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Securing Endorsements for your Book

Endorsement
by CJ McDaniel // May 26  

Securing Endorsement

Upon completion of your book, you’ll want to get some quality endorsements. Endorsements are short testimonials (1-3 sentences) used on the front or back cover. Place a glowing endorsement from a well-respected publication or expert on your front cover and it can go a long way in convincing someone to purchase your book. Securing endorsements for your book can be challenging, but in the end, it is well worth the effort.

Here are a Few Tips for Securing Endorsements.

•Shoot for the stars – Think outside the box and ask anyone who would be a household name to someone familiar with your genre or topic. Aside from authors, try to ask speakers, entrepreneurs, personalities and other well-known names. You might be surprised at who might actually say yes!

• Do not underestimate local personalities – There is usually only room for one endorsement on your front cover and this should be reserved for your most recognizable expert, but it is beneficial to have two or three endorsements on your back cover. For these endorsements, you might consider asking local personalities who have knowledge about your subject matter. If your book was about a specific disease or condition, a local doctor could provide a powerful endorsement for your book. The CEO of a recognizable company could give an endorsement on a book about leadership skills.

• More is better – There are many things you can do with endorsements, so don’t worry about getting too many. You can always use any extras on your website, for speaking engagements, email signatures, or in the beginning of your book. Most likely you will not receive replies from all of the experts you ask, so it is wise to ask a large number of people for endorsements.

• Send initial contact – As soon as you decide who you want to endorse your book, send initial contact right away. Expect that if the endorser has a high profile, they will have busy schedules. That is why you should contact them in advance, to give them enough lead time to grant your request without pushing back your deadline. With celebrities and well-respected authorities, it can take as long as 6-8 months before the endorsements are provided.  It is not uncommon for the best endorsements to show up after your book is already in print, but it is still worth the effort because you can change out your cover on your POD and ebook versions, and you can add the better endorsement on the second printing of your traditional print-runs.

• Preparing your request –  Along with your endorsement request, you will want to send several chapters of your book and the table of contents. Let the potential endorser know that the entire manuscript is available upon request. There are also some who prefer to have a ready-made endorsement so they can just sign their name, while others want to create their own endorsement from scratch. You can provide several sample endorsements and tell them that they can modify or get ideas from those samples. If you do provide prewritten endorsements, make sure that you do not send the same endorsements to multiple experts. If two experts selected the same endorsement it would render one of the endorsements useless!

• Be patient – When securing endorsements for your book, you should be very patient and not expect to receive them back immediately. However, as your deadline approaches, you can send them a friendly reminder, just in case they forgot.

These are just some tips that can help when you are securing endorsements for your book. If you are successful, it will attract people to read your masterpiece and eventually boost your sales.

How to Secure Amazing Endorsements for Your Book

In this video, Reedsy book Marketer Joel Pitney explains the basic of getting endorsements for your book before you’ve even published it.

 

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About the Author

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CJ grew up admiring books. His family owned a small bookstore throughout his early childhood, and he would spend weekends flipping through book after book, always sure to read the ones that looked the most interesting. Not much has changed since then, except now some of those interesting books he picks off the shelf were designed by his company!