Hello and welcome back to my blog.

Today I will talk about the fundamentals of marketing your book.

The first thing is to let people know you’ve written a book and it is published. It’s not a case of write/publish and they will buy. How will people know to buy your book if they don’t know it’s available? They won’t.

However, this is not to say that you should be spammy and always tell everyone you know to buy your book every time you see them. With friends, family and co-workers let them know once and that should be enough. You’ll likely annoy them if you’re constantly saying they should buy your book or asking them to buy.

The second part of fundamentals of marketing is to write the next book. And get it published. Most of us are not going to strike it rich on the first book we write. It does happen from time to time but, most likely you’ll gain traction after the third book is out.

Have links in each of your books to buy the your other ones. But if you only have one book out this will be difficult, or should I say impossible? But once your next book is out put the link to the new book in the back of your old book and republish it. That’s the great thing about self publishing, you can always add more.

But always continue to add more and more books to your catalog. That way when someone reads one of your books and they like it they will continue to read more of your books.

Get your book professionally edited. This is an absolute must. There are people who will leave scathing reviews over books that are poorly edited, have typos and have factual mistakes. In this day and age of Google and other search engines there is simply no excuse for not knowing how a particular type of profession operates or how any type of machine works.

If you’re going to use social media pick one to specialize in and have a presence on all the others, or as many as you can manage. This is the old saying that it is better to be great at one (or few things) than to be mediocre at many.

And when it comes to social media, use it in the same way you talk to your friends, family and co-workers about your book. Don’t always post “Buy my book, buy my book!” every single time you post. The thing to do in this would be to post helpful things more often. So do a “buy my book” post for every four to nine posts that you post about helping people solve a problem.

Basically ten to twenty percent commercial posts and eighty to ninety percent helpful posts. That way you’re not always bugging people for money.

And last but not least have your own email list. There are many auto responders available to choose from. This is important because this is a list of customers/fans that you own. As opposed to being reliant on a social media site or search engine for any customers. Social media and Google search results are not something you own and can therefore taken away when they change algorithms.

There you have it, I hope this helps.