For the past several weeks I have been discussing marketing tactics an author can take to secure more marketing muscle and “exposure” for his/her book on the various channels made available by his/her publisher. I’ve been using our company Outskirts Press, and specifically our free self-publishing app, as the primary example, although many of these tactics hold true for all writers, regardless of where they published.
Specifically, our app has four categories: blog, authors, videos, Twitter. For the past two weeks I covered the six different ways our authors can get featured on the blog category of our app. Today we’ll talk about how to get featured on the “authors” category of the app, which is updated on our app three times a week and provides an excellent spotlight for the authors who appear there. The app shares the author’s biography, comments about publishing with Outskirts Press, the front cover image of the book, and buttons to buy the book directly either from Amazon or the author’s Outskirts Press webpage. When a new author is featured, he/she also gets a plug on our Facebook page.
When you combine limited availability of promotional channels with the publication of around 150 books each month, one needs to establish “requirements” that each book or author needs to meet in order to be considered for promotion in the various channels. For instance, a few postings ago I introduced a new free opportunity we’re offering for our authors called the “Awesome Cover of the Week” spotlight. The requirement in that case, obviously, is that the book has to have an “awesome” cover. Of course, I realize that “awesome” is a relatively subjective phrase, but in our line of work, it is relatively easy to identify covers that do and do not fall into even the subjective areas of that definition.
So, how do we identify authors to feature in the “authors” section of our blog? It’s relatively easy, also — we feature authors who have chosen to share their positive publishing experiences with us. I started Outskirts Press to help authors (since I am one), so I love hearing from our published authors about their joys of publication. Authors share their comments with us all the time in a variety of ways. And with this new app feature, we can “thank” those authors for those kind words by giving them additional exposure for their books. Authors who share their positive experiences with us are also archived on the Self Publishing Author blog at http://selfpublishingauthor.wordpress.com
Next time we’ll talk about improving your chances of getting featured in the “video” section of our iPhone app — and this is actually a guaranteed method. So stay tuned.
President of Outskirts Press 