Your Book Marketing Plan – How Much Should You Budget to Promote Your Book?

To promote your book successfully, it’s important to budget funds for book marketing. While it’s certainly possible to do online book promotion on a shoestring budget, you will still need to invest in promoting your book.

The amount you should budget depends on your book marketing plan. Here are some expense categories to consider and some money-saving tips:

Blog/Website: Website design and hosting fees. If you use a blog-based website, you’ll minimize costs for online book promotion.

Graphics: Design of website header and graphics, design of printed materials, purchase of stock images for blog/website, and a photo shoot for your author photo. Services such as Killer Covers and eCoverBee can provide lower cost website graphics.

Printing: Business cards, bookmarks, postcards, flyers, and posters for personal appearances. In addition to local printers, check prices for online printers such as Printing for Less.

Copywriting and Editing: You may want to hire a professional copywriter to help you write effective sales copy for your website and other book promotion materials. It’s also a good idea to have an editor or proofreader review your website and marketing materials.

Email Marketing: You will pay monthly or per mailing fees to the company that manages your opt-in mailing list. Some services, like Mail Chimp, waive their fees until your list gets to a certain size.

Review Copies: Printing, packaging and postage for review copies sent through the mail.

Publicity: There are a number of free online press release services, such as PRLog and Free Press Release. To get wider distribution for your most important releases, you will need to use a paid service like PRWeb.

Learning: There are a number of blogs and newsletters with helpful book marketing information. But don’t forget to budget funds for books, teleclasses and other opportunities to get more in-depth education about publishing and book marketing, and for dues to writing and publishing organizations. You’ll be more effective at promoting your book if you know how to do it properly.

Administrative: You may need help in implementing your book marketing plan, especially if you have a day job. There are a number of virtual assistants who specialize in working with authors. You may also want to invest in consulting services from a publishing or book marketing coach to help you develop your book promotion strategy.

Other Expenses: Additional expenses may include travel, book fairs, book award entry fees, advertising, and administrative expenses such as postage and internet access.

The best way to develop a budget is to assign a projected cost to each element in your book marketing plan. Then you can break down your expenses by month, to arrive at a monthly budget.

Dana Lynn Smith is a book marketing coach and author of the Savvy Book Marketer Guides [http://www.SavvyBookMarketer.com]. Get your free free book marketing plan outline at The Savvy Book Marketer blog, and follow @BookMarketer on Twitter for more book promotion tips.