Twitter

My Twitter Strategy

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A guest post by Jean Shorney When my son suggested that as a writer I should get myself ‘out there’ via the medium of Twitter, all I visualised was people either photographing partially eaten meals, or entertaining us with averaging innumerable cups of coffee per day. Twitter can be a vehicle for promotion, but it … Read more

Book Collecting With Twitter

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Twitter may prove indispensable for collecting new first edition signed books these days. An aspiring author can sacrifice hours hunched over their keyboard and they often take breaks to “microblog” on the popular social media website. Just as with regular blogs, they share everything from the consistency of their gnocchi to what they just said … Read more

A Novel Book is now Online, marketing tips appreciated!

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A Novel Book online bookstore

Well, finally after many stops & starts, A Novel Book is back up and running. I am much happier this time around – and the site is so much more user friendly than the last so hats off to the designers.

Now, what to do next?

I have started listing the books.

I have written my listings up. I have added synopsis. I have even added information about the authors I have a few books of. I’ve written up my Meta descriptions / keywords. Then I rewrote them. Then I did some more research, and rewrote them again.

Then I spent a bit of time googling some of my listings. A few came up on the first page or 2 which surprised me. The rest didn’t, which didn’t surprise me. I must’ve just fluked the few that come up high in the searches.

So I went back and tried to find out what I did differently to those listings.

NOTHING. They have ALL been entered the same way. Gee, this is harder than I thought. So I’ve left that alone for now. I have bigger issues.

Advertising!

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Getting Boots Into Your Bookshop

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Online shops and physical bookshops share some challenges and one is called traffic, getting people to actually come in the door.  Physical shops do this by being in a good location and by advertising, online shops do this with SEO.  There are many different forms of SEO, there’s all the traditional forms of SEO which … Read more

What worked and what didn't in the bookshop, 2009 edition

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Thanks to a snowstorm and a fairly quiet day at the store, I was able to sneak into my office to begin sorting out the holiday piles. As I crunched numbers, I looked closely at the figures in front of me and realized we had a pretty good holiday season after all. It wasn’t just reflected in the sales sheets, either. The large pre-holiday crowds were, for the most part, happy with our selections, pleased with our customer service, and open to suggestions. Our booksellers, while welcoming the slow Monday after Christmas, were happy it was over but were telling more stories of the fun we had versus the Grinches we encountered. I looked over my cluttered desk and started to make two more piles…

What Worked in the Bookshop

1. The Best of 2009 display – We chose titles strictly on sales and focused on those that sold particularly well during Father’s and Mother’s Day. We ended up with a nice mix of fiction and nonfiction, mostly paperbacks, and things that we already had a good stack of because of their consistent sell-through. Everything was faced out on an endcap, about 40 titles altogether. We put up “filler” signage on each shelf that was no bigger than an index card-sized shelftalker because we had printer problems the week we put up the display. When sales were over $1000 within the first three days, we decided to save our ink and let the display run itself.

2. New York Times Top 100 display – Thanks to Twitter, I had this list in my hands within minutes of its online posting. We quickly set to work checking inventory – turned out we were only missing eleven of the 100 titles. We also had two local authors on the list (which created instant foot traffic). We used bright green shelftalkers to highlight the titles throughout the store and then created an endcap of titles that weren’t already on other displays. We put a small sign on the front and back doors announcing that we had the books; sales were instantaneous. The Sunday NYT book review is second in popularity only to Cleveland Plain Dealer reviews – we put up separate displays for the Top Ten, and put the PD top twenty up two weeks later. (slatwall displays these nicely)

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