Your book is published, it's been out for about a year and now that the initial PR push has passed, you might be wondering, "now what?" Now that you've finally built your confidence up enough to publish a book and get yourself out there to promote it, don't let the seeming end to your debut party really be the end. An organized portfolio is key to book marketing and will help keep your presence and book sales alive.
How To Organize Your Portfolio With Pinterest & A Web Page
We suggest starting a Pinterest account and web page simultaneously, but hitting the "live" button on your Pinterest first makes most sense because it gets you out there gaining followership. If you're not already using Pinterest, it's simple and streamlined and offers endless, cross-tagging opportunities. Applications also exist if you're more of a "set-it-and-forget-it" kind of person to put it on autopilot- we like Pingraphy to schedule posts.
Creating several boards to highlight the various media you've been featured on will help keep your book selling, many a self-published author go on to be offered deals or asked to appear because of a Pinterest users ease of access- news stations, magazines, bloggers and other social media and news sources specifically hire their social media specialists to comb Pinterest to locate experts and especially those that have been published. Create boards for video press features, featured book reviews on major news channels, guest blogging appearances, photos of demos that have been done live. You can also link your Google Hangouts and YouTube videos to your Pinterest page. Be sure to use the words "press" "major media outlets" "featured" "interviews" and "appearances" to gain optimized search action, but also to attract the specific attention you're after.
When you're pitching a new media outlet you'll have everything in one place with organized links to either reference each board or to show your following. You'll naturally make connections, and speaking of, if you've been featured on major news outlets, write to the social media team to thank them for featuring your book and ask them to follow you sending the exact "click on me to follow" link to make things easy for them. Let them know you're the one to get a hold of when they want to feature a story on whatever your topic may be.
Creating a stylized book portfolio web page
While you're uploading to Pinterest, spend time building a web page portfolio specifically focused on your book. When choosing a url either use your name or title of your book. The first year books tend to climb all at once or steadily during the initial PR push, but after that, it's up to authors to keep themselves out there. You can get invited to live demo, teach classes and speak if you've taken the time to carefully place these elements on your site.
Squarespace, Wordpress and Tumblr offer affordable options that excel in featuring media-rich content. Think about choosing websites that use sliders on the top section of the landing page. Here you can feature your most biggest media appearances, a well-attended book signing and any photos of you being interviewed by a news station or popular media outlet. Below, stay minimal organizing by media type. Be sure to include a small bio, and all of your media links.
And, remember, stay out there, present your portfolio often and continue adding to it to keep selling!
Keep the Faith an May the Force be with You!