Guest Post: How to Announce Your Book With E-Mail

How to Announce Your Book With E-Mail

By Sandra Beckwith


What's the best way to announce your book via e-mail?
I've received quite a few book announcement e-mails lately, including some that were trying to achieve "Amazon best-seller" status. Sadly, most of the messages were not very compelling. More often than not, they were self-congratulatory ("I've achieved my dream!") or self-serving ("If you buy my book on Amazon at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning, my book might become a best-seller!"). Some were brief: "My new book is out. Here's a link where you can buy it." Others were rambling. None of them told me why I'd want to buy the book - what was in it for me, the reader.
I don't want you to repeat the mistakes I keep seeing in my inbox, so I'm sharing seven tips that will help authors with any level of marketing experience write a book announcement e-mail message that isn't obnoxious, annoying, offensive, or downright sad:

1. Start with the text from your back book cover. It should tell us why we will want to buy your book, right? You might need to massage it to make it more personal, since e-mail is such an informal means of communicating.
2. It's not about you. It's about the person you're writing to. Tell me what your book will do for me. Will it educate, inform, entertain, enlighten? What's in it for me? How will your book improve my world, help me improve someone else's world, or help me forget about my world?
3. Include a link where we can purchase the book. Seriously - you'd be surprised at how many messages omit this.
4. Forget the "help me make my book an Amazon best-seller" plea. Unless you are my total BFF, I don't care if your book is a best-seller. All I want to know is whether I'll like or need your book or whether I know someone else who would like it. If you feel compelled to be focused on that best-seller-for-five-minutes-on-Amazon plan, at least share information about your book, too.
5. Don't come on too strong. You might suggest that it makes a nice gift, but don't tell me that I "should" buy it for everybody on my holiday gift list.
6. Ask me to share your news with my networks. If I know people who will want to know about your book, I'll help spread the word. But sometimes I need to be reminded.
7. Remember that the quality of your announcement reflects the quality of your book, so make it as high-quality as you can. I received one this week that looked like a ransom note, with multiple fonts and sizes. And I know this wasn't what the author intended. You don't need to have a professionally designed, all-HTML'd-up message, but you do want something that reflects the quality of your book.

Send your announcement to as large a list as you can assemble, remembering that some people will be more interested in this news than others. And some are just naturally better at sharing and forwarding. And whatever you do, make this just the starting point for your book launch. There's lots more you could - and "should" - be doing.
Sandra Beckwith, the author of two publicity books, teaches a popular publicity e-course for authors. Sign up for her free book publicity e-zine at http://www.buildbookbuzz.com.

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