Mark Coker - Smashwords Book Marketing Guide: How to Market any Book for Free

Copyright 2008-2011 MarkCoker, Founder of Smashwords ( http://www.smashwords.com )

Version 1.16 Updated 7.12.11

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Smashwords Edition

Cover design by PJ Lyon

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Other Smashwords Titles by MarkCoker :

The Smashwords Style Guide

The 10-Minute PR Checklist How to Earn thePublicity You Deserve

Boob Tube

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Table of Contents

IntroductionAbout the Smashwords Book MarketingGuide:

This guide provides authors and publisherspractical advice on how to market their books. The ideas presentedherein cost nothing to implement other than the investment of yourtime.

In the last three years, tens of thousands ofauthors and publishers have improved their book marketing with theSmashwords Book Marketing Guide.

Although the Smashwords Book Marketing Guidewas originally written for the benefit of authors who publish anddistribute their ebooks at Smashwords, the principles youll learnhere are universal.

Some of my tips require only a couple minutesof your time, yet will reap dividends for years to come. Other tipsrequire a greater ongoing investment of your time and attention. Dothe easy things first.

This guide begins with a short summary of howthe Smashwords platform assists an authors marketing, and thencontinues on with over thirty book marketing tips any author canemploy.

This guide is a living document, so I welcomeyour suggestions for new tips and techniques we can share with theSmashwords author community. Write me (Mark Coker) at first initialsecond initial at you know where dot com. Ill update the guidebased on your feedback, and as we introduce new free marketing anddistribution tools for authors.

Background on Smashwords:

Smashwords is a free ebook publishingplatform and distributor serving ebook authors, publishers andretailers. Since its founding in 2008, Smashwords has helped nearly20,000 authors and publishers release and distribute over 50,000ebooks. The Smashwords service distributes to most major ebookretailers. Smashwords offers various free tools for digitalpublishing, marketing, sampling, selling and distribution. Thesetools help you connect with your audience.

Setting Expectations:

Book marketing is a tough uphill battle. Evenmost authors published by large commercial print publisherscomplain they get little or no post-publication marketing supportfrom their publishers. Most authors, whether theyre traditionallypublished or self-published, must do their own marketing.

At Smashwords, we dont make promises wecant keep, so we cannot promise you your book will sell well, evenif you follow all the tips in this guide. In fact, most books,whether theyre traditionally published or self-published, dontsell well. Whether your book is intended to inspire, inform orentertain, millions of other books and media forms are competingagainst you for your prospective readers ever-shrinking pie ofattention.

Ebooks represent the fastest growing segmentof the book publishing industry. Ebook sales have been increasingover 100 percent per year the last few years, according to thelatest industry research, while traditional print book sales havestagnated or declined. If youre an author, you need to expose yourwork to the digital realm.

Despite the rapid growth of ebook sales,ebooks still represent a small fraction of overall book industrysales. But this is changing. For all of 2010, according to theAssociation of American Publishers, ebooks accounted for over 8% oftrade book sales in the U.S., up from about 3% in 2009 and 1% in2008. Yet these industry statistics dramatically understate whathappens when publishers make their books available in ebook form.Sourcebooks, a large independent publisher, reported that 35% ofits revenues came from ebooks in the month of January, 2011. Someof the best-selling indie authors at Smashwords are selling over100 ebooks for every print book.

Bottom line, youre smart to get your bookout there as an ebook.

How Smashwords Helps Authors andPublishers Market Their Books

Okay, in the previous paragraph, we leveledwith you and told you how youre unlikely to sell a lot of ebooksin the near term. Now that we have that out of the way, letsreview how Smashwords helps market your book today, without youlifting a finger:

1. Exposure at Smashwords.com, our retailoperation - Simply by publishing your book on Smashwords, yourbook is exposed to thousands of customers who pass through ourvirtual doors each day. Once a visitor starts browsing, we make iteasy for them to serendipitously discover other books and authorsof possible interest with features such as category searches,bestseller lists, highest rated lists, People who recentlypurchased this book also purchased these books, and People whorecently viewed this author also viewed these authors.

2. Distribution to Apple, Barnes &Noble, Kobo, Sony and others

Smashwords is one of the worlds leadingdistributors of ebooks. Ebook distribution is important, because ifyour book isnt widely available in all major retailers, then itsnot discoverable. Once your book is accepted into the SmashwordsPremium Catalog, Smashwords can distribute it to the AppleiBookstore (U.S. U.K. Canada, Australia, France and Germany) Barnes& Noble, Kobo, Sony and the Diesel eBook Store. More retailagreements are in the works (stay tuned!). Most Smashwords authorsand publishers derive 80% of their sales through the Smashwordsdistribution network. Its free and easy to earn inclusion in thePremium Catalog. Simply format your book to the requirements of theSmashwords Style Guide. Learn more at http://smashwords.com/distribution

3. Distribution to Mobile Reading Apps- Did you know Apples iPhone has quickly become one of the mostpopular ereading devices for ebooks? Its true, and this rapidascendance of the iPhone as a strong competitor to other e-readingdevices is largely thanks to the success of one of the most popularapplications for the iPhone, the Stanza e-reading app. Over 2.5million book lovers have downloaded Stanza onto their iPhone oriPod Touch, allowing them to browse, download and read thousands ofbooks. At Smashwords, we offer full integration with the Stanzareader, making it easy for you as an author to reach this importantand fast growing audience of voracious readers. Within seconds ofyou publishing your book at Smashwords, itll appear in the nativeStanza catalog. In addition to Stanza, Smashwords books aredistributed via Aldiko and Word-Player, two popular mobile readingapps for Android phones.

4 Profile page - When you publish withSmashwords, we automatically create a personal web page for youwith a unique web address. You can post your bio and picture,provide a listing of your published books on Smashwords, add linksto outside web sites, integrate your external blog, or providelinks to where readers can purchase print versions of your book.Your profile page also lists reviews you have written of otherSmashwords books (more on this later).

5. Book pages - For each book youpublish with Smashwords, we create a web page dedicated to thatbook. You can upload a book cover (or some other artisticrepresentation of your book), upload YouTube book trailers, and adda synopsis and descriptive tags to help readers find your book.Your book page is where prospective readers can access samples ofyour book in formats readable on any ebook reading device.Customers can post reviews of your book on your book page.

6. Sampling - Smashwords offers themost powerful and flexible sampling system youll find anywhere.Sampling allows readers to try your book before they buy. Smartauthors realize that youre competing more for your readers timeand attention than you are for their wallet. If you can get thereader to invest their precious time to read the first 20, 30 or50% of your book for free, odds are theyll want to purchase thebook to finish it. This is why sampling is so critical to your bookmarketing success.