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Book Review & Contest Insights from Real Reviews and Submissions
What separates great books from the rest? Below are articles with insights from real reviews and contest submissions—what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve your book. You’ll also find a wide range of articles covering writing, publishing, marketing, and more. Each article has a Comments section so you can read advice from other authors and leave your own.
Why Some Books Win Awards (And Most Don’t) — Insights From Real Contest Submissions New!
What separates award-winning books from the rest? After evaluating contest submissions across a wide range of genres, certain patterns become clear. Some books consistently rise to the top. Others, even with strong ideas and clear effort behind them, fall short. The difference is rarely dramatic—it...
What We’ve Learned From Reviewing Hundreds of Thousands of Books (And Why Most Don’t Stand Out) New!
After reviewing and evaluating books across thousands of submissions over the past two decades, certain patterns become impossible to ignore. Some books immediately stand out to reviewers. Others—even well-intentioned ones—fade into the middle or fall short. The difference is rarely luck. It comes down to...
The Best Way To Start A Book Marketing Plan
There are hundreds of ways to promote books but the most effective method is word of mouth recommendation. It has been for decades. How can word of mouth recommendation still be the most effective way to promote a book? It is a highly credible, highly viral method of promoting a book or anything else. It is also free. To effectively use this method of promotion, you have to write a book that is worth sharing. Afterwards you should find a way to give it to the people who will help you to spread the word. These two sound easy but making them work is the difficult part. As they say, the devil is in the details.
The concept of word of mouth recommendation is simple, but to make it work for your book you need to work very hard, especially at the beginning. You also need to be very patient because there is no way to measure your progress. If you do everything right, you will soon reach a point where your fans will start marketing the book for you.
To give your book the best chance of success, you should formulate and start implementing a marketing plan for it even before you write it. You need valuable relationships to market a book and creating such relationships takes time. You should learn what your readers want and create a group of fans that yearn for the release of your book. The best time to grow your audience is when you are writing a book. This way, by the time you launch the book, you will already have an invested audience eagerly waiting the debut.
What if you have already written the book? It is never too late to start creating an audience even if you have already finished a book. You will follow the same steps as a person who started promoting his book early, but you have to wait a bit longer to see results. If you have a fantastic novel that is worthy of recommendation, you should start getting it noticed by the right people who will start recommending it. You should keep several things in mind.
1. Don’t focus on selling the book. Instead, focus on discoverability. If your book is good, it should pretty much sell itself. You should make sure that the book is found by people who would want to read it.
2. Take full responsibility for promoting your book. It doesn’t matter if you do everything that pertains to promotion or if you outsource some services, you should accept that the success of your book depends on the actions you take.
3. Promotion and platform building are closely related. There is a very thin line between building your platform and marketing your book. When you have a solid platform, it is much easier to sell a book. Therefore, when you want to promote your book, you should not only focus on the people that know you and your previous works. You should also work to increase the number of people who believe in your work.