Landing Page Challenge
If you self-publish your book, you face a marketing challenge. The challenge is to get people to buy your book. In today’s world, most buyers shop for books online. If you do any marketing research, you’ll be shocked at how many different marketing tactics you can use to try to get people to buy your book.
When you strip away all the marketing jargon and doublespeak, your book’s landing page is what closes the sale. Or not. All the other marketing activities are designed to deliver potential customers to that landing page.
In short, the landing page is your most valuable marketing content. Therefore, it makes sense to create a landing page that visitors can’t resist. Let’s talk about how to do that.
There are four vital components to every landing page:
Cover
Blurb
Description
Reviews
Together, these four components can provide an un-resistable attraction to a landing page visitor. I’ll use the landing page on Amazon for my book Infographic Guide to Creating Stories to illustrate the process of creating such a landing page. You can find its landing page here.
Cover
When a visitor comes across your book’s page on Amazon (or any other book seller) the first thing that grabs her attention is the book’s cover. In other words, the cover has to impress the visitor. A generic or hand-drawn cover won’t do that. To impress the visitor, your book has to have a unique cover.
Blurb
The purpose of the book blurb is to hook the visitor into clicking on the “read more” icon. After all, the descriptive text is only five lines. That’s not much at all. Once the visitor clicks on the icon, she’s shown the rest of the blurb and the book’s description.
A fatal mistake many self-publishing authors make here is to use the synopsis for the blurb and description. Let’s face facts: every synopsis ever written is boring to read. A synopsis has its uses but marketing is not one of them.
A blurb has three parts:
-The pitch line or hook: This is the first statement and it is the hook to grab the reader’s attention. Its purpose is to persuade the reader to keep reading the other two statements. It should be simple, one or two sentences at most, and it must make a clear statement about your book.
-What’s different about this book? With all the books published every month, what makes your book stand out from the others?
-What’s in it for the buyer? This is a statement that explains what the reader (i.e. a book buyer) will get in exchange for money. This must be explicit. Tell the reader what benefit she’ll get from buying the book. Think of this statement in this way; if your book is surrounded by hundreds of similar-sized books on a shelf in a bookstore, what would persuade the buyer to choose your book instead of one of the others?
The secret to creating an effective blurb is to keep rewriting and condensing it until it expresses the ideas with a minimum of words. Ideally, the blurb will be less than 100 words.
Description
The description is where you can close the sale.
The book description for a non-fiction book will be quite different from novel. With book descriptions, one size does not fit all.
Fiction description
The goal here is to get the visitor interested in the character and that character’s problem. If you can get the reader think, “Oh! I wonder how the character will get out this trouble?” you’re close to a sale.
Non-fiction description
If you wrote a non-fiction book, your intention was to solve someone’s problem. So tell the visitor how you’ll do. If your book is about plumbing repairs, tell the visitor how you solve his leaky pipe issues
Reviews
There is no such thing as having too many reviews. They tell a landing page visitors that other readers liked the book. That eliminates the suspicion that the visitor may be getting tricked into buying a piece a junk.
You get reviews on your own, use review sites and by buying them.
On your own
Every author does a bit of this. You contact your relatives and friends and ask them to read and review your new book.
Another approach is send out social media posts asking for contacts to review the book. This is quite iffy. Many of the contacts who respond have no intention of every writing a review: they are simply after a free book. Still, you will get an occasional review this way.
Review sites
There are many sites that will, for a fee, spread the word about your book to their list of potential reviewers. Many of these sites will only promote ebooks on Kindle. Of those sites, many will only promote ebooks that are heavily discounted. Others will only accept ebooks that are free.
Note that any reviews that come out of these promotions are not paid reviews. The fee does not buy a review: rather you’re paying for access to the site’s list of potential reviewers.
Buying reviews
Sites such as Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews will review your book for a fee. A large fee. Amazon will not allow paid reviews to be posted for your book. These reviews can however be added to the book’s content using the Amazon Central Page feature.
In conclusion
If you self-published a book, you should invest a large gob of creativity in the landing page for the book. The time and energy and creativity spent doing this will pay off in the long run.
I’ve written a lot of material over the course of my writing career. Much if it has value to writers and authors. I’ve organized this content into a series of easy to use webpages called Padlets. You’ll find the master Padlet here:
I have so much to learn. I appreciate this post, Hank. Thanks, eh.