Natalia Yashenkova

Head of Marketing and PR at StarForce Technologies

Natalia Yashenkova has more than 15 years experience in software development and information security. Before StarForce Technologies she worked at Netris and Vimcom Optic.

Suppose, you have written a wonderful book and ready to present it to your potential readers. Unless you are Joanne Rowling, you have to struggle through competition and information noise to reach your reader. Follow our advice and your book will be successful!

On the preliminary stage:

1. Ask a famous person to write preface for your book. You can always find out a public person among your friends or people you know or classmates - look closely! Probably, you should write the text of preface yourself and suggest it to the right person for approval to save his time.
2. Pay attention to the illustrations. You can find a cool illustrator or create them himself. Anyway, the illustrations have to be amazing.
3. Add Easter Eggs if the genre of your book allows it. A small quest would be an interesting way to get a bonus and to leave a good impression of the book. That works for both business and entertainment literature.

When your book is about ready your next step is to stimulate the interest in potential investors or collect useful contacts for future sales.

4. Create a promotional video of the book, and post it on all the resources. In this case it is desirable that the video does not look like a frontal attack on the reader's wallet, but as a solution to a certain task or tasks of the person / humanity.
5. Arrange A/B testing of the cover of the book in social networks. In case you do not have significant amount of subscribers use thematic groups and societies. In addition to discussions on the cover ask people to choose the best photo of the author, design of an advertising poster and a landing page of the web-site. The web-site best practices will be analyzed below.



6. Place the book at crowdfunding resource. Experienced funders recommend authors to contribute significant amount of money by themselves to create an image of a promising project that is catching the public eye. That will help you to collect money quickly.
7. Among your friends you definitely find out people that are worthy of respect or you probably want to imitate. Ask that people to write comment on your book. You can use the comments as a resource for promotion or include them into the book. In addition to individuals, it is always great to receive such comments from mass media. Remember how it is usually said: The New York Timed considers that this is the best book about yoga ever, the book putting everything upside down.

So, the book is ready. You have two options of the bookdelivery to your readers: a classical paper copy or a digital file. Of course, nothing so amuses ambition as the smell of freshly printed pages of your own book. Again, you can give to your mother a copy with an autograph. If the book was created to maintain your image, it is necessarily to provide a hard cover and an elegant look. However, the electronic version has its own advantages: it weighs nothing, fits even in a small women's handbag and is delivered by e-mail instantly after purchase. To protect against copying and pirated distribution, you can use the SFContent.com service - books will be available for reading on all popular operating systems: Android, iOS, macOS and Windows.

Regardless of the form of launch for successful promotion and sales you need a web-site.

8. Create your own web-site or at least a landing page about the author and the book. Tell the audience what hardened the author, what thorns he passed through, and how this affected his work. Tell us about the book itself, and what it could give to the readers. Add reviews and comments. Your task is to create an attractive page about the product. In the future, the web-site will become the main source of all cultivated content aimed to promote your book.
9. Connect to your web-site a payment system or place a link to the store where the book can be purchased. Thus, you will shift the traffic to the right direction.
10. Select a part of the book for free distribution, for example, the first chapter. Upload the file onto your own web-site for free downloading. Also upload it to the other resources that provide book for downloading. At the end of the file give a link to your web-site or to the purchase page.
11. Perform presentations of the book to mass-media: invite journalists, bloggers and other nice people.
12. Arrange presentation at the presentation. If you wrote a detective - let the murder be committed, if the book is about personal growth – show a person who is close to a suicide, etc.
13. Organize the author's reading of the book. Part of the content can be given in the form of videos and placed on YouTube.
14. Use free promotional opportunities in the social networks and thematical clusters and communities, for example, by asking recommendations of experts and use paid options of social metworks to demonstrate your videos.
15. Send your books as a gift to the leaders of your community and present to the participants of the thematic events.
16. Donate part of the revenue from sales of your book to the thematic charity found.
17. Make photos of famous people with your book in their hands (or in whatever it is). It can be the photoshop or photoshop contest.
18. Make an impression of a very high demand and deficit of your books.
19. Cooperate with the authors you are not competing with – advertise their books and they will promote yours.
20. Establish good relationships with the Universities societies.
21. Create your own story on “How to sell books in the Internet” and publish it at the well-known resource.

Have some other ideas? Please share in the comments.