How and where to display text with UKBookLink clickable links

Each of the following online services give you enormous potential to provide carefully-worded clickable links to would-be customers.

These brief notes hardly scratch the service of what it's possible to do to actively generate publicity and sales rather than simply passively relying on the listing websites such as ABE to find all your customers for you.

Email signatures: Set up an automatic signature to go out at the bottom of all your emails inviting customers to view named selections from your books. Change the signature regularly to suit the recipients or selections being offered, perhaps using wording similar to those shown below.

Note that the demonstration links immediately below don't actually work - these are merely suggestions for the sort of thing you want want to say. In each case, change the abc123 to whatever link UKBookLink provides for you leading to your own book selection.



See our fishing book of the week at http://UKBookLink.com/abc123

This week's special selection of 35 books on golf are at http://UKBookLink.com/abc123

We've just uploaded some nice Sussex local history books to http://UKBookLink.com/abc123

Specialising in old and rare books on cycling - http://UKBookLink.com/abc123

Just in! A lovely collection of 80 1930s seaside postcards at http://UKBookLink.com/abc123

Email signatures are arguably the best piece of free permanent publicity you can give to your book business - it really is a waste to finish every email with merely "Best wishes, Jim" or whatever. If this week you've got books for sale on 19th century agriculture, and next week books on the cinema, then use email signatures to tell people this. How else are they to know?

Whatever email software you use, it'll certainly have a facility for putting an automatic signature (which you can vary whenever you want) at the bottom of your emails. If you don't know how to do this look for "Signatures" in your email software "Help" file.

Ad hoc personal emails: If you know that someone has an interest in some subject area - perhaps because they've just purchased a couple of books from you in that same area - then drop them a personal line giving them a link to your other titles on the same subject.

Do you keep a record of who buys what from you so you can contact them with news or offers at appropriate times? If not, why not? A gradually expanding mailing list should be one of the major assets of your business.

Regular email newsletters: Newsletters are a more formal and structured variation of the above. Newsletters can take many forms - the monthly newsletters issued by Stella and Rose's Books are a good example of what can be done to keep your own customers in touch with what you have to offer.

Newsletters are very effective for long term development of your business although they generally require you to set up some sort of subscription form somewhere for customers to subscribe.

Please let us know if you yourself have a bookselling newsletter; we may be able to give you extra publicity.

Blogs: Many booksellers run blogs with some of them clearly having built up a reasonable following. If you're unfamiliar with the blogging world, search www.blogsearch.google.com for "booksellers" or anything else you're interested in to see the wide range of uses.

Very importantly, entries on blogs are indexed by Google so this is another way of ensuring that mention of your copies of a particular book or collection of books will show up on a Google search.

Please let us know if you yourself have a bookselling blog; we may be able to give you extra publicity on our own UKBookInfo blog.

Twitter, Facebook, etc: Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks can also play their part in building up a customer base.  It's still early days for these type of sites but again an increasing number of booksellers are starting to explore the possibilities.

Just as with blogs, entries on Twitter are indexed by Google so this is another way of ensuring that mention of your copies of a particular book or collection of books will show up on a Google search.  We ourselves (using one of our other booktrade services) have a small Twitter account at http://twitter.com/UKBookInfo which we're developing long-term for this very reason.

Please let us know if you yourself have a Twitter account to promote your book sales; we may be able to give you extra publicity.

Specialist newsgroups: There are thousands of separate newsgroups on the internet covering such about every type of human interest and activity. The website run by www.harley.com with its searchable list of these newsgroups could be an eye-opener for you. For example, if you've got a load of books on aviation, there are some 28 different newsgroups which may be interested in hearing from you.

I say may as each newsgroup will have its own basic rules as to whether advertising is allowed or not and you really must adhere to those rules.

However, adding something sensible and interesting to a newsgroup discussion on (say) WW2 German fighter-bombers with a discreet signature mentioning "Specialising in old books on WW2 military aircraft" with a clickable link to your stock could be well worthwhile. And the more you participate in general aviation discussions on that particular newsgroup, the more other members will trust you and come to regard you as a useful source of material.

Specialist magazines and newspapers: Specialist newspapers and magazines can also play a large part in bringing you customers you wouldn't otherwise have found.

Earlier this year, we ourselves bought a fair quantity of German military books, documents and Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance material published in Berlin between 1940 and 1943 relating to towns and cities right across England. Having catalogued the items we sent an email press release about the collection to 100 English local newspapers giving details of the historical background to the items and mentioning that these items were listed for sale at http://ukbooklink.com/xkx6mh.

Around 10 local newspapers (and 2 national newspapers) ran the story either as a small feature or a filler and we had, literally, hundreds of enquiries and a goodly number of orders.

Local newspapers and specialist magazines are always looking for stories of particular interest to their own readers so don't overlook the potential here for free publicity.

Of course, you need to provide some interesting angle, a peg on which a story can be hung. Merely having some some books for sale in the general subject area covered by the newspaper or magazine isn't newsworthy in itself.