In Part 5, I talked about ARCs, finding your audience and the best people among them to target as ARC readers. But don't blow your chance with a rude, disrespectful approach! Don't spook them with grandiose ideas about your own work or with presumptions about how you think your novel is the next best thing.
So... how do you approach them, then?
I’m not sure if my approach was the best or whether it was universal. After that massively exhaustive quest to find the holy grail *cough* sorry, the ARC readers... I approached a lot of them, and while I got quite a few ‘No, thanks’ and even more people not even responding at all, I also got a LOT of people who said ‘Yes, please”. As I mentioned, I was already a relatively active member of the community, which might have made some of them more willing to say ‘Yes’ in the first place.
Another reason why I think my approach might have worked was the way I did it. I drafted a very simple message, introducing myself as a debut author. I explained them the book genre, subgenre, niche, gave them a very brief teaser of what the book was about, showed them the cover. And finally, I told them why I was contacting them specifically. Those I had found through Goodreads, I mentioned I had read their review of book X, and that made me think they might also enjoy my book.
Try not to be presumptuous here or act like you know exactly what they like. Don’t say ‘my book is the best book ever and you should be happy I want you to read it’ or things like that. This is horrible and the only thing it does is grant you an immediate block. You can easily be blacklisted by the entire community and ruin your chances before you even start just by doing things like these.
In the end, I made sure to tell them what the release date would be and that I’d appreciate it if they could read and review by the end of the release week, but that it would be totally fine if they didn’t. People are already dealing with schedules and timelines and pressure on their day jobs, so no one likes to feel pressured at all when being asked to read a book, which is something they’re doing as a favour to you and with nothing in return. Don’t abuse their love for books and willingness to help – seize it and cherish it forever. You can even say something like ‘I’d like to send you the book, and for you to read it, but with no commitments or any obligations. It’s my gift to you.’
You’d be surprised how freeing this is for reviewers. A lot of them appreciate this so much they are even more eager to pick your book up from the dozens or hundreds they already have in their piles.
Hopefully your approach is soft and smooth enough to motivate some to start reading. When they do, your hope is it will trigger a snowball effect. They all follow each other on social media and hang out in the same circles online. So if they see everyone is reading and talking about reading your book, they’re more likely to pick it up too to see what the fuzz is all about, which escalates into widespread buzz. Of course, that doesn’t always happen, but if it does, congrats: you’ve got some serious buzz behind you, and it didn’t cost you a penny.
Timing
Another thing to keep in mind as well is the timing.
First, the timing of your approach. If you’re reaching out to them during the Holiday season or during the summer, the response rate might be quite low, so you might want to avoid that. Second, you should time your approach to them quite a long time before your book is meant to be published. If you’re aiming for a May release, you might start thinking about approaching them with the ARC by late February.
The more time in advance you give them, the more likely they are to actually follow through and read it. If they keep seeing your name out there, on social media, with other marketing initiatives, even better.
Sending out ARCs ahead of time to your niche target audience is an amazing start and you’re already doing better than 90% of self-published authors at this point. You’re giving yourself a head start and I’m all here for it! But pre-launch marketing doesn’t end here, and you can continue to build up buzz for your book, even as a debut. There are a lot of other things you can do while your ARC readers read the book and start leaving reviews.
Cover Reveal
This is a really effective marketing tool that typically generates some buzz, even if it is short-lived. As a debut author, you want to cling to every bit of help you can get, seizze every possible moment of (good) spotlight. There are several approaches to doing a cover reveal and they all have advantages and disadvantages.
- 1) Yourself – There really isn’t any upside to just doing the cover reveal yourself on your social media. It’s your cover, so of course you’re going to be excited about it. You might have likes from your friends and followers, but your goal here should be to reach the largest possible number of people, not to ‘preach’ only to those who are already converted...
- 2) Picking one ‘big name’ influencer – This can be pretty good. Some pretty big blogs, youtubers and instagrammers are sometimes eager to help authors out with this. If you can get a big name or relatively big name influencer here to post this and do the cover reveal for you, then it’s already a massive audience you didn’t have access to and now do. It also gives you indirect credibility. If a big name in the community is helping you out, that implies they have trust in you, and that is passed on to their audience.
- 3) Hosting the cover reveal with as many blogs/influencers as possible – The goal here is obvious: to cast the net as widely as possible, and it should work. The problem is that if you have a lot of people posting, you’re also diluting attention and decreasing the chance of the one post going viral and ultimately capping you at a smaller audience.
It's really up to you to decide what approach to take. But you have a cover and people love seeing pretty covers, so definitely USE IT to your benefit and market the hell out of it with the cover reveal.
Another thing you should definitely consider is tying your cover reveal with opening the pre-orders for your ebook on Amazon.
Why?
Well, when people see your cover and they really like it, but there’s no action button or no pre-order link, they won’t buy it and your marketing efforts have been potentially wasted. If you don’t include a pre-order link in the cover reveal post, then the whole cover reveal marketing campaign will be just for brand awareness and it will not have an impact on pre-orders, which you definitely should start piling up.
What can else can you do to promote the book? That's something for Part 7!
(Continues in Part 7)