This is a guest post by Chris Naish of NoHatDigital. Chris is a social media/SEO wizard and self-published author who likes learning new things and tinkering with stuff on interwebs. He also blogs now and again at his site ThinkClickRich.com and writes books with proper England grammar when the mood takes him.
3 Book Promotion Ideas (That Nobody Is Talking About)
I know you probably know all the basic stuff, so I want to provide you with book promotion ideas that you likely have not heard before. Here we go:
Thunderclap
Thunderclap is a service that allows you to get all of your supporters behind you on launch day. They sign up and grant Thunderclap access to post a message about your book launch the day it goes live. All of these tweets and Facebook likes to go out the same time so that you are literally everywhere on your launch day.
If you want to make sure you get even more eyes on your legion of tweets, be sure to visit Hashtagify.me and include a couple of popular ‘hashtags’ in the message that is going out.
In the image below you’ll see that with this particular thunderclap we got almost 2000 clicks to a free book. While there is no way of knowing how many of those actually downloaded the book, you can bet it was a fair few!
Finally, this is free. but only if you reach 100 supporters. This is hard work, no doubt about it, but worth your time. If you can hire somebody to do outreach to people in your industry/niche on your behalf it will, of course, make this a lot less painless.
Kindle Categories
Nicholas has written in the past about the importance of Amazon categories. As everyone says, make sure you select the best, most relevant categories for your book.
Well, forget that!
Select EVERY relevant category for your book!
It’s a little-known secret that you can actually add your Kindle book to up to ten categories. Identify them in advance of your launch day and, as soon as the book is live, message KDP from the dashboard (the contact link is in tiny text at the bottom) and tell them to place you into the other eight categories you have identified. Use the exact category path in your request, like so:
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Total Quality Management
Be sure to go to the deepest level possible as this will result in more eyes on your book, and a greater chance to rank highly in these deeper categories. This article will help with deep category selection.
Keywords
This is one is in beta, and something I wish I had thought of prior to publishing my last book. As far as I can see, nobody is really talking about this… at least not in public!
Now, I’m not talking about the seven keywords you get to enter in the back end of KDP here. I’m talking about getting Google to start selling your book for you. This involves doing some in-depth keyword research so be prepared to do some schoolin’ on the subject.
This may not work so well for fiction books, so the non-fiction crowd here will probably appreciate it more. The idea is to include a keyword in your title that is highly searched in both Google and the Kindle store. As an example, do this:
- Go to Google.com and type in “adult coloring books”
- Go to searchvolume.io and type in the same phrase
At position one (at time of writing) on Google, you will find this book.
At searchvolume.io you will see that there are somewhere in the range of 246,000 searches for this keyword per month.
Now check the best sellers ranking for that book on Amazon. Not bad huh?
Of course, it’s not guaranteed that you will rank first in Google just because you bang a keyword in the title. Some linking from other sites with relevant anchor text will help that book to rank for that keyword. Hmm… let me think of a good example…
OK, let’s say you write a book about online business and you think it is one of the best digital marketing books out there. You might create a link like the last one, in an effort to let Google know that is a vote for that search term.
The great thing about this is that Amazon is such a powerful and trusted website, that ranking your book for a highly relevant keyword should be much easier than on any ‘normal’ site.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope you found the book promotion ideas interesting. If you have any questions then holler below and I’ll see if I can’t help you out!
[tweetthis]3 Book Promotion Ideas (That Nobody Is Talking About)[/tweetthis]
Charles Yallowitz said:
Yeah, the keyswords thing kind of backfired on me a few times. Seems Amazon will chop up your keywords even if you’re under the character limit. For example, I had ‘elves, orcs, and zombies’ for one and saved the draft. Came back and it was chopped into 3 and 2 of the others were gone. Found it was like that on several of my other books. Makes me wonder why they allow long keywords.
Thunderclap is a good one. It was really nig and popular a few years back. I see it pop up at times, so I do wonder why it fell into the shadows. Only thing I have to say on categories is that it’s amazing how many sub-categories there are out there. All of them seem to have erotica too. 🤨
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Of course they do, Charles. It’s a post-50-shades world we live in.
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Charles Yallowitz said:
Sad, but true. Guess everyone wants to be the next ‘Erotica Gone Mainstream’.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
There’s a surprising number of erotica featuring Harry Potter in China, from what I hear.
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Charles Yallowitz said:
This revelation combined with my Twitter account going haywire makes me wonder if I’m still asleep and having a strange dream. So, Harry is in China? Wonder why that location was picked.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
It’s the other way around. The Chinese picked Harry. Apparently he’s pretty popular over there. Popular enough to feature in several explicit fan fiction books, anyway.
It does feel like we’re in a parallel universe at times, doesn’t it?
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Charles Yallowitz said:
I really hope they made him an adult. The whole thing is coming off a little creepy. Certainly a parallel universe feel today.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Trump meeting Kim? Definitely a lot of weirdness around today.
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Charles Yallowitz said:
I’m not sure what to think about that, but I’m trying to stay away from politics. Especially in public because that just causes anxiety.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Feel free to delete my previous comment, then 🙂
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Charles Yallowitz said:
Wait . . . It’s your blog we’re on, right?
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Like I said, weird…
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Charles Yallowitz said:
One of those days.
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Charles Yallowitz said:
Sent an email. Felt bad blocking the conversation. Especially since I was having it on texts at the same time.
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V.M.Sang said:
?
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Yep.
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Chris Naish said:
Hey Charles, you mean the keywords actually being in the URL or where the actual title is on the sales page?
They seem to cut shorter words from the URL, and on the actual title(s), if you go over 200 (at least last time I checked) characters they start adding ellipses and cutting words out.
Best to bear this in mind if you are using a series title also as that is part of the 200.
I wrote about this in-depth here: https://thinkclickrich.com/amazon-kdp-keywords/
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Chris Naish said:
Hey Charles, sorry if this comes through twice. Posted once and something went horribly wrong… I think. haha
With regards to the keywords, do you mean in the URL, or the actual title(s)?
In the URL, Amazon seems to cut any word of five letters or less.
In the title, they start adding ellipses if the total character count of all titles goes over 200. This includes your series title so bear that in mind. I wrote about this in-depth here: https://thinkclickrich.com/amazon-kdp-keywords/
Hopefully that’s helpful… or did I miss the mark completely? haha
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Charles Yallowitz said:
Maybe I read the entry wrong. I meant the keywords in the book setup when you first publish. You know how you can pick 7 keywords to help with searches and to get into sub-categories? I’ve also found that second trick doesn’t always work. All of my books in my first series are keyworded ‘sword and sorcery’, but only a few got into the category.
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Chris Naish said:
Yes, that’s often the case from what I have heard. You have to actually contact them via the link on the bottom of the site, or even better get them on the phone.
If they try to tell you that you can’t put your book in ten categories, you’re probably talking to one of the less experienced staff.
This only works on Kindle btw, not on paperback.
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Charles Yallowitz said:
I only do e-Books anyway since my attempts at paperback were might with crickets. I’ll have to give it a shot, especially since Sword & Sorcery seems like an obvious fight for my books. I’m guessing this is caused by programs instead of people.
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The Story Reading Ape said:
Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog.
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Chris Naish said:
Thanks for the share, much appreciated!
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The Story Reading Ape said:
Great article, Chris 👍😃
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gibsonauthor said:
Reblogged this on s a gibson.
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Chris Naish said:
Thanks again for the share! 🙂
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V.M.Sang said:
Great and useful article. Reblogged on Dragons Rule OK/
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Chris Naish said:
Thank you Viv, appreciate the reblog also! 🙂
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Thank you so much for the share 🙂
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Pingback: An interesting post about book promotion. | Dragons Rule OK.
OIKOS™-Redaktion said:
Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und über Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
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Chris Naish said:
Dankeschön!
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kimwrtr said:
Reblogged this on Kim's Author Support Blog.
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Chris Naish said:
Thank you Kim, appreciate you sharing this!
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Steve Boseley said:
Reblogged this on Steve Boseley and commented:
Some excellent tips for promoting your work…
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Chris Naish said:
Thanks very much Steve, glad you liked it. Thank you for sharing!
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Anna Dobritt said:
Reblogged this on Anna Dobritt — Author.
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Chris Naish said:
Much appreciated Anna. Thank you for sharing this.
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Don Massenzio said:
Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio and commented:
Check out this great post from Nicholas Rossis’ blog with book promotion ideas that nobody is talking about
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Chris Naish said:
Hi Don, thanks for the share buddy! 🙂
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Don Massenzio said:
My pleasure.
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