Some of you must be wondering what my current book marketing plan looks like now that I made so many changes to the way I do things.

Hey, I get why many of you may not have a full grasp on how I do things when all the things I’ve been saying on this blog seem to be all over the place.

For one, I talked about my plan to focus more on building an email list.

And I also mention where online booksellers fit in your overall book marketing strategy.

Heck, I even talk about quitting social media altogether.

So, how do I put all these moving parts together?

Well, you get to see how everything comes together in my book marketing plan.

As always, feel free to replicate the plan if you want.

But keep in mind that the result you’ll get won’t be the same as mine even if you follow everything I do in my author business.

The main focus of my author business

Depending on when you read this post, you may notice that many authors are now starting to warm up to the idea of selling directly to their readers.

Well, here’s the thing about selling direct – I had it all set up since day one.

But strangely enough, I didn’t put much focus on it until the last few years.

It makes sense why I don’t put much focus on selling direct.

We all know how hard it is to make selling direct work when selling books on Amazon and whatever online bookstores you can think of are so much simpler.

All you need to do is upload the book either directly or through a distributor like Draft2Digital or PublishDrive and wait for the sales to roll in.

But of course, such convenience tends to come with a big caveat.

And those caveats don’t do us any favor at all.

It’s too risky when the livelihood of your author career is highly dependent on Amazon and anything alike.

So, what any savvy author will do then?

They sell their books directly to their readers, of course.

Not only do they have direct contact with their readers. But they get paid right away too instead of having to wait for three months to get paid.

Of course, there are other reasons why you should consider selling direct. You can read my post about it right here if you’re interested.

Just to be clear I will still have my books distributed through Draft2Digital and PublishDrive, with Google Play Books and StreetLib also in the book, pun intended.

But my main focus for the most part will be more on direct sales.

For now, I’m using Payhip to sell directly. However, I do plan to switch to WooCommerce in the future.

As always, I’ll let you know if I finally make a switch to WooCommerce on this blog.

My book marketing plan to generate more consistent book sales

Now that you already know my main focus in my author business will be selling direct, how do I plan to generate sales from my own store?

Well, how I plan to generate direct sales will boil down to only these two things.

Blogging

Say whatever you want about blogging. But one thing I know for sure is it’s here to stay.

Well, what’s not to love about blogging when it can make things easier for people to discover you online?

Of course, the Google traffic magic can only work wonders for you when you have an active blog.

But assuming that you’re consistent with your blogging effort and do the website optimization the right way, it won’t be long before the traffic will come your way.

So, how does blogging tie back to generating direct sales, you wonder?

Well, it all boils down to having a call to action at the end of each post.

Believe me, I used to have this icky feeling whenever I tried to place a call-to-action for buying my books at the end of the blog post unless it related to the topic I wrote about.

But now?

I will add the call-to-action at the end of the blog post regardless of what I write.

Of course, I try to make the transition seamless so it doesn’t look like I’m placing a call to action for the sake of having one.

And I didn’t do anything fancy with it either. All I do is put the text for the call to action in bold.

If there’s one thing that I can play around with the call-to-action, it will be how I present the call-to-action at the end of the blog post.

Build an email list

This is a no-brainer thing to do since it’s the only way for you to connect with your readers on a deeper level and let them know about your upcoming releases.

Even better?

It’s not that hard to get started.

You can do what I do where you can offer a free ebook and have a link to get the readers to claim the free ebook at the front and the back matter of the book.

Or you can upload the same ebook and have it for free to download on your own online store.

Either way, it will still get you to collect your readers’ email addresses the legit way.

Of course, I’m also using my blog to build an email list.

But this one is more for me to notify people about my latest blog post, not so much about notifying people about my upcoming release.

It doesn’t and it won’t revolve around social media

It’s no secret here how much of a time suck social media can be.

While social media is never a part of my life despite being a millennial, I still choose to quit social media and never look back.

My reason for quitting social media is simple – it takes too much of your time just to get a decent result.

Well, that is as far as traction is concerned.

If you hope those puny tractions will lead you to sales, then I’m sorry to burst your bubble it’s not.

Sure, you may hear some people claiming that social media helps with generating sales for their business.

Okay, maybe social media does help with generating sales. But I’m willing to bet that most of their sales are coming from somewhere else, not so much from social media.

With social media a total dud when it comes to sales, does it mean it will never be a part of my marketing plan?

For now, that will be yes.

But I may consider giving Pinterest a try once again thanks to Joanna Penn’s podcast about Pinterest.

As for the rest of the social media platforms, I’m more than happy to miss out on all of them.

And yes, even the new ones, whatever their names are.

It doesn’t set in stone and it will never will

Well, we all know that not everything in life is already set in stone.

And so does my book marketing plan.

As you can tell, I will make any changes to it if it calls for it.

But if I ever did, I promise that you’ll be the first to know about it, for sure.