promo images – WordyNerdBird

As a promoter of Indie books and Indie authors, I’m always trying to find different ways to help authors put their books in front of readers.

The ever-changing and often-frustrating Facebook algorithm means that Facebook is becoming less and less fruitful for book promotion. My own recent frustration with that particular platform has provided further encouragement to look further afield.

This isn’t particularly devastating for me, as I have always believed that it’s better not to keep all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. My aim has always been to spread my promotions as widely as ever, and I have applied this principle to my promotions of others’ books as well as my own.

From the outset of my writing career, I have worked hard to build good reach on a variety of social media platforms. I have grown my following organically, through engagement and sharing, so that my audience is one actually interested in my content. That has paid off in the form of followers who respond in a positive way: with likes, shares, comments and engagement.

That is why I have confidence in Book Squirrel’s new promotional feature.

The ‘Book of the Week’ promotion provides a blog post including the book’s cover and blurb, and two reviews of the author’s choice from Amazon or Goodreads. This blog post is then shared throughout the week on Twitter and Pinterest in addition to Facebook. A “Book of the Week” post is also made on Instagram.

The social media posts will be accompanied by clear, attractive images like this:

As with all of Book Squirrel’s promotions, the price is deliberately set to be affordable for Indie authors on a tight budget. After all, I know what it’s like to want to promote your book, and not have at least $50 to make it happen.

One of the things I do in all the spare time I don’t have is creating book promotion for other Indie authors.

Over the past few years, I have learned a lot about creating promotional images, writing effective tweets, putting images and text together for different platforms and using it all to put books in front of people who hopefully want to read them.

Ironically, it’s a process that works better when you are advertising someone else’s book and not your own. If I tell a person that Charlie’s book is good, they are likely to take my words at face value. When I tell them my book is good, they tend to assume I have no idea.

I have been pondering these things afresh while organising the preorder promo for ‘A Rose By Any Other Name’.

Despite my obvious bias, it’s up to me to get my book seen by readers.
How can I make people want to read my book? How can I pique their interest? How can I get their attention?

Those are the million dollar questions every author or promoter mst ask.

The key lies in making them attractive to the target audience. An interesting story, well written and thoroughly edited, proofread, checked, formatted and checked again. A great cover that catches the eye and suits both the story and the genre. Promo images that are varied in colour and style, relevant to the story and genre, using clear and appropriate fonts. Not too wordy, and not too plain.

Hopefully, those things will combine to have a positive effect.
The fact is, before you can sell the book, you have to be able to sell the idea of the book. That’s why blurbs and taglines matter. That’s why a cleverly worded tweet will sometimes have more effect than a beautifully written excerpt.

Don’t get me wrong. A great excerpt is an effective way to win a reader, but you’ve still got to make people want to read it in the first place.
So, for the next ten days until the book’s release date on June 14, I have prepared a bunch of teeets, some short Facebook posts, three different 16×9 promotional images ideal for Facebook and Twitter, and three square promo images for Instagram.

There are hints but no spoilers. There is a mixture of information, humour and invitation. The hashtags are varied so that I reach more users than if I just stick to four or five basic tags. The images are different colours and styles, but all consistent with the story and genre.

Every post must have:

A promotional image that includes the book cover
Some information about the story or character
Clear indication of the genre
The link for ordering/buying the book
A mixture of popular and useful hashtags

My goal is to achieve preorders for my book so that it has some sales momentum as soon as it launches, and then to continue promoting it to generate sales after that. That means creating different images, different tweets, and so on, on a regular basis. There is, after all, no such thing as “set and forget” promotion.

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A Rose By Any Other Name’ is available for preorder here.

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