Selling Your E-Book via Your Own Blog or E-Mail List

Whether or not your e-book is available directly from your website or a web page (see Chapters 9 and 10), you can use your blog or e-mail list to promote it. You simply include a link to your e-book’s page at Amazon.com or on other major e-retailers’ sites.

When you launch your e-book, let your existing audience know about it. If you’ve been blogging for a few months, or if you’ve started an e-mail list where readers can opt in to receive updates about your e-book (and your other projects), get in touch with your audience, and point them toward your new e-book.

If your e-book isn’t yet finished, you can still start a blog or an e-mail list. In fact, you produce better results by building the readership of your blog or e-mail list before your e-book is ready — that way, you have plenty of people to contact on launch day.

Comparing blogs and e-mail lists

Blogs and e-mail lists are different beasts, and readers engage with them differently. This list can help sort them out:

Blog: A chronological list of commentary on a website. Readers can dip in and out, reading only a couple of posts or several, and they can easily share links to your blog and its posts with their friends via Facebook or Twitter or other social media sites.

E-mail list: A list of people who share a common interest and subscribe in order to exchange information. Their messages generally don’t appear publicly on the web (though it’s an option). Readers receive all mailings — unless they opt out of the list — and can easily forward mailings to their friends.

In practice, many readers will choose to subscribe to your blog via e-mail so that they receive your new blog posts straight to their e-mail accounts. Others will use an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader, like Google Reader, to receive new blog posts. Even so, a mailing list gives you slightly more control — and many online marketers emphasize the importance of building an e-mail list so that you have direct access to your readers’ inboxes.

If you’re just starting out, you may find a blog easier to handle than an e-mail list. Enable e-mail subscriptions on your blog — e-mail is a familiar, and favored, technology for many people. If you choose to create an e-mail list as well as (or instead of) a blog, look into Aweber (www.aweber.com ) and MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com ). These reputable providers ensure that your e-mail is delivered successfully to readers, and they offer insight into vital statistics, such as how many people open an e-mail and how many click a link.

Using your blog or e-mail list — or both

The ways in which you use your blog and mailing list may differ slightly. Here are my suggestions:

Use your blog to write about subjects that will be of interest to readers of your e-book. If you’ve written (or you’re writing) a nonfiction book, it’s a relatively easy task. You can create content that ties in with specific chapters, you can take a topic further, or you can give readers a beginner’s guide to the area.

If you’re working on fiction, you may need to be a little more creative in coming up with topics. For example, if your novel is a romance set on a Mediterranean cruise, you might choose to write about your own experience on cruises or about interesting areas of the Mediterranean that your characters visit. Alternatively, you can use your blog to publish short stories that relate to the world of your novel. This strategy can be quite effective if you’re working on a series of books.

Use your mailing list to send out occasional, short updates. Most readers don’t read in-depth articles from an e-mail list, so you may simply want to use your list to let them know when your book is out, or to occasionally advertise a special sale. However, try not to let so much time pass between mailings that your audience forgets who you are! You can even commit to sending a short update every month or two to let your readers know how the book is progressing.

Some writers, particularly of nonfiction, provide incentives to encourage readers to join their e-mail lists. It might be a miniature e-book on a related topic, an audio recording, or even a series of videos. If you have the time and resources to create a valuable piece of free content, an incentive will definitely help grow your e-mail list. You can see in Figure 18-1 how my list membership has increased. After months of seeing slow list growth, I introduced my first incentive, a free e-book, in June 2011. I added several others “goodies” during the next 12 months, and by June 2012, I had more than 2,000 subscribers.

When you craft a sales message on your blog or for your e-mail list, make sure that you

Remain positive and enthusiastic. Don’t apologize for sending a “promotional” e-mail, and don’t slip in a line about your new e-book at the end of a long blog post or a chatty e-mail update: Make it the focus of at least one post or mailing.

State explicitly how to buy your e-book. Explain that it’s available only in digital, downloadable format (unless you’ve created a paperback version). Emphasize the advantages: Your readers can buy your e-book at any time, from anywhere in the world. Let readers know that they can view e-books on their computers, tablets, or phones; they don’t need to have dedicated e-reading devices.

Avoid cluttering your message with options. It’s tempting to give readers lots of links — to your e-book’s page in every online store and to your presence on Twitter, Goodreads, and Facebook, for example. Rather than confuse your readers with different choices, suggest one or two links — perhaps to Amazon.com and any other major store that you know will be popular with your audience. Then simply add a note telling them that they can search for your book by title in other online stores, too.