You’ve written your book and you’ve managed to publish it either with a Traditional Publisher or by indie-publishing it. But what next? The book is live, you can see it on Amazon and other online bookstores – but how do you start selling it, and how do you encourage people to buy it, how do you get it into bookstores? You need to get marketing.

There’s no obligation to do any marketing at all but we seriously recommend it. Otherwise who is going to hear about your new book, who will know to buy it? There are lots of way to market your book for free - by contacting local press, using the power of the web and social media.

But don’t worry, we understand that marketing for most people is a complex science and that’s why our we have put together a series of highly personalised marketing services that will help you. Click here to visit our Marketing section for more information.

The marketing services we offer can provide you with some heavy weight marketing, the likes of which even first time authors with the biggest traditional publishers might not receive (indeed if you are a first time author with a big traditional publisher we can help you too!). Our packages include any of the following:

Unique marketing plan for you
Press Release
Website design and hosting
Contacting the media (print, radio and TV) in the UK and/or USA
Professional marketing advice unique to your book
Contacting bookstores
Pitching stories and reviews on you and your book to newspapers
Contacting your local press and radio

We have put together a comprehensive list of marketing services for our authors. Please visit our Marketing section for more details and information on these services.

Yes, you can. But please be aware that this is a very time-consuming process. If you opt for one of our Publicist services, your marketing consultant will be working with you and on your book for a period of up to several months. The marketing consultant will have lists of contacts within the media and with book stores that they work with on a daily basis – if you have a press release and it’s sent out to 200 people, if you do that yourself, you will have to draft the press release in the first instance and then find the contact details for those 200 people. Whereas your marketing consultant will do all that and more for you.

You should also consider, rightly or wrongly, the issue of perception. When an author contacts a member of the media, say a journalist with a leading daily newspaper (or even a local one) you have a very limited time to pitch a story on you or your book, when you introduce yourself as the author the journalist can often ‘switch off’ immediately. Again, rightly or wrongly, from our experience they are thinking ‘if this was a serious book the author wouldn’t be calling me, they’d have someone to do it’. Often we have authors trying the marketing DIY style, and then they come back to us a week or two later and ask us to do the marketing for them.

The best thing is to give us a call as early on in your publishing process as possible and discuss your goals and we will explain how we think we will be able to help you reach those ambitions.

First of all this can be difficult and again, time-consuming. Also, different bookstores make stocking decisions differently. What we do find is that bookstores are increasingly asking to see a Press Release before deciding whether or not to stock a book. You should also pop in to your local branches of your bookstore and introduce yourself as a newly published local author. We can help liaising with bookstores if you take out our Bookstore Liaison service.

Yes, we think it’s a good idea. In today’s world, a website is often the first place people go to for information e.g. about an author, for information on the book or to find out where they can buy a copy; and this goes for friends and family as well as members of the public and the media.

We have years of experience in designing bespoke websites just for authors – sites that complement the author and their book. If you would like us to design and host your website, please click here.

We also find that many of our authors have a business that ties in with their book e.g. it’s a cookbook and the author also runs an outside catering company. We will happily work with you to incorporate your business into your book website (see Premium Website Design).