Book Marketing for Authors: 19 Tips and Tricks to Market your Book to Readers by C.A. Price
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book was ok. If you know absolutely nothing about writing, publishing and marketing, it’s a good starting point. It sums up a lot of stuff for you and provides many useful links to other sites and books that will give you in-depth knowledge in all those themes.
That said, this is no more than that: A summary of various topics and a collection of (far more useful) links.
That your book should be well edited and proofread is a given, if a prospect author doesn’t even know that, then they’re in the wrong business. Also, I don’t know how that relates to actual marketing, because if you don’t count the “look inside” that not all books have, then they’ve probably already bought the book by the time they get to read it.
But lets forget about that, because this book made me ranty.
I might have been slightly miffed by the following quote: “Nowadays, readers can be vicious, and there are trolls everywhere. Don’t believe me? Look at some of the greatest books out there, go to their Amazon page, and look at the one star reviews.”
I don’t deny readers/reviewers can be vicious. And of course, there are trolls everywhere. But this seemed to imply that all reviewers that gave these “greatest” books one-star reviews were trolls, which is simply not true. There is a thing called “taste”. It’s different for everyone. Some people just don’t like those so-called “great” books. Get over it.
Maybe I’m just being overly sensitive. *shrug* But it set me in a bad mood for the rest of the book.
The tips he provides, as I said, are sound enough, and he does a lot of name-dropping which was both annoying and good. Annoying because on the one hand it left me wondering why he just couldn’t go into it himself as part of the tip instead of just saying “You need this” or “you need that” but “go read this book for more information”; good because at least you know where to look for more information.
Another thing that annoyed me slightly is that this was supposed to be about marketing, but it’s all over the place with pre-marketing stuff (editing, proofing, etc) as well as side-stuff you should be looking into (formatting for paperback, etc).
And finally, one of the tips is to make it easy for the reader to get to more of your books by adding links. Yet he assumes that everyone reading on a phone, tablet, or ereader has working wifi and/or is willing to go through the bother of using it, rather than going to their desktop PC. As such, actual urls are only put at the very end, and the text is peppered with hyperlinked words that made it really, really annoying to me, both because I’d sometimes accidentally click on one without realizing, and because it required me to go through extra steps to get the actual url (or wait until the end, and by then I was no longer motivated enough to click most of those links.)
