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Circular Book Marketing and Web SEO

Circular book marketing used to include book readings at libraries, interviews on TV and radio, book signings at bookstores and then talks at the local Rotary and the Ladies Club. The idea was to get a little grassroots campaign going to garner publicity. Successful book sales started this way spread like water flowing from a broken dam across the fertile fields of readers. You can still make a dent in your paperback sales by following a similar path.

For everyone else, the web-savvy sellers, and those who are learning, you've got to produce a circular-style bunch of links to your website and your friendly book bloggers and sales outlets.
I read a lot of books, more than I write, and I also read a lot of book reviews. Usually, I'm looking for something about the story a book brings, but I take everything the reviewer says and let my mind wander over their words before making up my mind. I don't get too hung up on an editing error or two, I want that great story!

What Book Reviewers Do For Sales

What book reviewers do for everyone is condense three or four-hundred pages down to a couple of paragraphs that either turn us on or turn us off. That means they are marketing for the book and influencing our behavior. That's OK. And sometimes a review goes viral when it's written very well and is truly insightful. Sometimes a little 'ol Book Blog gets picked up by a major newspaper or Social Media giant and then the author gets some real benefits. 

I remember an author and book reviewer having her blog featured on Blogcritics, and then it got picked up by a reviewer at the Seattle PI. The blogger, Leslie Ann Wright, got a huge jump in traffic to her blog, to her profile at Goodreads, and other places. And yes, the book she had reviewed did great!

That type of circular marketing is a wonderful thing. And, it's free. Along the way, it also creates what the search engines love: organic links. Google has very sophisticated algorithms for finding popular keywords and they distinguish between what they consider quality pages and spam. You can't beat the algorithms with junk anymore, and you can't achieve Domain Authority or high page ranks with junk either.

What Search Engines Get Fired-Up About

The same way that readers want a great story, search engines want great content - a web of quality backlinks to choose how high in relevance to rate key words. Without those links, you'll have trouble getting noticed - and no publicity means no sales. You've got to get the word out, but it's got to be a good word.

So, if you're looking for a point here, it's not just the review that's selling your books, it's the reviewer and the links into the pages of the reviewer and how search engines read those links. If you have an author page or a book page for your work, make sure it has backlinks (links to the page) as well as links to other quality sites. Without those links, you won’t rank high enough with the search engines to ever get noticed!

If you are just getting your book launch started, you might want to check out this very detailed 12-step Book Launch!

Thanks for reading - Al W Moe

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