Marketing Your Book

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.

Uniquely among self-publishing companies, we offer full retail trade distribution and active marketing to 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 Book Trade Marketing is designed to get your book in front of those people in the retail trade who make the buying decisions. Our marketing team regularly meet with retailers’ buying staff to show forthcoming titles and ensure that titles have the best chance to be stocked by those retailers.

Matador offers authors a full retail trade distribution service, coordinated by the Marketing Department using the services of distributor Orca Distribution. Our distribution service is offered as part of our Book Trade Marketing.

Our Book Trade Marketing service includes the following specific services:

Our media/public relations marketing service is for authors who aim to give their book a cost-effective media profile. Run in-house by Matador’s marketing team, it concentrates on seeking to achieve a basic media coverage for you and your book.

Our media services are only available to authors taking our Book Trade Marketing service, as without effective trade marketing, media and PR work is pointless. While we target selected national media as appropriate for your book, we do not undertake national TV and radio marketing (this is included in the Enhanced Media Outreach Service).

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.

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.