Why your book cover image is as dead as a fish out of water when it comes to marketing your book online

As an author, you know that a lot of effort goes into your book's cover - its title, the imagery and so on. Of course, the cover's aim is to get a reader to open the book and sample your writing - and then hopefully, buy the book. In terms of marketing a book, giving a reader the opportunity of glancing at the cover and flipping through the book's pages is the bare minimum required.

There's nothing wrong with this approach except that it works only in physical bookshops - the book will ultimately sit on a bookshelf somewhere, where a reader can easily browse through the book. But as you know, the world has changed a lot and people don't buy books only in bookshops. Books are also marketed online through blogs, social networking sites and of course, your own website.

Nonetheless, authors continue to use the book's cover image - basically just a static picture of the book cover - in their online marketing efforts. This image just sits there, and potential customers cannot do what they would in a physical bookshop - open the book and start flipping through the pages right there and then.

It's a huge marketing opportunity wasted.

Your book-cover image

Your BookBuzzr Active Book Cover

This is where BookBuzzr comes in. It's a neat, nifty 'widget' (basically, a software tool) that enables readers to easily do online what they would do in a bookshop - 'open' a book and start reading immediately. Readers do not have to hunt for your book's excerpt on your site. Bookbuzzr also displays the pages as they would in your physical book - with the same layouts, fonts and so on. Best of all, the pages really flip so the reader gets an authentic reading experience. Of course, you decide how many pages of the book you want to show. Here's what the widget looks like.

1. Replace your book's cover image with the BookBuzzr widget.
For starters, you can - and must - replace your book's cover image with the widget wherever your book appears. This would include:
» Your website
» Your blog
» Share your widget with family, friends and colleagues on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn
2. Email signature
BookBuzzr also comes in the form of an email signature, which also looks like a flappable book.

3. Twitter integration

Moreover, given the growth of Twitter and its importance in helping authors build their platform and sell more books, a number of Twitter features have been added to BookBuzzr to help authors market their book on Twitter with a large degree of automation. The goals behind these features are:

» To help the author gain more followers on Twitter
» To make the book more visible among the authors' Twitter followers
» To help readers of the book share the book among their Twitter followers.
These Twitter features for marketing books online include:

» Authors can schedule tweets about their book in their Twitter accounts daily or weekly.
» Every time a reader opens an author's book-excerpt, a tweet goes out to the authors Twitter followers mentioning that the book was opened.
» Readers will find a link to follow the author on Twitter when they are reading the author's book-excerpt and when they finish reading the book-excerpt.
» Readers can tweet about the book with just a few clicks.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As you know, it's very important for users to be able to find your book through search engines such as Google. When you sign-up, you also get listed on our sister site, fReado.com, where readers can interact with you and with other readers. Further, you can link from fReado to your own author-site or blog thus helping your search engine rankings. Because fReado.com is optimized for search engines and because fReado.com is regularly crawled all over by the major search engines, the information about your book will soon be noticed and your pages should be listed in response to web searches.