Introduction – About the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide

NOTE:  In January, 2018, an updated and expanded edition of The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide was released, offering 65 book marketing ideas and new "Deep Dives" sections exploring social media strategy, how to work with beta readers, and how to earn free press coverage. 

To download the new Smashwords Book Marketing Guide for free, here are the coordinates:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iBooks
Kobo
Smashwords

The new 2018 edition of The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide is also available as a serialized podcast on the SMART AUTHOR podcast, starting with Episode 10.

Click here to access all SMART AUTHOR podcast episodes.






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The information that follows on this page is from the 2013 edition of the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide, which will remain here for historical purposes only.




The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide provides authors and publishers practical advice on how to market their books.  The ideas presented herein cost nothing to implement other than the investment of your time.

This is the special web edition of the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide.  If you would prefer to download the entire ebook all at once to read on your smart phone or e-reading device, download it for free at Smashwords here.

In the last four years, nearly 100,000 authors and publishers have improved their book marketing with the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide.

Although the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide was originally written for the benefit of authors who publish and distribute their ebooks at Smashwords, the principles you’ll learn here are universal for all authors and publishers. 

Some of my tips require only a couple minutes of your time, yet will reap dividends for years to come.  Other tips require a greater ongoing investment of your time and attention.  Do the easy things first.

This guide begins with a short summary of how the Smashwords platform assists an author’s marketing, and then continues on with over thirty book marketing tips any author can employ.

This guide is a living document, so I welcome your suggestions for new tips and techniques we can share with the Smashwords author community.  Write me (Mark Coker) at first initial second initial at you know where dot com.  I’ll update the guide based on your feedback, and as we introduce new free marketing and distribution tools for authors. 

Background on Smashwords:
Smashwords is a free ebook publishing platform and distributor serving ebook authors, publishers, literary agents, retailers and libraries.  Since its founding in 2008, Smashwords has helped over 60,000 authors and publishers release and distribute over 180,000 ebooks.  The Smashwords service distributes to most major ebook retailers, including the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and others.  Smashwords offers various free tools for digital publishing, marketing, sampling, selling and distribution.  These tools help you connect with your audience.

Setting Expectations:
Book marketing is a tough uphill battle.  Even most authors published by large commercial print publishers complain they get little or no post-publication marketing support from their publishers.  Most authors, whether they’re traditionally published or self-published, must do their own marketing. 

At Smashwords, we don’t make promises we can’t keep, so we cannot promise you your book will sell well, even if you follow all the tips in this guide.  In fact, most books, both traditionally published and self-published, don’t sell well.  Whether your book is intended to inspire, inform or entertain, millions of other books and media forms are competing against you for your prospective reader’s ever-shrinking pie of attention. 

Ebooks represent the fastest growing segment of the book publishing industry.  Ebook sales have been increasing over 100 percent per year the last few years, according to the latest industry research, while traditional print book sales have stagnated or declined.  If you’re an author, you need to expose your work to the digital realm.

Despite the rapid growth of ebook sales, ebooks still represent a minority of overall book industry sales.  But this is changing.  For all of 2011, according to the Association of American Publishers, ebooks accounted for nearly 20% of the U.S. trade market, up from 8% in 2010, 3% in 2009 and 1% in 2008.  In 2012, ebooks will probably account for at least 30% of overall US book sales.  Yet these industry statistics dramatically understate what happens when publishers make their books available in ebook form.  Some bestselling indie (self-published) authors at Smashwords are selling over 1,000 ebooks for every print book.  Most Smashwords authors don’t even bother to publish in print any more.

Bottom line, you’re smart to get your book out there as an ebook.