Using Your Book Trailer to Actually Sell Your Book (Part 2 of 2)

In Part One of this blog series I explained how I made my DIY book trailer on a shoestring $19 budget and how you can design and build your own epic book trailer. Today in Part Two I'm going to tell you how to use your awesome book trailer to effectively market your self-published book, even if you don't have any social media followers or any kind of author platform. This is the situation I found myself in when I set out to publish my first novel. At that time, I had zip-zero-nada for a mailing list and maybe 30 followers on Twitter.

I'm a new author. No one knows me. Without a big following, having the best book trailer in the world wouldn't do much for me. The most amazing, eye-catching, masterfully engaging book trailer that has ever existed would probably still get ignored by the half dozen social media followers who actually look at my posts. I had to have a plan on how-exactly-I was going to use my book trailer to actually produce book sales.

Now, there are other problems that a self-published debut author faces besides no one listening. Most self-published authors getting their first book baby into the world also have inconvenient things like a full-time job and a family and lots of other life obligations. Because... life. You need to spend time and effort (and a lot of both) on marketing your book and don't for a second think I'm saying you don't, but you also need to understand that you are one person with limited time and are not a full-time team of professional marketers employed by a big-five publishing company who has years of experience promoting books. Emulating professional strategies will not work for you until you have a large enough platform to give you some extra muscle. Until then, you need to focus on the basics and work on being visible and attractive to people already looking for you. There is a relatively minimal amount of time and effort that a person in this typical situation can put into marketing their book and I was no exception-even as a full-time mom, I'm a full-time mom. My kids are my full-time job and my outside productive hours are dictated by how long of a nap my kids take, assuming they take a nap at all that day. Even then, I have a number of other things I simply have to do in that short amount of time I have available, so I have to be very smart about how I go about things if I want to use my time effectively.

Now, there are four main components that self-published authors need to pay very close attention to in order to sell their book with the relatively minimal time and effort that one person who also has a full-time job and a family can put into marketing their book. Some of these four components I've talked about in my Marketing Your Book blog series and I will also be covering all of them again later on my Youtube channel. 

The last thing you want to do is to get on social media and say "HEY! MY BOOK IS PUBLISHED!!!! GO BUY IT!!!!" yet, sadly, this is the strategy most self-published authors rely on to market their books. One step above this is spewing out a bunch of ads aimed at anyone and everyone. Most people are immune to most advertisements simply because they are bombarded with them every day. When was the last time you clicked on a book ad from your Twitter or Facebook feed? We develop a blind spot for information we deem irrelevant. Yelling on social media that you have a book for sale is pointless unless you are intimately familiar with exactly the kinds of readers who like exactly your kinds of books, and that knowledge only comes from time spent with your established readers. Don't spend money on advertising until you have your demographics pegged. You can worry about advertising and courting new reader demographics later when you have the platform and the knowledge that can make those strategies cost-and-time effective. Until then, focus your time and effort on the big four components of book marketing that you can control and that will get you a measurable return for your efforts, which are:

(1) Your search keywords

(2) Your book cover

(3) Your description blurb

(4) Your customer reviews

For my book trailer, I chose to use it towards the fourth component to court advanced reviewers. Advanced reviewers are readers who read your completed book before the launch date and agree to review it. They may have their own platform such as Youtube or a review blog that they post about your book on, or they may simply be individuals who meet the requirements to post their customer review on Amazon. Advanced reviewers are critical to earning the numerous reviews your book needs on day one of its launch to be successful.

Asking complete strangers to read and review your book is hard to do. It's awkward and more than a little cringe worthy. Never mind the whole asking-a-stranger-to-do-something-for-you aspect of the task, but just getting their emails is a whole, long process that I will cover in a different post. Now, getting a list of emails is a huge challenge and is a very hard thing to do, but actually getting reviewer's attention and making them excited to read (and review) your book is even harder to do. How do you spike their interest? How do you make yourself stand out? Also, you don't get to skip this part-advanced reviewers are absolutely essential to the success of your book. You need reviews on your book's Amazon page on day one. Preferably, you need a lot of them.

After I spent several weeks (not a typo-this is a big step and a lot of work) compiling a list of potential advanced reviewers, I wrote up a brief email template that featured my pre-release book trailer. Now, my book trailer rocks and advanced reviewers aren't used to seeing something like this. It made me stand out from the other review requests and before long I had an Excel spreadsheet filled with people who wanted to read my book and review it on Amazon. Many of these people also ran small book review blogs and asked to interview me or ran their review on their blog, reaching even more potential readers. Later, I used this same method to contact larger blogs and YouTube book reviewers.

I think I ran my book trailer once on my Twitter page... and no one paid attention. Same on my Facebook page. If I had relied on simply having and showing my book trailer then it wouldn't have even paid me back for the $19 I spent on it. By having a specific strategy and a specific goal in mind I was able to achieve a specific goal. In other words, "I will use my book trailer to entice specific advanced reviewers before my book release, and their reviews will help drive further sales by informing future customers about what kind of book it is" rather than "I will show the world my book trailer in hopes that it will go viral and make people want to buy my book."

In other words, it was a lot of work and took a lot of time-but boy did it make my book stand out! I was able to launch my debut novel with numerous 5-star Amazon and Goodreads reviews on day one. I also have several book bloggers and book vloggers incorporating my novel into their future plans, so hopefully they will drive even more traffic to my book.

Which, by the way, if you're interested in a high fantasy novel about dragon shifters, check out The Last Dragon Princess, now available on Amazon

You can also read the first chapter for free here: The Last Dragon Princess