JO-ANNE VANDERMEULEN “Conquer All Obstacles”

Congratulations! The buzz is happening.

You’ve managed to *conquer all obstacles* by accomplishing this gigantic first step in marketing your book(s):

_____You’ve successfully targeted your reading audience – Reaching out and interacting with other people who’d be more inclined to purchase the book or material you have to offer.

_____The number of followers have increased and your name is exposed – More and more people are requesting your friendship in all the social media sites.

_____You’ve even established strong relationships – These followers are converting nicely into your fans.

_____Your blog/website is filled with valuable content, linked to high traffic sites, and is attractive for others to come – Visitors are leaving comments on your site. Checking out the Feedburner and Google Analytics stats, you see peaks which indicates the hits/subscribers are increasing.

_____Your name and the title of your book is showing-up on the first page of the Google Search Engine. – You’re carefully selecting tags or keywords with all your posts. The webcrawlers are picking you up. No longer does your potential customers have to scroll through Google Search Engine pages to find you. (Let’s face it, they wouldn’t anyway…at least I wouldn’t).

For authors, who are marketing their books, if you can honestly check off the points listed, it’s time for you to accept this grand sense of accomplishment. Reward yourself…(wine and chocolate work well for me…lol) Creating a buzz is a major accomplishment. It takes a lot of time and effort to achieve a buzz and create a sense of exposure out in the massive competitive realm of the Internet. Building an author platform is no simple feat.

But, don’t stop now. (okay, rest with your wine and chocolate, but just rest…) You have another obstacle to conquer. There’s a VERY important second step you must accomplish to market your books successfully…

SELL YOUR BOOKS

Let’s put our feet in our potential customers’ shoes. They call us by our first name, know where we (our book) are located, and totally trust what we have to say. I’d say probably around 40% would purchase our books in an instant. As long as we’ve got your purchase buttons displayed and the process is simple, they’d click and we’d have a sale. But that still leaves the other 60% of your fans…

These followers may hesitate just prior to pushing the purchase button. Perhaps they’ve been burned before from others who’ve lured them into a purchasing situation. Sales people are bred to be very good at what they do.

Now it’s up to us to provide proof. We must supply a sample of what exactly our potential customers will be receiving for their hard earned money. We have the ability to allow them to read a part of our book.

Just think of the last time you went into a book store. Unless a friend recommended a title or you heard it was on the best selling list, you would have to check out an unknown author or book title before purchasing. You’d probably flipped it over and read the back. Maybe even opened the cover and read the first page or two, before deciding the book was good enough to purchase.

As authors, who are marketing books online, this is something we can provide. Just incase our book doesn’t hit the best sellers and our viewer has never heard of us or our books, we can *conquer all obstacles *by presenting the first few pages or even chapter of our book right on our site where our platform is located.

With your book cover, purchase button, short synopsis, reviews, interviews, and that wonderful content you’ve been supplying, it is vital for you to supply a sample of your writing for your potential customers to read.

What if I told you that this is possible for you to supply attractive display right on your site? Just picture your fan entering your site, physically opening the cover of your book, flipping each page, and reading your story.

This amazing method is not entirely new. Here are a few examples of distributors using this tool:

- Harper Collins – Has a site for ebooks. *Browse Inside – Try Before You Buy*.

- Amazon – In 2003 had pioneered this tactic. *Offering Samples*.

- Random House, Inc. – By clicking on binoculars the reader can search within the text of the book. *Browse and Search*.

These distributors are keeping up with the dramatic changes in society by taking advantage of this strong market expansion of Internet purchasing and are now meeting the needs of all types of customers.

“Harper Collins had a similar experience with sales. Harper Collins reported print sales increase of 30% and 250% for specific titles using their Browse Inside functionality.” (http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/ihulse08.pdf)

“Amazon, who pioneered offering samples on a large scale in 2003, reported about 9% increase of print sales across 120,000 titles in 5 days after the search inside capability was available on their site.”

(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_mOEIN/is_/ai)

They’ve come to realize that targeting markets is a better promotional strategy than broadcasting the old fashion advertising way, and you can too…

A book-widget called BookBuzzr (available at www.freado.com.) is a portable author website that extracts book information, supplied by the author, and makes your content accessible on many social media sites (Facebook, Blogs, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.). Now you can upload your pages (and just like a real book) your cover will be displayed on several of your personal profiles, including your web/blogsite, for your viewers to flip the pages and read.

Here’s my BookBuzzr for “Conquer All Obstacles”. I’ve included an attention quote and a rating for young viewers:

“Enjoy reading the first chapter of ‘CONQUER ALL OBSTACLES’ Author: Jo-Anne Vandermeulen” COMING SOON… Rating: Adult Content

Just think of the exposure. Now, not only fans; but also acquaintances (while reading your profile on a social media site), will be able to sample your book by just clicking on the cover. So, even if your personal site isn’t getting the traffic you’d hoped, others will soon discover your book through these massive traffic media sites.

BookBuzzr is FREE and will give you the exposure that you deserve. Try it. You can *conquer all obstacles* and successfully market and sell your book.

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Related Posts:

SO YOU WANT TO YOUR BOOK TO SELL?

THE SECRET TO PROMOTION

CREATING A BUZZzzzz

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Follow me on Twitter: @prempromotions

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