If you remember from my last installment, we were pulling together all of the background material on the book and Angela. That’s done and we’re ready to start assembling the marketing material.

Lesson 3 - The Online Press Kit

Sounds fancy, but all an online press kit consists of is a web page with links to all the information a third-party would need to announce the book. You can find the one for this book here. Once we get other sites and publications interested in doing interviews or running excerpts, we’ll send them here for promotional material.

Lesson 4 - Amazon

When you list a book on Amazon, it’s usually accompanied by a minimal description. You can go back in later and enhance that description by submitting a request here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/content-form/?ie=UTF8&product=books

You’ll need to know the following details about the publisher, if it isn’t you:

Publisher
Contact person
Contact e-mail
Mailing address
City
State
Country
ZIP/postal code
Phone
ISBN (no hyphens in between the numbers)

Once you get in, you can add the following extra information:

Description (up to 300 words or 2,400 characters)
Publisher’s comments (up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Author comments (up to 250 words or 2,000 characters)
Author(s) bio(s) (up to 500 words or 4,000 characters)
Table of contents (Up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Inside-flap copy (up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Backcover copy (up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Reviews
Excerpt/first chapter (not to exceed one chapter)

Once you submit the above info, an email goes to the publisher confirming that you are authorized to update the book information. When your publisher responds, the information goes live on the book page.

Lesson 5 - Squidoo

There is a new site/service called Squidoo. It’s build on the same concept as About.com - experts maintaining pages on specific topics. But unlike About.com where they pick the experts, with Squidoo you can claim any topic as your own and become the Squidoo expert for that topic. In Squidoo lingo it is known as “creating a lens” (lens - magnifying a subject - get it?).

I went ahead and built a Squidoo Lens on the subject of VBACs using the VBAC book marketing material. Plus, Squidoo has some nice tools for pulling info on a subject from Google News and the blogsphere.

This is more of an experiment to see what happens, rather than a proven marketing strategy.

In the next installment, I’ll talk about adding keywords to Amazon to help the book come up better in the searches, and how to find out the hot topics to write articles about for Angela’s VBAC blog.