By: Christopher A. Master, Lead Cover Designer
Ever judge a book by its cover?
Snap judgments (whether conscious or not) are what many of us rely upon when formulating our initial opinions. New foods, new clothing, new locations, new automobiles… the list goes on. These inherent “gut-feelings” are often our most reliable tool when making decisions based solely on appearance. So why should it be any different when considering Book Cover Design ?
Let’s face it, the cover is the most important piece of marketing
your book has. A snap judgment is all that stands between your book and the customer, and the cover art is what will entice a customer to close that gap. Over the course of the next few months, I will be sharing some simple recommendations on effective cover design.
Fundamental 1: Keep it simple—Does the cover concept make sense for the book?
There really isn’t an exact formula for successful cover design. The best thing you can do for your book is create a concept that makes sense for the story or idea you’re selling. For fiction or biography, common elements include a character from the book or a scene that is integral to the story. For self-help and business books, good art can support a point or concept discussed within the book as well as convey more nebulous facets like mood and aptitude. It goes without saying that children’s books should appeal to their audience. Confusion on the part of the potential customer will result in a missed sales opportunity.
Try this simple exercise the next time you visit a book store. Allow yourself some extra time to stop in the section with books related to your specific genre. Scan at the selection displayed, judge the designs, and pick up the cover that is most appealing to you. Next, critically compare that design with the other books on the shelf. Then, make a list of design elements that you find appealing and use this to begin structuring your own cover design concept.
Go ahead. I won’t judge you for it.
Click here for Part 2
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Christopher Master works as the Lead Cover Designer at Infinity Publishing. With 10+ years of cover design experience, he has amassed a design portfolio of well over 1000 book covers. He has been married to his intelligent and very patient wife for nearly a decade. In 2010, they welcomed their first child, Sylvie, who is a now toddling machine. A few years back, Christopher published a collection of humorous true childhood stories entitled Tiny Cracker Zoo. Between work, family and freelance design, he strives to find the time to pursue writing a second book, this one focusing, perhaps, on the misadventures of new fatherhood.
By:Penny C. Sansevieri
So you’re out there marketing. You’re doing all the right things (or so you think). You’re following the book marketing advice of some leaders in the industry. You’ve got a checklist and you’re methodically checking off your goals. But how do you know you’re doing everything right? The fact is, most of us don’t. Yet we forge ahead, keeping pace with our marketing plan, without ever knowing if it’s paying off. We don’t see it in sales. Does that mean it’s not working? Not at all. You could be seeing the effects in other places but just aren’t keeping track of it.
I find that especially in social media you need to keep a close eye on what’s working and what’s not. If you’ve spent *any* kind of time online you know that you can be in front of your computer for what seems like 20 minutes and yet three hours have gone by. If the three hours of marketing is paying off, then it’s fine to spend the time. But you need to know the difference. Here are a few things you can review to measure the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of your marketing.
- Jumping in without a plan: Set clear, measureable goals because most marketing is invisible. Let’s face it, you send an email and wonder half the time if the intended recipient got it or if it ended up in a spam filter, never to be seen again. That’s the power behind goals. You need them and you need to run your campaign by them. So what are your goals? And no, you may not say sell books. Yes, that factors in - but there are a million small steps along the way before you even get to sales. Consider these goals and see if any of them fit your book, topic, and future:
- Establish yourself as an expert or get known in your particular field. Hey, maybe you just want to be known as the go-to person for everything related to paranormal romance. That’s great and it’s a realistic, attainable goal.
- Increase the visibility of your brand. OK, sort of the same as the bullet before this one but more geared to the non-fiction author.
- Increase traffic and incoming links to your website. This is a great goal. Whether you are fiction or non-fiction it’s a great focus.
- Do what makes sense for your book: if your followers aren’t on Twitter then why have you spent the last month or so promoting yourself on there? Mind you, Twitter works for most of the books we manage, but there are a few that don’t make sense. Twitter skews older than most people think so don’t be surprised if your YA reader isn’t on there. Before you launch head first into a campaign, make sure it fits your demographic.
- Neglecting other marketing: I know it’s easy to get all a-twitter about Twitter but what else are you doing to promote yourself and your book? If you’re good at events and speaking are you still focused on that? Don’t get too myopic on doing just one thing for your marketing. The truth is, you need to do a lot of different things, balanced out over a week or a month for your marketing to really make sense.
- Set goals – be clear on what you hope to achieve in social media: What are your goals for Twitter? If it’s just about gathering followers then you are missing a big piece of this social networking tool. For many marketing people it’s all about the number, but numbers don’t make as much sense unless they are driving interest to you and your book. If the numbers keep growing along with traffic to your website then you’re on the right track. But if you’re just growing numbers for the sake of being able to say that you have 10,000 followers then it makes no sense. That’s like buying a fancy car you can’t really afford. Eventually the debt of it will drag you down. It’s the same with Twitter and Facebook and any other social media site. It’s not about the numbers. It’s about the activity.
- Be clear on who you are trying to reach: many of you say you’re trying to reach readers but is that really true? We all want to sell books, but who are you really going after? In all likelihood you will have a variety of different targets you are going after. Consider these: booksellers, speaking opportunities, interviews, bulk sale targets, reviewers, and readers to name a few.
- Measure effectively: in order to know if stuff is working you’ll need to measure effectively. As I pointed out earlier on in this article you may not want to do that by fans or followers - instead consider these ideas as ways to measure your success:
- Retweets on Twitter: the best sign of success on Twitter is the amount of retweets. Are you getting them and if so, how often? If your tweets are good and your followers are active, you should see a few a week at least (depending on the amount of followers you have). If you’re curious about the amount of Tweets that get RT’d – check out retweetrank.com. Twitter Analyzer (twitteranalyzer.com) is another great tool for determining how far tweets have traveled.
- Site hits: are the hits to your site increasing? Are you watching your analytics to be sure? If you’re not, you should be. Watch your site stats closely and monitor the increase in traffic and where it’s coming from.
- Inbound links: how many new ones are you getting? Did you do a vanity search before you started this campaign? If not, do that now. Make sure you know how many new incoming links you’re getting as a result of your efforts.
- Sign-ups to your mailing list: are they increasing? If you’re doing the right stuff in your social media they should be increasing weekly.
- Increasing the contacts in your industry: remember that social media marketing is just like going to a networking meeting. You want to expand your reach and get to know others in your industry. If you’re not increasing your reach and contact base then you need to be. This is another great way to gauge how effective your marketing is.
We always want to make progress in our marketing but we’re not always sure how to do it or if what we’re doing is making a difference. Follow these steps and see if it doesn’t help your marketing momentum. If it’s paying off, you’ll know sooner rather than later and you can keep doing the good stuff, and punt the bad.
Bonus: additional tools for tracking marketing
Bit.ly: this site serves as both a URL shortener and also as a measurement tool. Bit.ly can help get you real time results on clicks to links you are posting to Facebook and Twitter.
Google Analytics: if you don’t have any back end web analytics (and even if you do) Google gives you a lot of valuable data.
Trackur: this is a great monitoring site to see what’s being featured on you online and off. It’s not free like Google Alerts but much more comprehensive. Their basic package is $18 a month.
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Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert and an Adjunct Instructor with NYU. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. She is the author of five books, including Book to Bestseller which has been called the “road map to publishing success.” AME is the first marketing and publicity firm to use Internet promotion to its full impact through The Virtual Author Tour, which strategically works with social networking sites, blogs, micro-blogs, ezines, video sites, and relevant sites to push an author’s message into the virtual community and connect with sites related to the book’s topic, positioning the author in his or her market. To learn more about Penny’s books or her promotional services, you can visit her website athttp://www.amarketingexpert.com. To subscribe to her free ezine, send a blank email to: subscribe@amarketingexpert.com Copyright © 2010 Penny C. Sansevieri
By: Penny C. Sansevieri
Face it, times are tough! The economy blah, blah, blah. Tell me something new. The key is:
Everyone loves a bargain, especially today. And, bargains drive sales. Here’s a great way you can explode your sales:
Call a bargain what you want: a discount, coupon, sale, bonus package, gift with purchase, etc. The point is, people love it. Several weeks ago, we tried an experiment. We decided to bundle my latest title: Red Hot Internet Publicity, with an older book called Book Promotion Made Easy. By older I don't mean outdated, I mean that it was an evergreen title, older to the list so the author had moved on from aggressively promoting it. The match was perfect and on the first launch our sales of Red Hot Internet Publicity quadrupled. I was stunned.
For many publishers, a backlist is either gold or stagnant. In either case, there's likely a title that you can pair up with a newer one you are promoting. In the case of the bundle mentioned above, I didn't even write Book Promotion Made Easy. So if you're looking for pairing options and you don't have a suitable book in-house to pair it with, consider co-promoting the titles with another author. Not only will you get a quality bundle, but if they have a list they can promote it to you can participate in their promotion as well.
The breakdown was easy, here’s how we did it. We bundled together my new book Red Hot Internet Publicity with Book Promotion Made Easy. Total value: $30.95.
Red Hot is $18.95 and Book Promotion Made Easy is $12.00.
Book Marketing Experts offered the bundle that offered both books for $20. That's a 35% savings or $10.95.
Want to know how we did it? I’ll tell you and here's how you can create your own special website promotions to double or triples sales from your site:
-Analyze your book and its cost.
- Look to raise the price of the bundle "a bit" to cover the cost of the add-on or bonus item. - Offer great value to your customer.
-Look for bonuses you can add in. Successful examples include a booklet, book, eBook, checklist, article or special report. An MP3 audio program or CD.
The key to success is to offer a bonus or package that is Valuable to your customers. That [value] drives sales.
-If you’re going to partner with someone to do this (and what a great idea!) then contact the author/seller. Most vendors, inside and outside publishing, love to make bulk sales at a steep discount. Often 70-80% off retail.
-Don't want to spend money or pair up? No worries. As an author or publisher you can write your own special report, booklet, eBook, etc. Just make sure it has a significant value.
-Assign a value to your new publication. Some eBooks have a price of $9.97, $17, $17.95, $19.95, $24.50 and in some cases even higher. Set the price based on your market's perceived value of the product.
-Round up the price. Make it easy to make a purchase and the dollars and cents clear.
We rounded up the price of Red Hot Internet Publicity from $18.95 to $20 and gave away Book Promotion Made Easy for $0.00.
It’s important, however to explain the savings clearly so the customer sees the great value you're offering.
-Add a special landing page to your website that promotes your special offer.
For an example, here's ours: http://www.amarketingexpert.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=104
-Link the landing page (offer) to your shopping cart, PayPal, etc.
-Fill the orders asap. Buyers are a very impatient group these days.
-Promote your package to your mailing list and if you’re partnering with someone, make sure they promote it to their list as well.
Book bundling is a fun and easy way to increase sales of virtually any book. I have found that when I pair up Book Promotion Made Easy with mine at speaking events, I quadruple the sales there as well. Two books for $20? You bet that’s a great offer and not only that, it moves books and moves them quickly.
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Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert and an Adjunct Instructor with NYU. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. She is the author of five books, including Book to Bestseller which has been called the “road map to publishing success.” AME is the first marketing and publicity firm to use Internet promotion to its full impact through The Virtual Author Tour, which strategically works with social networking sites, blogs, micro-blogs, ezines, video sites, and relevant sites to push an author’s message into the virtual community and connect with sites related to the book’s topic, positioning the author in his or her market. To learn more about Penny’s books or her promotional services, you can visit her website athttp://www.amarketingexpert.com. To subscribe to her free ezine, send a blank email to: subscribe@amarketingexpert.com Copyright © 2010 Penny C. Sansevieri