Marketing Your Self-Published Book

Information

ISBN & Barcode

You need an ISBN Number and Barcode for each book you publish. If you want choices of where to distribute your book, then you should acquire your own ISBN through the Bowker company, just like a professional publisher would. You then use that ISBN everywhere we submit the book for distribution.

If you have several books to publish soon, you should buy a bundle of 10 ISBNs, along with their BarCodes. The ISBN number and the Barcode are two separate items. The ISBN number is to distinguish your book from any other. The Barcode is managing inventory with a digital barcode scanner.

https://www.myidentifiers.com/Get-your-isbn-now

The following is another place affiliated with Bowker where you can buy an ISBN and Barcode.

http://www.isbn-us.com/

Copyright

You do not need a copyright to self-publish a book, and you do not need to publish a book to acquire a copyright. Your book is legally copyright protected the moment you put the following on your manuscript:

The purpose of applying for a copyright from the Library of Congress (LofC) is to store a dated, public record that proves that you have owned the manuscript since that date. The quickest way to prove ownership in a court of law is with a copyright from the LofC. Without this step, the only proof you will have is the dated digital file on your hard drive, or a hard copy you may have mailed to yourself without breaking the seal. This is a separate procedure from publication that the author will need to conduct.

http://www.copyright.gov/

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Book Marketing

Marketing is separate project from Print & Distribution. AquaJazz can design and produce your marketing materials for you, such as a Logo, a Website, a Calling Card, or Posters. You will need a PressKit. We create those too.

The Website

You need a website, and you need to use that website, not just let it sit there. Your website will present the profile of you, as a writer, and a company, with a page devoted to each book you publish including a link to the outlets where your book can be bought and shipped. Your website will also have a Journal where you will answer questions and write short articles about your writing career and your life to share with readers. They want to know you better and want to know where to find you. Really!

Networking

Everyone you have ever known is your network. If you can reach them, you must tell them where to buy your book. You can use email, or paper mail, FaceBook, Twitter, or a phone call. Tell everyone you meet. Hand them a calling card with your website address or the title of the book on there. This is your marketing network and the most important marketing resource you have.

Book Stores

When you want a brick and mortar bookstore to carry your book on their shelves, it is a good idea to send them a free copy, along with the information they request in their submission protocol. As long as your book is listed in the Ingram Catalog, or an outlet of their choice, they will eventually review your book. If they like it, they will stock it in their store.

YouTube & Vimeo

The most potent and effective promotion you can do on the Internet is to produce a video and properly publish it on YouTube and Vimeo. The video can be either a creative Book Trailer, or an audio-visual narration of an excerpt of the book. Write a script. If you don’t know how, AquaJazz can do this for you. Embed your video into your website, put a link to your website in your video, tweet about it, post it on your FaceBook wall, email it to your contacts, then you have done everything you can with your video. Be patient for a while. There is a good chance you will benefit from this video promotion. Videos are very effective marketing.

http://youtube.com http://vimeo.com

Book Signing Events

Professional Publishers have traditionally encouraged writers to attend book signing events all over the country to promote a new book. Travel is an expensive activity for a writer and self publisher. It is best to begin in your neighborhood. Befriend your local bookstore owners and book clubs. You will be helping yourself and your bookstore by putting on a good face and making readers happy to meet you. The word will get around, and you will be asked to attend other book signings farther away. Then, you know you are succeeding. It will be worth the trip.

http://booksigningevent.com/

BookClubs

If you enjoy talking to groups and you think you could be entertaining or informative, you could offer to give a talk before a local book club. If they like your book, they will pass the word around. Tell your story. Have a sense of humor. Inspire readers to read and you will make progress here.

http://www.meetup.com/

Crowd Funding

One terrific way to get connected to new fans is to seek Crowd Funding for your book. You offer rewards and a copy of your book in exchange for an investment by members. On Publishizer, the investors are often Publishers interested in contracting your book. If you want to be your own publisher, you can still choose autonomy and self marketing. This builds your network of readers before you even launch. AquaJazz will help you set up your pitch presentation.

https://publishizer.com
https://www.indiegogo.com/explore/writing

Press Release

A press release is a traditional method for announcing the arrival of something new and newsworthy. An effective press release follows a pretty strict traditional template that has been proven over many years, however, new media possibilities have expanded the creative possibilities for press releases using video or sound or images too. It is important that your press release is distributed to the right targets. You may as well use the industry leader to distribute your press release.

http://www.prnewswire.com/

There are many more good venues for marketing your book. Hire AquaJazz, and I will show you all of them.

Preparing for Your Web Designer

by Artisan | Website Design Journal

Imagine you have become enlightened. You know that one of the top 3 most important platforms of advertising you could possibly add to your business is a state of the art, professionally designed website. The first website you had was thrown together by a friend or relative for free, but you know this will no longer be enough. You have matured and so have your business objectives. You are ready and willing to pay professional rates to a professional designer for professional results, but you still don’t want to pay top dollar. You want to keep the cost down as much as possible, while not sacrificing quality and effectiveness. Realize that nothing comes of nothing and that to save money, you have to save the designer some effort and time by doing some of the work for him. You just have to determine which components of that work you have the skills and the time to complete. This article should help you move in that direction.

Photography & Graphics

.We can schedule a time when all your employees are dressed nicely and on site. I can travel to your office and take photos of everyone, then return and crop them for upload, and you can pay me for all that time. Or you can tell all your staff that you need portrait photos by the end of the week and that the world is going to know what you look like, so make them professional.

If you have many products, or even a few products, you probably already have photography for those products. Find the original JPG files of all those photos and get them ready to send to your web designer. If you do not like the photos you have, maybe you could take new photos with your phone camera and send those. The most important rules for achieving excellent product photos is as follows:

Set up a clean and intentional background
Get close, include the entire item with a little room at the edges
Set up bright lighting, or do it outside in the sunlight.
Hold the camera very still, and take several shots.

If you follow these rules with any photos you take, I bet you 10 dollars you will succeed.

You might also have some kind of concept you need to convey using more than words, using a diagram or a chart or some kind of illustration. It is important that this graphic clearly respresents the information and has a professional look. AquaJazz can clean up these graphics for you, but if you take the time to clearly sketch some idea of how you wish to represent the information, this will save you money during the web design process.

If you want some kind of big, attractive slide show on the home page, this will require big, attractive photographs. To save you a lot of money, you should find those photos in your own collection, or ask someone you know who is good at photography to provide them for you. The alternative is that AquaJazz will spent several hours searching through large online collections for ideal candidates, then ask you to pay anywhere from $50 to $100 each to buy the rights to use them on your website. Again, I can stage and produce custom photos for you, but if you find them yourself, you will save lots of money. Web designers do not have a magical source for beautiful free photos. Free photos are usually free because they are not attractive.

Verbal Content | Market Copy | Sales Pitch

Perhaps you have a print brochure containing some literature. Start there. You might also have some literature from the wholesalers of your products. Gather that. Perhaps you recently wrote a powerful sales letter to a prospective client, and that letter sold them on your services. That letter could have valuable material for a page of the website. Include that in the material that you hand to your web designer.

Do you truly have a clear and organized description of your services, written by someone who can write well? If not, this is the time you need one. Be sure that the literature you want to put on your website contains the terminology relevant to your business and your customers. The words in your website are what search engines use to find you. Graphics make your website beautiful. Words do the marketing. Without words, you are an invisible hot dog stand in cyberspace with a missing objective.

Technical Details

Every website has a domain and a hosting plan. The domain may have been purchased at the hosting company, but the hosting company might be the wrong kind of hosting company to upgrade your website. In that case, we have to move you elsewhere. It takes time to extract your domain from a registrar to move it elsewhere. Sometimes all we need to do is change the DNS number of the domain at the registrar to point to a new hosting company. Allow time for this. There are many shabby, overpriced hosting companies. Some are not even hosting companies, but brokers taking your money for doing nothing. If you are on one, I will move you before I build a new website.

To determine all these details, and to get you set up, you will need to send the web designer your usernames and passwords to all related accounts. I have to enter those accounts to build the website.

Draft an Outline

Go find a website built by a competitor to your business, or something similar. Make sure that you actually believe that the website is well designed. Examine what they did. Take notes. Gather ideas. Pay attention to what pages they have. What is on those pages. Why? Are they useful pages? Do you want those pages on your website? Make a list of the pages you think you need and what should be on them. Write it all down.

Delivery

Make sure all this material is in stored in the form of computer files. Now, attached it all to several emails and send it to me. If you have done a good job, my job will proceed smoothly and you will get a truly professional website for a reasonable price, and it will get completed quickly.

So there you go, Portland Oregon. If you want to save money, be prepared. I will help you with all these things any time you like, but there is a lot you can do too.