A question we get from authors is how to send review copies of their book to potential reviewers. We’ve put together a quick guide to help you below. 1. Just create a PDF and send that to the reviewer via email. 2. Download the .mobi file from Amazon and send that one if the reviewer wants to read it on his Kindle. If the reviewer wants an EPUB for their iPad or Nook you can send them that as well. Show
Want to learn to self publish your writing, grow your presence as an author, get more reviews, get press, and sell thousands of books? Sign up for Author Academy. Our 12-part video series just $99 for a limited time. PREVIEW YOUR FREE SYLLABUS 3. Send the book as a gift to the reviewer. In this case, when he redeems the gift, this will count as a sale. You pay the list price but you get back the royalty. So you could end up paying only 30% of the digital price. If you get a reviewer like this they show up on Amazon as a verified purchase. 4. Contact your reviewer when you run a KPD free promotion. Remember, reading a book takes time. Expect your book reviewer to take up to several weeks to read your book. ———————————————————-Our Standard publicity campaign (six hours), delivered by your publicist. For Standard PR, you won’t have email contact with your publicist, but they will add their plan to your Promotional Plans box one to two months before your book comes out. They will: Approach contacts for reviews, interviews (print, online, radio, podcasts etc.); Pitch articles, mention you and your book on relevant CI social media; Create memes where appropriate, all the while using and updating our Contacts Database as they go along; At CI we keep various mailings lists, who we contact with new title information, bestsellers and notable backlist. One made out of consumer fans who we email 1-2 times a month. We also email once a month to the trade, and Moon Books has their own separate list/ If we mention your book in any of these newsletters you can see it recorded on your Marketing Page in the Email History section. Click on the blue link to see the the contents of the newsletter. The initial campaign is not, in itself, likely to generate substantial sales. A proper campaign takes months. The purpose is more to get an indication of travel, of directions to follow. 500+ PublicityAdditional publicity for every 500 copies you sell. Your publicist will put in a short burst of top-up milestone promotion, which could either be more selective, based on the initial feedback, focusing on interviews, intense social media promotion, or widening the list of contacts approached. As numerous titles pass the 500+ Milestone every month, your publicist will prioritize the order in which milestones are completed first by the following criteria; 1)The time it has taken to pass the 500+ Milestone (momentum) 2) The overall quantity of sales 3) The author's continued efforts and recent marketing activities. The work will be done within 4 to 8 weeks of the notification – it is dependent on the individual workload of the publicist but should happen within a couple of months.We do not award extra PR time for price drop/discounted deal (Bookbub, for instance) sales, and bulk buys from the author will have discretionary time allocated. 3 Month ReviewYour Publisher and Publicist will leave a note on your Promotional Plans box A three months after your book is published, evaluating what worked and what didn’t and refining our approach When to begin your marketingStart planning it when you receive the Starting to Market (Key Points) notification ( once your final, copyedited manuscript has been approved by you and uploaded back to us), in preparation for beginning your work 6 months before publication. The first thing you should do when you receive the Starting to Market (Key Points) notification is write the latest, final version of your Marketing Plan (the one you submitted when you filled out your proposal) plan in the Promotional Plans box on your Marketing page. The Promotional Plans box is a vital space to communicate with your publicist and the rest of the team. When you are done write your initials and the date you added the plan, and your publicist will do the same. This is so you can keep track of your communication. Outline in bullets what you will do to promote your book. Sales reps, especially in the US, want to see your social media numbers. Knowing the numbers, givies them a rough conversion rate on sales to expect. Though not an extract science, the rule of thumb is 10% of the following will see the post and from that number around 10% is likely to buy/read. For example: 1000 followers — 100 see the post — 10 sales minimum. If your numbers are positive it encourages the sales teams to pitch larger sales of your book. Add your name, book, publication date and list your networks as follows: Under a separate title add Priorities for in-house PR. Detail the most important activities you think your in-house publicist should do to promote your book. Write down 8-10 interview talking points for your publicist to use in the promotion of your book. Interview talking points focus on the most interesting content in your book that you can share in an interview. Each point should only be a few sentences long. This list is used to “hook” the interviewer to having you as a guest. Upload your interview talking points as a Microsoft Word doc to the Articles section of the Publicity box on your Marketing page. Check your Keywords are the best they can be. The right words and phrases in your title, subtitle, blurb and Keyword box (on your Marketing page) greatly increase your visibility on search engines such as Google, Amazon, Apple and LibraryThing. As most people “shop” for books on line, this is crucial to your book’s success. If you’ve written a book that teaches reiki and someone searches for “book on how to do reiki” and your book does not show up on the first 1-3 pages of results, potential readers are not going to find it. AI/TipsheetThe four cornerstones of your sales pitch are the cover, the price, the reviews, and the blurb In the month after your book's publication date gets set, and based on information that you have given us by uploading it to your Marketing page, wedistill and synthesize these cornerstones tto create your Advance Information or AI sheet. The AI Sheet is a promotional tool that publishers use to present their books to the book trade. The information we use to create your AI sheet includes your Back Cover Copy, your Author Bio, Endorsements, your Promotional Plan, your USP, the Categories you select for your book, the Competing Books you added, and your Previous Titles (if you have them). Your AI will be circulated to our sales reps, and they will use the information on it as the basis of their pitch. Book buyers look at your AI sheet and take a decision on how prominent to make your book on their database, whether to take print copies into stock and, if so, how many and where — so it's your chance to get their attention, and the information must be accurate, punchy, and concise. Once the AI is up, feel free to download and use it. Some ideas: You can base your own promotional emails/approaches off it. You can use it to create any promotional material you want, along with your cover. You can take it along to local stores that might host a signing session. If you think any information on your Tipsheet is incorrect or out of date, please leave a note on the Sales and Distribution forum. Sample AI for Afterlife of King James IV, Chronos Books Record your marketing as Marketing ActivitiesMarketing Activities are the way we record your marketing. Both you and your publicist are expected to use them to record the work you do. Accurate, up-to-date Marketing Activities help make your book a success:
The 10 Marketing Activity types
The 4 Statuses
Keep it simple - adding activities can take up a lot of time, so we reccommend, as a general rule, only recording a Marketing Activity when it is cmpleted. How to add a Marketing ActivityBefore you add a Marketing Activity STOP! Check the Contacts Database for correct contact. If the contact isn’t there, add it manually and THEN add the Marketing Activity. Insturctions on how to add a contact here. There are two ways of adding a Marketing Activity - Via the Marketing page of your book - Via the Contacts database How to upload an articleUpload your Articles to the Publicity section of your Marketing page, under Articles. File formats we want:
Formats we don't want:
Write your own Press ReleaseWe strongly encourage you to write your own Press Release as part of your own marketing work. Some media contacts like to hear from us and some, the author only. A personalized approach can go far. You can also send it out to your own mailing list, if you have one. If you don't, then consider starting one.Please upload your Press Release to the Press Release section of the Publicity box on your Marketing page and record any press releases you send out as a Email/Press Release Marketing Activity. How to add a Press Release to your Marketing pageFile formats we want:
Formats we don't want:
How to upload:
Organising events with usWe don't organise events. If we are contacted by an event organizer we will then pass on the organizer's email address to you. We need to make sure there are enough books printed and in stock for your event. If you don't tell us in time you may not be able to order enough.
How to add your event to your Marketing pageScroll down to Marketing Activities.
How to send out review copiesWe allocate 15 hard review copies for every book. We don’t send out review copies willy nilly on spec. Only ask if there is a serious request for a copy, from an important contact. The review copy could take up to a few weeks to arrive, depending on how many copies are in stock. We impose no limit on sending out digital review copies (PDF and EPUB). PDFs can go out once finished files and the PDF Review File are ready and your title has a publication date. , and EPUB is uploaded a few weeks before publication
If you get a good review
As publisher, we cannot add reviews to online sites such as Amazon, The Book Depository, Goodreads and others. You can do this through your own Author Central account. Bad reviews: Inevitably, it happens. It's one person's opinion, maybe not a well-formed one. You cannot get them removed, unless they are libelous. How to add a review to your Marketing page
Organising a giveawayYou can use your review copies for giveaways. If you want to arrange a copy as a prize, drop us a line on the Review Copies Author Forum.
Organising a discountOur US and UK distributors can offer your attendees your book(s) at a discount (20% is normal) to readers. This is known as a “discount code”. It can last for a specified amount of time, particularly if you are doing several talks/events/conferences. Typically, we have organized codes to run for 6 months. Promotions must be set up by CI. If you would like to run a promotion, please post your request in the the Help forum under Sales & Distribution/Other queries. And make sure to add this promotion to your Marketing Activities and to share with CI on the FB closed author group. Read Chapter 16: Ordering, for more info. Organising a promotionWe don't encourage these. We believe that it's much better to sell at RRP and that a price promotion is not a sales panacea. Authors dropping the price of their book, without putting effort into a dedicated marketing plan, tend to receive a few dozen sales (if that). We only like to even think about such promotions after 1000 sales and 50+ Amazon reviews, and the minimum sales target should be hundreds of books. And even if your book has achieved the above, the promotion is still at the Publisher's discretion. Occasionally, we offer books at discount to readers or booksellers, or invite authors to offer this to their networks. These offers to authors are only effective for books by several authors with wide ranging and deep networks of potential buyers. Promotions are run at our discretion. We set up a promotion code and an offer discount and special ordering details with each relevant regional distributor. To run this promotion authors and CI could:
To claim the discount, readers would need to:
Promotions must be set up by CI. If you would like to run a promotion, please post your request in the the Help forum under Sales & Distribution/Other queries. Make sure to add this promotion to you Marketing Activities and to share with CI on the FB closed author group. AdvertisingThere are two main ways we advertise:
If we pay for advertising, we will record it in Marketing Activities . As a company we advertise minimally, and evaluate opportunities on a case by case basis. We run adverts for qualifying books in trade catalogues.We also submit books to reviewers in the trade press such as Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller. These catalogues and journals are both in print and digital, and offer booksellers details of new books several months in advance of publication. Reviews and adverts are recorded on your Marketing Page as Marketing Activities. On the basis of previous results we have made the decision to stop promoting any paid-for services through Amazon (June 2021). We also do not currently advertise on NetGalley. We submit all our new titles for notice in the trade journal, The Bookseller. Though not strictly advertising, we also record it as Advertising as this feels like the closest fit. I want to place some adverts. What should I do?Sign up for an Extra Publicity Campaign and you will receive:
If you plan on advertising yourself, tell us on the Forum, and we'll see what we can do to help. If you go ahead and secure it, make sure you record it as a Marketing Activity. Links
Submitting to awardsWe aim to win awards at CI and we have a dedicated Awards Co-ordinator who routinely enters CI books for awards. She uses her discretion in this area, based on reader reports and recommendations from Publicists, Publishers and the Marketing Manager. If your book is entered for an award you will receive the Title submitted for an award notification. We can only enter our books in a limited number of awards each year, so while we understand that most authors desire to enter their books into as many awards as possible, we have to be selective. If you think that your book should be entered for a specific award, make sure you read its guidelines thoroughly. If you are sure your book is eligible then let us know via the Awards Forum. Please be mindful that in many cases, this may not be possible. However, we encourage you to enter your book into awards if we don't, if the award allows it. We pay for the awards we choose to enter; you, the author pays for the awards you choose to enter, including related costs, entry fees and copies to be sent in, etc If you enter an award, update the system! If you submit your book to an award, enter it as Marketing Activity and add the award to the Contacts Database. If you win, or are a runner-up, mark it as completed and a notification will be sent out to the relevant book team members to let them know what has happened. The Publishing Manager and Publicist can then use this information to promote the activity using social media. If you have a good or bad experience, let us know on the Awards Forum, you will give a gift for authors in the future! Not all awards are equal, so use your discretion. Some awards, such as those created by JPX media, can be seen as vanity awards and are mainly promoted to self-publishing authors. These are characterized by:
These awards have little standing in the book trade and in our experience, have no relevant effect on the sales of a book. We are usually unable to update your book cover and back cover copy with the award logo, due to the costs involved, unless you have exceeded sales of 1000 copies. Discretion must be applied to the types of awards we will include here, and the final decision is ours. Do you pay for reviews?Paid Reviews Are a Legal Liability The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is a consumer watchdog. One of its roles is to rid the marketplace of unfair or deceptive marketing. If it identifies your business as one that actively pays for reviews, it has the capacity to take you to court and issue fines. Do you have to pay for book reviews?To Pay or Not to Pay? That is the Question! Since you can solicit general public reviews or perhaps convince some bloggers to review or mention your book, should you pay for a book review? The answer is a resounding “yes” because you can buy true quality in addition to a variety of marketing services. How can I get free book review copies?Use NetGalley for free to request, read, and recommend digital review copies before they are published. Your reviews and feedback are essential to publishers, authors, and other readers! How do people get review copies?Normally, a critic who is interested in writing about a new title will contact its publisher and ask for a copy. If the publisher agrees, the critic receives it in the mail and uses it to pen a review. The process may also happen in reverse, with publishers asking critics if they would like to review their games. |