Author Marketing Experts, Inc. is described as a full-service marketing and PR firm specializing in customized campaigns and Internet Marketing. Can you tell us some of the tools you utilize to create a book campaign?
Interestingly enough the biggest and most important tool is creativity. In a world where there are 1,000 books published each day in the US, you must be creative to stand apart from the crowd. The other piece is that you must know how your book benefits your readers. Readers don’t buy books they buy benefits.
AME’s clients have been featured on The View, CBS The Early Show, The Today Show, Entertainment Tonight, CNN, National Public Radio, Reader’s Digest, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Essence Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, MSNBC and many others.
Your company has some fantastic connections! I understand this exposure is not guaranteed, but what are the chances of a fiction or non-fiction book realizing this form of promotion through AME? What percent of your clients achieve this level of exposure?
You know it really depends, we tend to focus much more on Internet than we do traditional PR anymore – the reason? The Return on Investment (ROI) tends to be better with Internet marketing and in the end, authors want to sell books. The odds though of getting on a show tend to increase with a significant platform, what this means is that the author can’t pop out with a book and say “please feature me on your show” there has so be some “legs” to the book and the campaign before any of these shows will even consider it. As to the percentage – that’s a very tough question. If we have a solid book, meaning a book that’s got a good foothold in its market, and an author who has a great platform then the chances are very good that they’ll get major exposure, sometimes as high as 90%.
Traveling to promote our books can get expensive. Can you tell us about Virtual Author Buzz Tour?
Yes, and thanks for asking. When it comes to marketing there are two types of promotion: push and pull. Push-marketing is where you “push” your message out to the media, so you push it to radio, TV, print, etc. That’s good, but not always effective. Pull-marketing is where you “pull” readers into your site via incoming links to your website. That’s where we shine. Our Virtual Author Buzz Tour is a combination of aggressive online blog pitching, social networking, Twitter – all of the latest and hottest online venues to pull readers to your book and to your website.
AME offers extensive online resources visitors can access through the Internet at A Marketing Expert. These resources include a bi-weekly online newsletter. What topics covered in your newsletter? How can we sign up to receive it?
You can go to the site to get the newsletter and thank you for mentioning it, I love it – we get tons of compliments on it. We also have a ton of free teleclasses that we offer through our AME-University. I believe in free resources. I think authors are looking for help and guidance and frankly, an educated author makes better choices for themselves and their book and in the long run, the more you know the more money you’ll save in promoting your book!
Penny’s career in the publicity, book marketing, and literary field spans over 15 years. During that time she has been an author, freelance writer, publicist, and instructor. Her diverse background enables her to bring a multitude of talents to the table. I encourage you to visit AME A Marketing Expert to learn more about how they can create the buzz you want to get your book flying off from bookstore shelves.
Penny,
ReplyDeleteYour website is awesome, as are the articles on marketing.