A Day in the Life of Troubador Marketing – Part 3
On publication: Ebook Marketing. This involves us making the ebook available for bloggers, reviewers and journalists to download through a protected channel in order to generate reviews.
Alice Graham sets up an author’s ebook entry on NetGalley
As well as working with authors looking to market their physical book, we also work with those looking to publish their title digitally – either solely as a standalone ebook, or as an additional format to their printed book.
For authors that choose to do so, it’s important to think about how you’ll market your ebook – whether alongside a paperback or not. How will buyers know it’s available, and how will reviewers and bloggers spread the word? These are important questions to ask. Marketing is vital to the commercial success of a title and without it you stand very little chance of selling copies of your ebook. Not only that, but marketing a digital title is very different to that of a paperback.
Unlike with a physically printed book, sending copies of an ebook out for review is a much more difficult than it first seems. Firstly, you can’t simply pop a copy in an envelope to literary editors and ask them to read it – it all has to be done digitally, and with great care. Sending out your ebook file might sound like the only way to get your book out to a reviewer, but it poses some security issues. Sending out a source ebook file (most commonly an epub) means it won’t be protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM), which means that anyone who you send the file to can simply pass it on. This makes your ebook vulnerable to piracy and re-publication.
At Matador, we strongly advise against sending the epub file out in a email – even if you trust the reviewer. Even sending a watermarked PDF with your contact details and a ‘copyright’ stamp is more secure than simply sending an epub, but there’s an even easier way to do it.
We use a website called NetGalley, the leading ebook media review service, where ebooks have a chance of being seen by over 300,000 journalists, bloggers, reviewers and retailers worldwide. NetGalley takes your source epub and adds DRM protection, meaning that it can be downloaded in a safe, protected way that’s free to the reviewer.
Users can browse the site by subject, publisher or keyword, and then download copies of ebooks that they want to review. Making your ebook available via a service like NetGalley can not only lead to media coverage, reviews and book sales, but it also gives your books an equal footing with the books published by other companies using the site – for example, Penguin Random House and HarperCollins list their titles on NetGalley.
Ebook marketing is a particularly great way of generating coverage both from bloggers who have their own websites, along with those who post book reviews on sites like Amazon and Goodreads.
If you’re publishing your book in dual format, you might be inclined to focus on the paperback marketing only, thinking that that will in turn increase sales of your ebook. While this might be true to an extent, ebook marketing is as crucial as any other part in the publishing process – and it opens your work up to a completely different section of the media – which is why a lot of the authors who publish with us opt for both ebook and physical book marketing.
In addition to opening up your book to a different audience of reviewers (remember some reviewers do all their reading on e-readers!), it also allows you to reach reviewers and bloggers on an international scale.
About us…
Matador offers a bespoke, comprehensive and high-quality self-publishing service. (www.troubador.co.uk/matador). We also offer standalone marketing and distribution services for authors who publish elsewhere (http://www.troubador.co.uk/distribution.asp) and standalone design and editorial services via our sister company, Indie-Go (http://www.indie-go.co.uk).
Our annual Self-Publishing Conference, held on 22nd April 2017, offers sessions on all aspects of the publishing process and can be tailored to each delegate’s requirements – registration is open now for £65 per person: (http://www.selfpublishingconference.org.uk).