How to promote a book – lazy ebook promoting

Lazy promotion is something you do from your couch. Not all authors feel comfortable getting out and meeting their readers in person. In this article I will show you how I promote my children’s book Tooth in a lazy way.

Without promotion there is a really small chance that your book will be popular (unless you are a popular author). Here are the things I do that work:

Get reviews

It is the most important step. There are several things to consider while trying to get reviews:

1. You’ll get the feedback that will make your book better. Don’t worry about getting bad reviews in the beginning. Make changes to the book and publish another edition! It will just make your book better. My first reviews were 1 and 2 stars. I forgot to check for spelling mistakes and had typos. After fixing it 5 stars began to roll!
2. You’ll get a word out about your book.
3. You’ll see if your book is interesting to the reviewers. If not maybe you need to change something?
4. The best reviewers are always the ones who actually are interested in the types of books you write. For us, it’s children. We’ve experienced bad reviews just because the reviewers were adults without small children – they think that funny kids’ books are silly. So now I try not to ask for reviews if a person is obviously “not into it”.

The most difficult part is to actually get reviews. I’m still working on it, so I’ll update the list as I get more experience in the field.

How to get reviews:

• Free promotions on Amazon bring reviews from time to time.
• Free book on a site like Smashwords will also generate you some feedback.
• Do author review swaps (Amazon doesn’t like it). Goodreads is a good place to start to ask. Visit the reviewcircle subreddit.
• Participate in review pools. This is the best method – you review their books and other people review yours.
• Contact reviewers who can review your book. Contact more writers. Swap reviews. They often give you their real opinion, if not on Amazon, then by email. It can be really useful as you can always change your book and make it even better. Contact us, for example, if you want a review (use our Contact us form).

Register in communities

Find digital communities where you can register your book. We started with these:

• Goodreads – register as an author and make your book available for reviews. Add your book to some lists. Invite friends.
• Library Thing – tell people about your book there. This one never worked for us, but you can always give it a try.

Tell people about your book

As I’m doing lazy promotion, I won’t tell you to go out and make launch parties or whatever normal authors do. I suggest telling about your book on different social places:

• reddit – a very popular site for all kinds of people. Use a Freebooks subreddit when your book is free. Talk about your book in a Ebook-subreddit. Or start telling that you have written a book in a WroteABook subreddit.
• Pinterest – share images from your book or Amazon or whatever you have. Write as many keywords as you can.
• StumbleUpon – stumble your books.
• Twitter – you need to tweet a lot in order for it to work and get more followers! Tweet with hashtags #book, #ebook, #freebooks, #kindle, #freebie and so on. Post images. Post sketches and drawings and share your future plans. Follow other authors and like their tweets.
• Facebook – make a page for your book and try to get as many likes as you can. Facebook didn’t work well for us, though.

Do Social Media outreach with caution. Here is the list of articles I’ve come along while promoting my books which tell you just what I’ve experienced: that social media is a waste of time for promotion:

• 7 ways authors waste time building social networks
• Promoting your book on Facebook and Twitter is a total waste of time

Other tips

• Write a series of books. New books are a great promotional tool for the old ones.
• Use Free promotion opportunities at Amazon. They work!