10 Ideas to Help Sell 10 Books

It's easy to get stagnant when it comes to promoting. Sometimes, you feel like you've run out of ideas. The ones I'm sharing here can help jumpstart your own creativity and get you moving toward more sales....maybe even more than ten!

1. Write a creative news release about your book and send it out. Even if your book isn’t a new release, find some way to connect it to today’s news or something about how you wrote it. Just make it newsworthy and get it out there. You can find people on fiverr.com who will send out press releases for $5.00 and even write them if you have difficulty doing that.
2. Take several sets of bookmarks to at least three area libraries. If you don’t have bookmarks, you can get them inexpensively at gotprint.com. People do still check out books, and getting your bookmarks into their hands ups the chances of them asking for your book.  
3. Sign up for a local book fair (or one close to you). Do it now before you can talk yourself out of it. Once you’ve committed yourself, make an announcement on all social media and prepare another press release.
4. Adapt a chapter of your novel (if your book is non-fiction) and submit it as an article to several online sites. Bonus: You can sell these articles! If your book isn’t non-fiction, write a unique article about the book and submit it. Try writing about the setting, an artifact that is featured prominently, or the history behind a certain real character.
5. Contact ten authors who have newsletters and ask to swap mentions. You can be mentioned in theirs, and they can be mentioned in yours.
6. Get interviewed on blog radio. Yes, this one is a bit more of a challenge, but there are plenty of radio shows out there looking for guests. If you are unable to find one, then go to Fiverr.com and pay $5.00 for an ad to be placed on one of the radio shows.
7. Contact one local columnist (this can even be for a small newspaper) in your area with a personal note or invite them to lunch. Don’t let this come across as a sales pitch, but you do want to have your business card handy. You want to let them know you are a local author, but you also want to give them a reason why they should meet with you. Everyone has something unique about themselves. Don’t just try to pitch your book. Pitch yourself.
8. Get scheduled for interviews at five blogs (at least). Yes, you have to track these down, but my assistant got me scheduled for over twenty interviews one month alone so it can be done! During the interview, you’re going to talk about this book, even if it is a backlist title.
9. Write personal thank you notes to five to ten reviewers who have reviewed your book and send. Yes, this can be in an email, but it’s even better if it’s a card you send through the mail.
10.  Do some research and find a celebrity or news figure that likes to read your type of book. Send a copy to that celebrity. You can usually find their agent contact information online.