Book Promotion - Part 2

As promised this is the second part of my post on book promotion, find the first part here.

Facebook Advertising

The only form of paid advertising I did for my book was Facebook advertising.  I was promoting the book on my Facebook page anyway so I decided to pay to boost a couple of the posts and ran one sidebar advert too.

I spent just over £5 on the sidebar advert and got 228 clicks through to the book listing on Amazon so I thought that was well worth the money.  If even 10-20% of those people bought the book it would have lead to 22-44 sales.

I think I spent about £12 on boosted posts as well, so in total £17 on advertising.  I think I might run another sidebar ad in the future for the book, you can target it very precisely to people who like crafts and business.

Facebook advert

Social Media Promotion

I used all my social media platforms to promote the book several times in the week of the launch and around once a week after that.  I shared pictures of the book on Facebook and Instagram, I pinned it to Pinterest and tweeted about it.  I also retweeted or shared reviews, offers and giveaways of the book on social media too.

The one thing I was a little wary of was overdoing the social media promotion, I didn't want to be going on about it all the time and boring my followers so I tried to make sure I spaced the posts out well and still posted lots of useful content in between.  There's a fine line between sharing your news and spamming people with it.

I'm hoping I got the balance right, no one has complained about me posting so much about the book so that's a good sign!  Luckily most the people reviewing the book, and many of the people who bought the book also posted about it on social media so I think plenty of people will have seen it and become aware of the fact the book exists.

Books piled up at the launch party

Launch party

The launch party is something I was a little unsure about whether to do.  I don't really like being centre of attention, and I know from having run sewing meetups it takes a lot of planning.  I got a few offers to do ones several hours away from Devon in big cities, but I declined.   By the time I considered travel, hotel, providing food & drinks for the party etc it would have cost me more than half my advance.  Although I didn't write this book expecting to make lots of money I still wanted to keep some money to compensate for all the time and effort that went into it. I can see that you can quite easily spend your entire advance promoting the book and buying copies for yourself (I got 6 for free which were soon handed out to family members).

Then in the summer I was chatting with a friend on Facebook who runs a local sewing shop, Jenna from The Exeter Sewing Machine Company and she suggested we team up for the launch.  Jenna's shop is only 45 mins away from me, and also close to my family and friends which meant it would be easy for them to get to so we decided to go ahead with it.

Launch party goodie bags

It took about 3 months of planning (most of it in the last month) to sort out where and when, and to get things for the amazing goodie bags (see my post here about the party itself & the goodie bags).  We also had to promote the event on social media and locally to make sure people came along. It did get a bit stressful as the night approached making sure everything was ready, and we were unsure how many people would come as many didn't RSVP which made it difficult to calculate how much food and drink to buy. But in the end we had over 60 people and the night was a big success.  It was great to meet so many new people in the area who also run creative businesses, plus many of my friends from my sewing group in Exeter came along too.

I've made a couple of new friends thanks to the launch and that was definitely worth more than book sales. :)

So as you can see a huge amount of work goes into promoting a book and what I've written about is just what I've done, the publishers have also done a lot of work promoting it too.  I never realised when thinking about writing a book that there was so much work after the actual writing was finished.   I guess until you've done it once you don't know the full extent of what is involved, which is why I have written this series to share my experience with you all.

It's not over yet though.... no I'm not about the announce another book! Now that the majority of the UK promotion is done it's now time to focus on America.  My book is published on the 13th of January in the US & Canada so it's back to the start on the promotion cycle again.  It will be a lot harder this time as I have much less contacts outside of the UK, but I still want to give it my best and do what I can to make my book succeed. 

I also just realised it's now exactly 2 years since I came up with the idea for my book and starting drafting the plan and setting up meetings with publishers.  What a busy 2 years it has been!