Just for kicks, every couple of weeks I plug “book marketing news” into the Google News machine to see what pops out…it’s always interesting, and often more than a little perplexing.
This week, most of the stories are coming out of presentations at the Digital Book World conference that took place on January 13-15. The revelations that come out of this conference always make me grin…because they’re always basically the same:
- Digital marketing can help with book sales, both new and backlist titles.
- Knowing one’s audience (readers!) when employing digital marketing tactics is important.
- Ebooks aren’t going anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong…I’m sure some of the DBW presentations have interesting insights into tactics associated with one or all of the above revelations, but they all seem to be variations on a theme.
Also in the news has been the changes coming in April to Facebook advertising. In a nutshell, the changes are:
- Sponsored stories will no longer exist,
- Targeting will be more specific, using “and” instead of “or” when various categories are selected.
If you’d like a more detailed explanation of these changes, you can find one here.
Several recent articles have also discussed SEO (search engine optimization) and its importance in marketing books. To me, this is a no-brainer because rising to the highest possible spot in Google search results is never bad. This is why your website needs to be optimized and assuming you fit the requisite criteria of its definition of notable, you really should have a Wikipedia page.
And speaking of search results, you might have noticed some of Google’s recent changes, including giving everyone with a gmail address a G+ account and tying your G+ account to YouTube. The takeaways here? They’re pretty simple:
- Have a G+ page (and, for that matter, YouTube channel).
- Make sure G+ is integrated into your website (if you use WordPress, Jetpack has this built in).
