A dream of every writer is to be able to do what they love and get paid for it, too. This isn’t a magical hack to suddenly get you counting a million dollars overnight in book sales, but with a bit of dedication and consistency, I’m confident your pocket will experience a breath of fresh air and thank you for it in the new year. Let’s dig in.
Book Sales Tip #1: Get Closer to Your Readers
Some of the most financially successful writers are those who’ve been able to build a community around their fanbase. Social media has made this easier for you, start there. With time, you can move to a blog (free or paid). Through your regular updates, get them to know, like, and trust you beyond what they may or may not already know about you from your books they’ve already read.
You’ve got a new book coming soon, inform your community, tease them with pages of its content, and carry them along on the journey from conception to publication. Try this and marvel at what a difference it’ll make for your book sales.
Tip #2: Study the Pattern of More Successful Books in Your Genre/Niche
There’s a popular saying that everyone has a boss. Even the boss. So, no matter how successful you already are in your writing career, there’s a high chance someone out there is relatively more successful than you currently are, and there are some new things you can learn from them to help boost your own book sales. How can you go about this? Read their books, follow them on social media, subscribe to their newsletters (for those who own), show up for their seminars/webinars. You basically want to shadow them and humbly learn at their feet.
Tip #3: Solicit For Honest Book Reviews
Reviews generally give you better insight into what you’re doing to know if you’re performing well or not. Book reviews are no exception. Solicit for honest book reviews from friends, families, and professional book reviewers. No sycophancy stuff. You want the real thing here – the truth and nothing but the truth. That way, you’ll know what parts of your storytelling need tweaking and to what degree. If there are parts of your writing your friends and family have a problem with, chances are the public will too. That’s a good place to start fixing from.
Tip #4: Pay Extra Attention To Your Book Blurb and Book Cover Design
The importance of having a great book blurb and beautiful book cover design cannot be overemphasized. One of my favourite pidgin proverbs says, eye go first chop, before mouth go follow chop. What this means is that your book stands a higher chance of being bought if its cover and blurb are high attention-grabbing. Check out this recap of a conversation we had with Osar Adeyemi, an OkadaBooks Bestselling Author, on why writing great book blurbs should really matter to all authors.
Tip #5: Really, Really Understand How OkadaBooks Works
There’s more to OkadaBooks than meets the eye. We’re awesome, we like to have fun, we love great books, amongst many other cool stuff. But a newbie to the platform looking to buy your book might not know this. While we look forward to onboarding them and showing them the ropes of how easy it is to navigate the OkadaBooks mobile bookstore, you can help out by first giving yourself a crash course on how things work on this yellow side so you can be the first aid to their needs before our team of Customer Service Professionals step in. Not sure where to start from? Let me help you with that. Click HERE.
While this list is non-exhaustive, these tips are really good places to start to help improve your book sales. Tell me in the comments which one(s) resonates with you the most. To your writing success… have an amazing 2022!
Thank you for taking your time to point out these tips.
It’s much appreciated.