Getting your book published is tough but getting it to stand out from the crowd is also hard. I asked the founder-CEO of fReado Vikram Narayan just how a writer should be promoting their book and getting it to stand out from the crowd.
His answer was the concept of the Five Second Test.
“Here’s how it works. Let’s say you’re at a party and somebody asks you about your book. Can you describe it in five seconds? More importantly, can the person who heard the description repeat it to someone else (when you’re not there) without distorting the message?
The five second test means that your message needs to be unique, clear and specific. Once you’ve got a clear five second message you make sure that it gets out there in as many different ways as possible.
Coming up with a message that passes the five second test is hugely challenging. We’ve spent months on coming up with a five second message for BookBuzzr. It’s probably harder to differentiate a business than a book but the problem is still the same. That problem is ‘categorization.’ Listeners tend to rapidly categorize a message. And if you’re not first in that category in their mind, you’re going to have a hard time getting and keeping their attention.”
I then went on to ask Vikram his advice for writers looking to promote their book on the internet.
“Let’s first look at the problems of an author when he begins to think about marketing his book on the Internet. The very first thing an author needs to do is to share the book on his or her Facebook profile and blogs.
The next thing you need to be able to do is to allow your fans and friends to share your book across multiple social networks such as Facebook, MySpace or Orkut and across multiple book marking sites such as Delicious or Digg. Finally, you need to be able to allow your fans and friends to share information about your book via their email using their contacts in their Gmail, Yahoo mail or Hotmail accounts.
So what we’ve created is a free, online book marketing technology that allows you, your fans and your friends to share your book-extract with others. Now the book extract itself loads inside a nice flip-book … so it looks like a book and flips pages like a book.
Finally, you can add in a lot of information into the widget that you create including where you can buy the book, links to media mentions, YouTube videos where you may have a book trailer and more.
Think about it – right now about 99% of author websites and blogs just have a static image of their book cover. What if that static image actually engaged with your audience and became a flip book that allowed your readers to preview and sample your book-extract right there? What if your fans and friends could embed your book widget on their blogs or Facebook profiles with one click? What if, your author website was portable? In other words, all of the information about your book, including reviews and praise, where to buy the book, links to interviews, etc. was bundled into the widget and it could be distributed anywhere else? That’s really the promise of BookBuzzr and there really is no comparable service out there at the moment.”
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Hi Gary,
Thank you for this post. I really enjoyed the interview process!
Vikram Narayan
BookBuzzr
Free, Online Book-Marketing Technology for Authors
No problem Vikram. I found the whole interview really interesting but just picked out this bit as the point I thought was most useful to takeaway. I will post the whole transcript in the comments if anyone is interested – just ask.
Fascinating–thanks for sharing.
This is a valuable post, not only because of your restatement of the importance of instant positioning, but the link to BookBuxzr.
Thanks for the post, it has been serious food for thought.
I struggled with a 30 second “elevator” pitch for the blog, doing again but with 5 seconds as the target, serious work.
But also to do it for each of the novels, damn, they don’t even have elevator pitches yet.
Thanks – I’ve often heard about the elevator pitch. However, I’d never thought about making possible for the hearer to then pass it along. Good point and one I’ll go work on right now!
Vikram’s approach of the 5 second pitch is like all good ideas: simple in concept but difficult in practice. I found that it really makes to focus on what is important in your book but also what sets it aside from others.
I always tell writers to read this post when talking about pitches. Glad it helped.
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