We are pleased to offer a wide range of book and ebook marketing services to Matador authors.
If you decide to sign up for our Book Trade and/or Media/Public Relations Marketing, our Marketing Department will work with you on a one-to-one basis to market your book to the retail trade and publicise it to the media. Matador offers in-house trade marketing and media and PR services for books and ebooks, based on many years of active marketing knowledge and experience.
Uniquely among self-publishing companies, Matador offers a full range of active trade, retailer and media marketing services to authors. If you take any of our book trade services or media marketing services, our Marketing Department will work with you one to one to carry out those services.
Our marketing services offer a wide range of options, from marketing both the ebook and physical book to the media, marketing to the trade, some DIY options and some full service marketing choices. We offer the following services:
Marketing your book to the retail trade is the cornerstone of getting your book sold more widely than just to your family and friends. Without retail trade marketing, your book will still be listed by retailers as it carries an ISBN number, but no retailer will stock it or buy copies unless a customer specifically places an order.
We offer 2 retail trade distribution and marketing options to our self-publishing authors. We have been working with wholesalers and retailers for over 20 years, so they know us and trust that our books are well produced and saleable by retailers. As a result, most of our book sales are still made through high street bookshops and via library suppliers and wholesalers.
Our Retail Set Up and Distribution Service is our basic trade marketing and distribution service. It is designed for authors who want us to sell and distribute their physical book through high street bookshops, online retailers and on our own web shop.
Our next level of trade is our Trade Marketing and Sales Representation service, designed to get your book in front of those people in the retail trade who make the buying decisions. It is perfect for authors seeking a more in-depth bookshop option, backed up by an active sales representation team who will visit or present your book to buyers at key indie and chain bookshops across the UK.
You will need to take one or other of these services if you want us to sell and distribute your book.
Our media/ marketing services are for authors who aim to give their book a cost-effective media profile. Some authors wish to undertake some or all of the media marketing themselves, while others require a more comprehensive campaign run on their behalf. Or they wish to pursue both options simultaneously. We can assist in both cases.
Our Author ‘DIY’ Marketing service has been carefully designed for those who want to carry out marketing to the media themselves. This service offers a range of materials and support designed to help you target key marketing areas direct to readers, online and the media.
Our Matador Media Marketing service, on the other hand, is for authors who want to give their book a cost-effective media profile, with the campaign carried out by Matador. Run in-house by Matador’s marketing team, this service aims to achieve basic media coverage by planning and running a media campaign on your behalf. Our media marketing work aims to interest print and online media in reviewing a title, interviewing the author or in placing an article on the subject of the book. The service is targeted closely to each specific new title, it does not use a ‘blanket’ approach that is the same whatever the title.
Both of our marketing services can be taken simultaneously, with Matador running a marketing campaign and the author undertaking ‘DIY’ marketing as well.
We offer an ebook marketing service designed to give your ebook the chance of being seen by journalists, bloggers and reviewers worldwide. The service includes an entry on NetGalley, the leading ebook media review service – where members worldwide can browse for ebooks by subject, publisher or keyword, and then request a review copy.
The aim of our ebook marketing service is to get reviews and feedback for your ebook, which we then encourage reviewers to leave on retailers’ sites, as the more reviews an ebook has, the earlier it appears in search results. Customers are also more likely to buy an ebook that has reviews. NetGalley members are often regular Goodreads/Amazon reviewers or have their own book blogs/bookstagram accounts, so they may also post reviews through those accounts. Feedback from NetGalley can also be used by you in your own marketing efforts.
Ebook marketing is undertaken around the time your ebook is released for sale, and is designed to work around the release of an ebook to retailers by our in-house production team, over a period of around six weeks.
If you are taking our Matador Media Marketing service for your printed book, you do not need to take our ebook marketing service.
Social media is inescapable in the modern world and authors are finding they need an online presence to reach their readers and increase visibility. For many, however, social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram remain something of a mystery. For this reason, we offer a flexible menu of social media options that can be taken singly or grouped together for a wide range of complementary options.
Our three different social media consultation services will help you to get up and running on the three main social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), by offering a one-to-one consultation with a member of the marketing team, based around your own needs and social media plans.
Having an online presence as an author is essential. Readers are active online more than ever before, turning to social media and the internet to find out about authors. With the rise of #bookstagram, BookTok and book bloggers, we’re noticing more and more how readers discover new titles and share their reviews with others online.
Having an author website is an ideal option for authors looking to have everything to do with them and their books in one place, easy for readers to find. Your website is a centralised landing page for your readers. You can showcase your work and include links to buy, share news clippings, interviews, video and images, and allow readers to post reviews. You can really start to build your author brand.
Our Author Website services provide cost-effective and flexible solutions; with a bespoke website design created for you by a professional web designer, it is a collaborative process where you will have input on layout, content and colour schemes, while having the guidance and support of a professional. In fact, we have our own website devoted to Author Websites!
Our services allow you to create a website specific to your requirements, so you’re not paying for features you don’t need. Our ‘Standard’ website includes a homepage, a biography page and a contact page. Or you can opt for our ‘Portal’ website service, where you can choose from a range of modules to suit your needs - a blog that you can update regularly, a page for posting your new writing, a page for sharing news articles, a blog, reader reviews, a page for videos, and more. Once your website goes live, you can then add to your own content easily, and add new features as and when you need. And we offer ‘bespoke’ websites, for those who want something a little more involved.
Have a look at our Author Websites website, which gives all of the options we offer and is a place to start things moving.
Getting your book noticed in an increasingly competitive world is ever-harder. Discoverability is vital if you are to boost your sales. One means of enticing readers is to allow them to read some of your book first, beyond the short synopsis. Think of this as something akin to a reader browsing in a bookshop, where they can dip into the text, read the first few paragraphs, flick through and get a real feel for the book. This type of enhanced search is available from both Amazon and Google, and it has been shown to help drive sales of books.
Our Enhanced Discoverability service places your book on both Amazon ’Search Inside’ and Google’s ’Search in a Book’ platforms, so that potential readers can ‘browse’ your book. Both platforms make a percentage of a book available to view, never all of it! But neither allows us to specify what can or cannot be displayed, it is carried out automatically by the suppliers with different random pages being available to view with each visit.
We offer all our authors – whether or not they are taking any of our marketing services – a wide range of supplementary marketing services. All are designed to raise the profile of your book or ebook, and many can be used by you directly to promote your work to retailers and readers.
Our Supplementary Marketing Services are detailed in our flip-book, and include:
“Matador provide a quality self-publishing service at the high end of the market and Booked PR is proud to support their authors with UK publicity campaigns. I often get asked by those authors wishing to self publish who they should approach and I always recommend Matador for a professional product that is highly affordable. Matador are a friendly team who make quality and customer satisfaction their priority.”
Helen McCusker, Booked PR