gimmick like “Question Friday” where you ask your readers to post answers to questions in the comments
- Your opinion on something related to your field
- An insight into the writing/publishing world
- Any events that you will be or have attended
Remember, you’re not just an expert on your book–you’re an expert in your field.
Example: Literary agent Nathan Bransford’s blog has great variety of posts.
