Marketing Your Book

For authors wishing to give their book the best possible chance of selling through high street retailers, we offer full trade sales representation through Star Book Sales. Star have a team of 11 regional sales representatives who actively hand-sell new titles into retailers’ head offices, local stores and other book retail outlets in the run up to a book’s publication date.

To qualify for sales representation, authors must print 300 copies or greater so that there are enough copies to place on retailers’ shelves.

Our sales representation service includes all of the administrative work involved in setting up a title to be represented by Star Book Sales, and includes a range of other benefits designed to maximise the efficacy of the sales representation.

Full details on Star Book Sales and sales representation are available on our Factsheet.

For authors whose book has a wide national appeal, or who wish to carry out a more comprehensive/prominent media campaign, our Enhanced Media Outreach service is designed to capture the attention of print, radio and TV journalists across the country. Using Vuelio, a PR service used by publishers including Random House, Taylor & Francis and Emerald Group, we can directly contact up to 60,000 journalists, working in subject-specific areas of the industry, to tell them about you and your book.

When we distribute press releases via Vuelio, we frequently get instant responses from the journalists who wish to find out more information – which often leads to major media coverage. Using Vuelio, we have had coverage in the major daily papers, including The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Daily Express, The Sun, The Guardian and The Independent, as well as prominent regional publications like The Irish Post, South London Press and Absolutely Media, plus in subject-specific publications like Travel Guide London, Footy Boots and Parents Net.

This service is designed to increase the number and depth of media responses that you will receive. It is most effective carried out in advance of your book’s publication; we start Enhanced Media Outreach before your book has been sent to print, in order to give us more of a lead-in time to work with key print, broadcast and online media.

Our audiobook marketing service is designed to give your audiobook a good chance of being noticed by journalists, bloggers and reviewers. The service is ideal for authors who want a cost-effective service that they can align with their own marketing efforts.

As audiobook sales are exclusively made online, our marketing service concentrates on promotion in this sphere. Marketing usually takes place around the time of an audiobook’s release, and includes the activities outlined below.

We also offer arrange of supplementary audiobook marketing services that are priced individually. See our separate online catalogue for these services.

The use of social media to promote books and ebooks has become an industry-standard means of reaching a diverse yet closely-targeted audience. For many people, however, social media like Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads remain something of a mystery. For this reason, we offer a separate social media marketing service, designed to establish an author presence online, that enables authors to promote their work using the various social media.

We focus on Facebook, Goodreads and Twitter, the leading social media sites; these are also the most author-friendly, and are proven in increasing discoverability of authors and books. It can take years to build an author brand, but this campaign will kick-start your knowledge and use of the social media sphere. It is especially suitable for those who struggle to find their way around the internet or learn how to use new websites. This service, along with our invaluable social media handbook, will have you tweeting and posting in no time!

We create and help you set up professsional-standard social media accounts and start building your author brand, while gently introducing you into the world of social media. This campaign will give you a period of dedicated social media support from our experienced marketing team. Our aim is to fully involve you in using the accounts we set up for you, so that by the time the campaign has ended you will be confident with using them yourself.

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.