If you want your career as a writer to be sustainable and profitable, you need to build an enormous reader base. The process should be easy if you have enough money to throw at huge sweeping marketing campaigns, but writers who have tons of money to spare are a rare occurrence. So, what do you do if you need an enormous reader base but can’t spend much money? Here are a few tips:
Produce Digital Copies of Your Book
There are a number of good reasons why having a successful printed book is considered as a badge of honor; one of these is the connection between a book you can hold and calling it yours as author. It’s a sign that you’ve made it. However, more and more readers have moved onto the digital realm. If you want to get more readers (maybe even turn them into readers of your printed book), produce an ebook version. There are readers who are more likely to buy on impulse because of the convenience it brings, and it helps that ebooks are always cheaper than a printed version.
Give It Away For Free
It may seem counter-intuitive to give away your books for free if you want to make a lot of sales, but it will help generate awareness and some of them may even buy your other books. Additionally, those readers who sample your book in digital format and liked it enough may even buy the printed version because it’s more convenient or they like to collect things. If you want less risk of losing out on a sale, give away a chapter of the book to serve as a sampling of what you have to offer.
Advertise
If you have a little bit of money to spare, it wouldn’t hurt to advertise your book a little bit. There’s a reason why the advertising industry is worth billions and billions of dollars – because it does work for businesses. It could work in promoting your book; just make sure you try it out first in small test sizes so that you can be sure the ROI will be acceptable.
Build an Online Presence
Most of the time, readers also “buy in” into the author when they’re buying books. If you want to take advantage of this tendency, you need to build your name as a brand. Create websites, blogs, social media accounts, and post in them as a person (don’t just blast people with promotional posts). Interact with people, and show them that you’re a living, breathing, human being – who also happens to have written a book that they might be interested in.
Last but Not the Least: A Mix of All of the Above
The tips above are not mutually exclusive of each other – they can work together to give you an enormous reader base. For example, you can create a personal website that contains downloadable chapters from your books, and then create social media accounts that drive traffic to the website, and then run a short advertising campaign advertising the ebook, not forgetting including a link to your website in your ebook. With this approach, you can create a sustainable flow of readers as one platform/medium drives eyeballs on to the next one until it completes a loop.
Image credit: Pete on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hv1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.[/author_info] [/author]