7 Ways to Promote Your Book With Video
Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 5:00AMAfter a brief hiatus, we are back with the Our Little Books Guest Post Wednesday. Today we are pleased to present Dana Lynn Smith who is a book marketing coach and author of The Savvy Book Marketer Guides. Drawing on her 15 years of publishing experience and degree in marketing, she specializes in developing marketing plans for nonfiction books and helping authors learn how to promote their books online. One such way is using video to promote your book. She is someone to listen to as she knows her stuff! Enjoy.
Video is one of the hottest online promotional tools these days, and with good reason. People watch hundreds of millions of videos a day on YouTube, and folks who enjoy videos often forward the link to someone else, creating viral marketing opportunities.
Google includes videos in search results, and people also search Google and video sites for videos on a particular topic. So, how can authors take advantage of the power of video to promote themselves and their books? Here are some ideas:
- Add a video greeting to your website, to get up close and personal with your audience.
- Record a brief video promoting yourself as an author, expert, speaker, and/or consultant.
- Create a video book promo (similar to a movie trailer, combining graphics, words, and music).
- Offer free video tutorials.
- Make video posts to your blog (known as vlogging).
- Post video testimonials from customers on your website.
- Create a video bio for your online media room or post clips of live speaking events or television interviews.
Short videos get watched more often, so keep your video under three minutes. About 30 to 90 seconds is usually ideal. Be sure to include your website address and a call to action in promotional videos.
You can create brief promotional videos with a webcam, the video capture feature of your digital camera, a digital video camera such as the Flip Video Ultra or screen capture software like Jing. You don't necessarily need to use editing software to enhance your video—part of the charm is having it look homemade.
For book promo videos, you'll probably want a more polished look. You can download some basic video production tools and learn to produce videos, or hire someone to do it for you. Prices range from $150 to thousands of dollars, depending on the skill level of the producer and the complexity and length of the video.
I recommend uploading your video to YouTube, then embedding a link on your website or blog. Just copy and paste the "embed" code from the video's page on YouTube. When you upload the video to YouTube, include important keywords in the title, description, and tags.
Here are some other ideas:
- Promote your videos in your ezine and through social media sites such as Twitter, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, and embed them in your profile on social networking sites like Facebook.
- Use the free Tube Mogul service to upload your videos to multiple video sites, after you post it on YouTube.
- Submit your videos to video search engines such as Blinkx and Truveo.
- Insert video links into your book's page on Amazon.com, through Amazon Connect.
Dana Lynn Smith is a book marketing coach and author of the Savvy Book Marketer Guides. For more book marketing tips, follow BookMarketer on Twitter and visit The Savvy Book Marketer Blog to get Dana's free Top Book Marketing Tips ebook.
Reader Comments (4)
I love the idea of video testimonials from customers. I don't think I've seen that done before. That's an excellent idea to differentiate your testimonial page. I'll keep that in mind for the future. Actually including the work "video" on the link to your testimonial page would give a little extra kick for the search engines too. Thanks!
Dana,
I am on You Tube with book trailers, but don't see where that is useful for uploading to Tube Mogul. Is it possible I missed seeing something on TMogul where I can upload a code or url from YTube? The way I see it, you have to upload from your computer to get your videos onto Tube Mogul. Did I misunderstand?
This was very illuminating for me as learning about video marketing is on my agenda. Thank you for this opportunity to start to build that knowledge base.
I've heard author videos are more important than book trailers because they "break the fourth wall" by letting you interact directly with your readers. Personal is powerful. Very easy to do with any digi cam. Why I haven't done one yet? Good question!