Viral marketing

As I mentioned a few times in previous blogs, viral marketing means that information spreads around the internet like a virus. The best known forms of viral marketing are video funnies that we all receive in our e-mail and then send them onto our friends.

It is in our nature that we like giving things to our friends. We also like to tell them interesting information. And that is the principle of viral marketing. When we get something interesting, informative or funny, we send it on to our friends and acquaintances.

You can read about viral marketing in the following free books: 5+ Awesome FREE eBooks Regarding Viral Marketing.

I also warmly recommend the book: World Wide Rave.

In my next blog, I will reveal to you how we can use viral marketing to promote electronic books.

How to promote E-books?

Below are the different ways of promoting books and I give them a rating of 1 to 10, 10 being the best way and 1 the worst.

• Viral marketing           10
• Free books                3-5
• Book reviewers         2-4
• Virtual book tours      2-4
• Social networks         2-4    (depending on how many friends you have)
• Forums                      2-3    (depending on how interesting you are)           
• Interviews on the radio, the internet or printed media       2-4
• Press release              1       (if you are an unknown writer, a press release is pointless)
• Paid advertisement on radio, internet or printed media     1       (not recommended)

Whatever you do on the internet, is better than nothing. I have had periods when I was busy writing and was doing nothing on promotion and consequently I sold nothing. But when I started offering books for free, publishing information on social networks ((Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin), sales suddenly began. It is true I could not live from it, but I was very glad it started happening.

As you can see above, the strongest promotional technique is viral marketing. All the other methods demand a great deal of work, but there is a great possibility that you will not be quite happy with the sales results.

In my experience, using only one of the above methods is not good enough. It is best if you use at least two or more methods at once. An example: you offer the book for free, but you promote the news extensively on Twitter and other social networks.

Also, you should never think about paid promotion in the printed media or the radio or anywhere on the internet. It has been a known fact for a long time that people buy books only on the basis of a recommendation. Have you ever bought a book because you saw an advertisement for it? Probably not. You bought it if a friend or an acquaintance recommended it. If you manage to arrange an interview, that is a different story. But that will not be so easy for a novice writer.

Are my books worth 0.99$?

Certainly, and much more. I personally think they are worth at least 5 – 10 $. But it is a fact I do not feel obliged to have to justify the price of 0.99$ or 2.99$ whatever.

John Locke says that he does not need to prove that his books are good because he is offering them for only 0.99$. So now all those offering books for 9.99$ have to prove that their books are 10 times better.  

So, stop wondering if your books are good enough and direct your attention to the right way of promoting them instead. This means you must attract your target group. They will assess whether your books really are worth the price you are selling them at.

The price of your books?

Before I started publishing, I carried out a great deal of research. The first problem was how to set the price of my books. In this regard, I found the following article most fascinating: How does an unknown author become a Kindle bestseller?  

Reading J. A. Konrath’s blog and blogs by some other writers I will mention later was also very helpful. J.A. Konrath’s most relevant article on this subject can be found HERE.

One reason for John Locke’s success was his strategy of offering his books at the price of 0.99$. The following article is very interesting: Will 99-Cent E-Books Destroy The World As We Know It?.

There are two more very interesting articles by Dean Wesley Smith: E-Book Price Post Redone and The New World of Publishing: Pricing Indie Books…Some 2012 Thoughts.

Also worth reading are the following

1. Why Your Low Priced eBook Pricing Strategy is Wrong?
2. Are eBooks Too Cheap?
3. Pricing - What to do...what to do.
4. Pricing an E-Book on Amazon.

To sum up: the price should be somewhere between 0.99$ and 2.99$. Unless you are already well known, of course, in which case you can afford to charge, let us say, 3.99$ or even 4.99$. Only the very well known authors can charge more than that.