Sunday, February 22, 2015

Creating a website to promote ebook

Traditional methods of book promotion aren't cutting it anymore. I have tried grassroots and hiring a publicist, but both failed to convert. Without an author being tied to a publisher, bookstores are not interested in that author's books. This leaves two options: create a publishing house or disregard dead-tree versions of the book.

I actually tried the first option. Snowdrops Publishing was born in early 2014, but it was expensive to start up and will be hard to maintain. With domain expenses, ISBN purchases, buying inventory, etc., the money was leaving m pocket much more easily.

So how am I going to get Seefer Elliot to become one of the most popular books for 6th graders? I decided to concentrate solely on e-marketing for 2015. After all, the growing population of middle schoolers who own electronic reading devices has swelled dramatically in the last few years. If I am not going to be seeing my book in a Barnes and Noble or the public library, I need to reach the other big marketplace: e-readers.

I have created a hub page, Seefer Elliot, to help make my book more Google-friendly. It is my hope that others looking for information about books in the genre will find this page and receive the information presented on it.


In conjuction with having a crawlable site, having the the domain name makes it much easier to drive traffic. Instead of having the long amazon URL, I can simply say "hey check out my website at ..."

Once at the website, users can jump to the Amazon purchase page. Making book one 99 cents is also part of the strategy.

I will update this in the future to inform you how it goes and if it translates into additional sales. Maybe one day, you'll hear about my book being one of the best 6th, 7th or 8th grade books to read from another source other than me. :) Here's hoping at least.