Learn How Hiring a Marketing Consultant Will Help You Sell a Lot More Books

Unless you make a living as a marketing consultant, if you’re an entrepreneurial author who wants to promote a nonfiction book to boost your business or your career, you’re going to need a knowledgeable marketing consultant in order to find success.

Book marketing is a rather complex process with a lot of moving parts that need to work in unison. Many of the parts you’ll be dealing with are:

• Marketing your book effectively to bookstores, both online and offline
• Developing your author website
• Developing a blog
• Setting up email collection and creating email outreach campaigns
• Setting up the appropriate social media channels for your target audience
• Creating an effective public-speaking strategy, both free and paid
• Attracting media attention, mainstream as well as alternative

The best marketing consultant for you will be someone who’s not only experienced in the above areas but has also experience marketing nonfiction books.

Your consultant will help you stay focused on reaching out and connecting with your target audience while they take care of everything else.

8 Key Areas of Book Marketing and Promotion

When it comes to nonfiction books, there are eight specific marketing areas where most of your effort will have to go in order to get traction in the marketplace. Each area requires specialized marketing knowledge that the right consultant will help you with:

Area 1: Your Author Website

First off, your marketing consultant will help you set up your author website, which will be the home of your current and future books. This website will provide visitors with information about:

• The author (your bio, your story, how your book came to be)
• Your book (book information, testimonials, where to purchase)
• A calendar of speaking events
• Your media kit (bio, high-res headshot, high-res book cover, past and future media bookings, past and future speaking events)
• Your blog

Area 2: Blog

Next, your consultant will help you set up your blog: they will help you strategize what to write about, when to write it and in what sequence.

They will also teach you how to do keyword research, or do it for you, to ensure that people doing online searches about your topic will find your blog articles. Finally, they’ll make sure that your posts are optimized for search engines.

Area 3: Amazon Bookstore

Once you have a functioning blog, your consultant will help you set up your book on Amazon. First, they’ll help you set up your title on the platform, including choosing the best book categories and sub-categories and choosing the best keywords to attract users searching for topics on Amazon.

Then, they’ll help you set up your Author Central page (your personal author homepage within Amazon), which will link back to your website, your blog and your social media channels.

Area 4: Amazon Review Strategy

Your marketing consultant will also help you set up and manage your Amazon review strategy, which you’ll need to implement to ensure that your new book ranks high on the Amazon search engine (for more information, read my companion article: How to Get Reviews on Amazon For Your Nonfiction Book).

Area 5: Email Strategy

The next marketing area your consultant will help you set up is email capture on your blog and website with an email autoresponder. This is the mechanism by which you’ll acquire and market to your leads over the weeks and months following your book launch.

Area 6: Social Media Strategy

Based on where your target audience spends time online, your marketing consultant will help you set up and manage the social media channels most frequented by your audience so that you can connect with and market to them.

Area 7: Public Speaking Strategy

As a nonfiction author, a public-speaking strategy will be an essential part of your marketing mix. A knowledgeable consultant will help you develop this strategy to ensure that you’re exposed to your target audience face-to-face as much as possible.

Also, public speaking events will become an important lead generation source for your business in the long term.

Area 8: Media Outreach Strategy

Finally, your marketing consultant will help you leverage all of the above strategies to land media interviews as an expert in your field, which will expose your book and your business to large groups of people, driving online traffic to your website and foot traffic to your events.

In conclusion

With the help of a competent and knowledgeable marketing consultant, you’ll be able to truly get the most “bang for the buck” out of your book, not just immediately after launch but also in the long term.

For example, your public-speaking outreach will eventually become an important revenue stream when you begin to attract paid speaking engagements, plus the leads you’ll acquire from these events will become an important source of clients.

Your blog articles will continue to generate new leads for years to come, becoming an important asset for your business.

Your social media presence will grow organically over time, becoming an important source of traffic to your website.

In short, a qualified marketing consultant will allow you to get the most out of your nonfiction book marketing and promotion effort, making it a valuable investment.

Best of luck in your book promotion efforts!

If you enjoyed this article and are in the process of publishing or promoting a nonfiction book, be sure to check out my free nonfiction success guide, drawn from years of experience editing books for bestselling authors (including a New York Times bestseller) and ghostwriting for CEOs and politicians. Simply click here to get instant access.

Ben

Leave me a comment below if you have any questions or a specific need that I can help you address – I operate an author services firm that specializes in helping entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners who want to publish books as a calling card for prospects, to establish their status as an expert or to just to generate additional leads for their businesses.

Here are some related posts I highly recommend:

The 7 Most Effective Book Promotion Ideas For Nonfiction Authors

Learn How to Market a Nonfiction Book to Get Solid Results

Bennett R. Coles is an award-winning author of six books published through Harper Collins (New York) and Titan Publishing Group (London). He is also the publisher at Promontory Press, editor for multiple bestselling authors (including a NY Times bestseller), ghostwriter for CEOs and politicians and the founder of Cascadia Author Services, a boutique full-service firm that specializes in premium author services specifically designed for busy professionals. Our end-to-end services include writer coaching, ghostwriting, editing, proofing, cover design, book layout, eBook production, marketing, printing and distribution.