This post, from Saneesh, originally appeared on the Freado The Book-Marketing Technology Blog on 10/20/09.
[Note from Publetariat Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton: While this is really just a promotional piece about the BookBuzzr widget, since that widget is free and I use it myself and can therefore recommend it personally, it’s a resource I’m very happy to share with Publetariat’s audience. I’ve embedded the BookBuzzr widget for my book, The IndieAuthor Guide, at the end of this post so readers can see for themselves exactly what it is and how it works.]
As an author trying to market your book online, you may find that many of the simple steps involved in Internet marketing are actually quite daunting. Consider the simplest and most important prerequisite, of offering an extract of your book online in a nice to read format that can be easily shared among your readers.
99% of author websites are unable to allow sampling of books on their websites. They simply stick in an image of their book and hope that this is enough to stimulate the desire to read the book among site visitors. You know you can do better than that!
BookBuzzr is built from the ground-up for word-of-mouth (or shall we say, click-of-mouse) book-marketing. By signing up for BookBuzzr you can allow readers to browse through portions of your book in a nice to read online, flip-book format where the experience is similar to reading a real book. Additionally, they can get a [centralized] listing of all things related to your book such as links to where they can buy your book, where they can discover interviews with you, where they can listen to podcasts related to your book and more.
Need another reason to sign-up for BookBuzzr? Let’s talk about "share-ability" or "distribute-ability." Let’s say you saw a book-extract of a book that you loved and you want to share this with readers of your blog. The best most people can do is to put up a link to the book-extract. But is this enough? The era of people going to a few "destination" websites to get their content is over. Today you are as likely to see an interesting video embedded on a blog that you discovered as you are to see that video on YouTube. So we’ve taken care of this for you. Fans of your book can easily embed your book on their personal blogs and become ambassadors for your book.
BookBuzzr is intended to take care of most of the details related to online book-marketing and book promotion on an ongoing basis. At the very least, BookBuzzr helps you to:
- Reach your target audience by allowing them to discover your book in various places such as blogs, websites, social networking sites and more.
- Tell them that your book is available by providing links to places where they can buy your book.
- Persuade them to read it by allowing them to easily sample your book with jaw-dropping book simulation technology.
As a bonus, when you sign up, you also get listed on fReado.com where readers can interact with you and with other readers. Further, you can link from fReado to your own author site or blog, thus helping your search engine rankings. Because fReado.com is optimized for search engines and because fReado.com is regularly crawled all over by the major search engines, the information about your book will soon be noticed and your pages should be listed in response to web searches. We also have plans to connect fReado with Facebook Connect. This enables your readers to:
- Seamlessly "connect" their Facebook account and information with your book
- Connect and find their friends who are on fReado
- Share comments made on your book with their friends on Facebook
Sign up now for free and join other elite authors who understand the art of online book promotion!
Given the growth of Twitter and its importance in helping authors build their platform and sell more books, a number of Twitter features have been added to BookBuzzr to help authors market their book on Twitter with a large degree of automation. The goals behind these features are:
- To help the author gain more followers on Twitter
- To make the book more visible among the authors’ Twitter followers
- To help readers of the book share the book among their Twitter followers.
These Twitter features for marketing books online include:
- Authors can schedule tweets about their book in their Twitter accounts daily or weekly.
- Every time a reader opens an author’s book-excerpt, a tweet goes out to the authors Twitter followers mentioning that the book was opened.
- Readers will find a link to follow the author on Twitter when they are reading the author’s book-excerpt and when they finish reading the book-excerpt.
- Readers can tweet about the book with just a few clicks.
