7 Ways to Promote Your Book with Booktango

One of the most frequently asked questions we get from authors is “how can I effectively market my e-book?” There is no million dollar answer that works for every single author. It’s kind of like weight loss – don’t fall for quick-fix gimmicks, and if you put in a committed effort into working toward your goal, you’ll eventually see some results.

You already know that Booktango is unique for offering free e-book publishing. We also offer some marketing services and opportunities specifically catered toward our digital-only authors. Let’s look at a few and see why each one might work for your marketing strategy.

1.) Check out BookStubs – one our snazziest and most affordable marketing tools. It’s like a business card for your book that you can easily distribute at author events. Watch this one minute video to get a better idea of how BookStubs could be right for your marketing goals.

2.) Get your book featured in the Booktango bookstore. This increases your book’s visibility and it’s FREE publicity. We even offer a few tips on how to increase your chance of being selected. Continue reading

5 Tips on How to Get Featured in the Booktango Bookstore

5 Tips on How to Get Featured in the Booktango Bookstore

I just provided our content team with a list of the April updates for the Booktango bookstore homepage.  Believe it or not, there is not a systematic program that runs to feed this page. Each month I sit down and carefully review our titles to decide which books to feature.

The bookstore has several carousels of books on the homepage including the top ‘featured’ carousel, Books We Love, Noteworthy Titles and the coveted Booktango Feature Title. I thought I’d share a little bit about my process of choosing which books to feature, and give you five tips to help your book get picked in upcoming months!

1.) Make sure your keywords are updated.  The very first step in my process is to look for books that are relevant to events of the month or related to the season. For the April featured books I searched for the following keywords: April, Spring, Flower, Gardening, Vacation, Bloom, Autism, Earth, Health, Poetry, Baseball, and Mathematics (and a few more).  All of those words have some relevance to April or events going on around this time making them relevant books to feature for the month. Continue reading

Fact vs. Fiction: Booktango Reviews, Complaints and Scams

Fact vs. Fiction: Booktango Reviews, Complaints and Scams“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” I can’t tell you how many times my mother uttered those words growing up, and most of the time she was right. We often get some skeptics who check out Booktango and ask the questions: “If it’s free, 100% royalties, and non-exclusive rights, what’s the catch? How do you make money?”

These are legitimate questions from a consumer who is shopping around for a DIY publishing platform. But, there is no catch! Booktango was created from a group of forward thinkers who wanted to provide tools for any author to publish themselves. We wanted a platform that empowered authors to invest as much (or as little) into getting their book available on major online retailers.

I want to take a minute to debunk three of the most popular Booktango myths floating the interwebs and give you honest and direct answers.

Myth #1: If I publish with Booktango, I have to give up the rights to my book. False! Our terms and conditions state we have non-exclusive rights to your book, which means you can publish with us and another publisher at the same time. You can also publish with us and have full rights to cancel your book and take it elsewhere if you receive a traditional publishing contract or other offers for rights to your book. In fact, we would be thrilled if one of our authors got their name and story out there and was subsequently picked up traditionally! Continue reading

Three Ways to Maximize Your Royalties with Booktango

 Three Ways to Maximize Your Royalties with Booktango

One of the most common questions we receive at Booktango is “How can I earn more?” It is a legitimate question. For many of our authors their book was not just something done on a whim. You invested a great deal of time, effort, editing, re-editing, critiquing, designing and promoting your book. Like any good investor, you want to see a return on your investment! As we near the payout window for our Fourth Quarter royalties and many of you are anxiously checking your sales reports, I thought it would be timely to provide three tips to maximize your earnings. Continue reading

Year in Review – Celebrating Our One Year Anniversary

December is often a time of reflection for me and for most people. I spend time thinking about the accomplishments I’ve made over the last year, the opportunities to do better and to set my goals for the coming year.

Coincidentally, this year in addition to reflecting on my personal life and career,  I also get to take a look back at Booktango. Booktango officially went live to the world in Beta one year ago.  It’s been an exciting year and as we close out 2012 and celebrate our first anniversary, I wanted to take some time to celebrate the last 12 months and look ahead to 2013.

December 2011

At launch, Booktango had some of the core features you see today such as the online editor, error identification, e-book details collection, retailer selection and submission. We knew we weren’t done, but we were excited to get an initial product out and begin gathering feedback from our authors. We continued to develop and plan new features for roll out during the first few months following launch. Continue reading

Now’s Not the Time to Panic: The Perfect Gift for All this Holiday Season

Thanksgiving is behind us. So is Black Friday. As you come out of your turkey coma, it hits you: Christmas is only a few weeks away! Holy smokes!

We all have that hard-to-buy-for relative or friend who seems to have everything. And it’s those people in our lives we love the most but loath buying them a holiday gift. They have the newest gadgets, plenty of clothes, more books than some presidential libraries.

But they don’t have a publishing package. Yet. Continue reading

WINDFALL CONTEST: Publish Your Way to 10K

There are plenty of reasons an author might be tempted to publish an e-book with Booktango: there’s the freedom to publish when and how you want to, access to the biggest online retailers, and the highest author royalties in the industry. And if that wasn’t enough … for the rest of September, we at Booktango are making e-book publishing downright irresistible.

A Windfall of Prizes this September

Booktango is giving one lucky author over $10,000-worth of marketing services to help them promote their e-book:

Total prizes – worth $10,454

All you have to do to be considered is publish an e-book with Booktango by the end of September and send us a Tweet about it. It’s really that easy.

How to Enter the Windfall Contest

  1. Submit a manuscript for publication anytime from Sept. 10-30, 2012.
  2. Let the Twittersphere know about your upcoming e-book.
  3. That’s it! Just be patient and wait for us to announce the winner in October.

Why not go for it?

Simply by entering our Windfall Contest, you’ll end up with a published e-book you can be proud of. And if you win … well, then you’ll have all the tools you need to launch an effective online marketing plan to help your e-book reach its full bookselling potential.

Check out the contest terms and conditions, and enter the contest today.

 

Announcing New E-book Publishing Packages: Socializer & Eye Catcher

Since starting this blog back in April, we’ve discussed a wide variety of issues on the topic of e-book publishing. But we keep coming back to two key aspects that seem intrinsically important to publishing in the digital space: online marketing and e-book design.

As we’ve come to fully realize the importance of these topics, we’ve developed innovative enhancements to our online cover design platform, and we’ve added some unique e-book marketing services to help our authors create better-looking e-books and share them more efficiently with the world. Now, we’ve taken things a step further and created two new publishing packages that are designed to help authors meet their e-book publishing goals in these areas.

Introducing the Socializer package

Social media offers one of the most exciting opportunities for online book marketers; but it can also be one of the most daunting. There’s a lot to know and learn about the Continue reading

Is E-book Marketing Different than Print Book Marketing?

Marketing is marketing, right? Yes. The goal behind marketing a new book, regardless of the medium, is the same. You want to position a book so people will find it, buy it and read it. However, because of their format, there is a fundamental difference in the approach you should take for marketing e-books.

Your e-book is electronic, so people won’t be looking for it at the corner Barnes & Noble. But they will be looking for it online. Thus, the Internet is where you should focus e-book marketing.

While you may know how to write an e-book, marketing it online can be tricky unless you have a plan. Luckily, planning can be as simple as one, two, three.

One: Start with a Creative Brief

This is the starting point for any successful marketing plan. A creative brief helps you define several key points of your marketing strategy. Continue reading

Websites for Authors: Do You Need One?

Websites for Authors

Even in today’s undeniably techno-centric world, many writers resist the idea that they need to have an author website. After all, they have an Amazon page, a Facebook page and a few book reviews floating around on blogs. Isn’t that enough?

We don’t think so.

Imagine for a moment that you’ve overheard something about a great new Thai restaurant in town. You love Thai food. Your interest is piqued. So, you Google the place. Now, imagine there’s no website to be found. Maybe you track down a few Yelp reviews and a Twitter page that tweets daily specials … but you can’t find their hours, their full menu or their prices. Even though you — as a lover of Thai food — were genuinely interested in their business, you give up on the restaurant for now because you couldn’t easily access the information you wanted.

You don’t want that happening to potential readers who can’t find the information they want about you and your book online. Continue reading