Last week I visited the offices of Fairlight Books (my publisher) to meet with their Marketing team. Typically when meeting with a debut author, the publisher would take the lead in these sorts of discussions…
..But when you’ve literally written the book on book marketing, you’re expected to show up with a solid plan and a host of ideas.
The first item for discussion was timing. With the London Book Fair looming on the horizon, the Fairlight team was prepping to print and post their 2020 catalogue.
“We need to put your books up on our website next week, so if you want to do a proper cover reveal, we need to act fast.”
Thankfully, I had come prepped with the start of a marketing plan. I promised to clear my schedule to get everything in place for a launch. Here is what I did:
Created a writer brand
Because I originally started writing as a blogger, I based all of my branding around my blog name (The Nomad Mom Diary) rather than my own. I have a business website, but again, that wasn’t using my name. My social media accounts were the one exception – I’d transitioned those from my blog name to my own name several years back in preparation for eventually publishing a book. Score!
I wanted to keep things simple, so I used Google Fonts to choose two complimentary fonts for my website header / logo. I used Adobe Color to pick out a clean, modern colour palette. I created my website header / logo using Adobe Illustrator and downloaded the few photos I needed from Unsplash.
Built a website
I had purchased a domain several years back, with the plans to use it to host all of my books. That was as far as I had gotten. I quickly connected the domain with my existing hosting provider and installed WordPress. I used a Genesis theme – Author Pro with the Author Pro plugin. As the theme was designed with authors and book marketing in mind, half of the challenge was sorted.
That said, it still took me two solid days of work to get the website (HINT: this website) live and in good shape. I created a home page, contact and about me pages, book pages and a few blog posts. This gave me enough content to make the site look robust.
Newsletters & mailing lists
With the website in a good place, I turned my attention to setting up a newsletter subscriber list, forms and automated responses. I lost an hour trying to use Mailchimp (my previous fave) before switching over to MailerLite. MailerLite came highly recommended from other authors, and I quickly discovered why. They had off-the-shelf templates specifically for authors, which saved me a ton of time.
I created two subscriber groups: one for general book news and a second one for book marketing. This required two forms minimum.
I created a pop-up form and an embedded form for the general list, putting them on the website and in the footer. I created a separate embedded form for the marketing list, putting it only on the Book Marketing Plan post.
Automated emails
My final prep project focused on email automation. Because of time constraints, I only set up an automated email flow for my book marketing content. The first email in the flow delivers the promised marketing workbooks and offers a hint of what’s to come. The second email in the flow shares highlights from this post, inviting readers to visit the blog to found out what I did to launch How to Market Your Book. I plan to add more emails to the automated flow, introducing my book marketing support services offered through The Marketing Chair, talking about my publishing journey, and introducing me.
Reader magnet
To begin building a fan base for my nonfiction books, I decided to offer a reader magnet. A reader magnet is a freebie “taster” you use to encourage readers to subscribe to your mailing list.
If I were writing fiction or a memoir, I would have written a short story. But that wasn’t going to work for a How To guide.
Instead, I decided to build a workbook which authors could use to plan and track their book marketing efforts. This freebie had the added benefit of being useful to me as well. If you haven’t done so already, you can get your own copy of my Book Marketing Workbook.
Cover reveal
I did all of this prep work to get ready for my first Cover Reveal (and yes, it gets capitalised)! I’ve been posting teasers about writing nonfiction on my social channels, but have kept mum on my publisher, title and publication date. I saved that news for my cover reveal.
The Fairlight team sent me the cover artwork, and I used a 3D book cover generator to create additional assets I could use on my social channels. We agreed a go live time and confirmed which accounts and webpages to use for links.
Although this past week has been absolute madness, it has also been useful as a learning experience. When you choose to use a publishing company, you cede control over timelines. All of my efforts need to dovetail with theirs. Thankfully, I could get my house in order fast.
All the above took approximately twenty-four working hours.
Stay tuned for what happens next!