I decided I wanted to play around with the Apple Books’ marketing tool for authors today. Smashwords.com (eBook producer) and Findawayvoices.com (audiobook producer) both send your books in the format they produce to a wide distribution network. I have been using Smashwords for years. They recommended the FindawayVoices program for audiobook production. Amazon’s, ACX is pretty back-up right now and the actor I wanted to use was on leave. So I tried the new service for my smaller book, Top Ten Ways to Market Your Book For Free.
I have probably already written about my experience with them on another one of my blogs. Needless to say, I thought they have a fairly good service. The turn-around time was very reasonable and I found an actor that I liked. The book was under 1-hour video production time but I still had to pay for the full hour. It was ready for sale in less than 30 days. Then within 60 days, it had been sent to all their distribution channels. Both companies will give you direct retailer links for some of the companies that accept your books. You can add those to your website and use them in your marketing posts. And somewhere in the background, both companies send your book to the public library distribution houses. (That will be saved for a later post).
One of the retailers is Apple. They have a couple of marketing tools on their site to help you sell your books which I found to be pretty fun to work with. Originally, tried finding my books just using a search on the Apple website and through iTunes. Epic fail there folks. So now we are going to play with the toolbox. https://tools.applemediaservices.com/apple-books
For the link, you can attach that to any words inside your paragraphs or by itself
Once you find your book using their search engine you are taken to the detail page where you can choose just a link or an embed code display widget
You can also get the code embedded into the Apple Logos
How about the Apple Icon
And you can even get a free QR Code in three different colors to add to your printed material, social media, and websites.
These are all for the audiobook version of my book. You can do the same thing for the eBook version as well. Good luck, have fun and spread those free marketing tools around.
