For many book authors, a complete and holistic book marketing strategy equates to hiring professional book marketing services. Many others go with the DIY route and spread the word themselves. Unsurprisingly, most of the successful authors experience that mixing these two tactics helped their book succeed.
You see, book promotion demands just as much, if not more, time as writing a book. You need to build your author website, engage on social media, hang out on author platforms, and market a lot. What can break the camel’s back in this situation is the fact that you have to do all this months before the launch of your book. In most cases, this means that you have to start marketing your book while you are writing it.
Does it seem daunting?
No one said that writing a book and successfully publishing it was easy. It isn’t easy. You must consider it your second job and plan more than 15 hours a day for this project until your book is finally completed and launched.
You can hire professional book marketing services to lessen some burden. At the same time, if it’s the writing part that’s troubling you, you can delegate this task to a ghostwriter. But if you insist on doing it all yourself or actively participating in your agency-led marketing campaign, use this blog post to create your strategy.
Decide the Timeline
You are never early when it comes to marketing your book for launch. Some authors are known to start marketing their books a year in advance. Although a year is too early for most books, you would only benefit if you start networking or marketing your book up to six months before the launch date. If that’s not feasible for you, don’t shorten the pre-launch marketing period to anything less than 3 months.
Know Where Your Audience Hangs Out Most
You may want to discuss this question with your book marketing services agency. If you are working solely, you have to stalk your competitors to know the platforms they use to market their books. Here, you are concerned about the social media presence of your readers.
Most authors market their books on Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube. Depending on the genre, you can also explore LinkedIn, Reddit, and Quora. Start your search by searching for relevant content as well as the engagement this content is getting. Engagement is the key factor that you will consider while determining if a platform is right for you or not.
Build Your Author Website
This is an essential step in marketing your book digitally. A website gives information about your book and gives your fans a space to look to for updates. Other than sharing information about the book, its description, title, and updates, you can keep your readers in the loop with updates in your life that might impact the writing process or launch.
Set A Timer
Many authors set a timer on their website that reminds the visitors about the launch date of their book.
As you grow your following using all the marketing tactics listed in this blog post and visitors start to frequent your website, you should add a giveaway or a lead magnet to your site. This lead magnet can be a synopsis of your fiction book or it can be some insights into the non-fiction work you are about to publish. Make sure that the giveaway holds value for your potential readers so they will be prompted to trade their emails for this giveaway. Also, the value should be tempting enough for them to force them to buy your book when it’s published.
Why should you include a giveaway in your book promotion campaign? You might want to know the importance of this giveaway. Well, it’s necessary because it will work round the clock to act as your marketing agent. It will gather potential readers’ email addresses for your email list. This way, you can personalize the marketing campaign to the taste of every reader.
Not only that, but this email list will work as a foundation for your next book writing and publishing project. For many authors, this email list helps them research the market and plan books with increased demand from the readers.
Social Media Marketing
Partner with a book marketing team or simply engage with your target audiences yourself. Note that social media is the backbone of fast-paced digital marketing that is required for book success these days. It has proved to be better than search engine optimization for short-term projects like book launches.
You can start social media marketing based on your research of your target readers as discussed above. Many platforms have groups and communities for writers where they share synopses of their work and attract feedback. If you write amazing stories or your insights are worth reading, you will easily attract an engaged fan base from these communities.
While sharing your posts is a must-do step, don’t skimp on engaging with other people’s posts. If you want to build an audience from social media, you must build relationships, and the best way to build relationships is to engage with other people. In addition to commenting on group posts from other authors and readers, try networking in the messages.
Utilize Paid Ads
If you are a first-time author, you will start with a very small readership that will not be enough to turn your book into a success. You need more exposure, and you need it quickly. We have already discussed the first best thing to boost your followers – using social media.
The next best book marketing strategy that can attract the attention your book deserves is paid ads. You can run these ads on social media as well as on Google as it’s the most popular search engine. However, most authors have reported quick success with social media paid ads.
Here, you are advised to either take up an advertising course to amp up your paid ads’ reach or to hire help from a paid ad specialist. If you are working with professional book promotion services, you will get this service as part of your marketing package.
Launch Your Book with a Bang
We have discussed earlier that you need to announce your launch date early on. You can announce it one to three months in advance. This way, you will build anticipation and interest in your readers.
Another way to support your book in making waves is to plan a book launch event. This event can be physical or web-based depending on your marketing needs based on the target audience of your book. Virtual events are easier to carry out and are more successful because people find it easy to show up from the comfort of their homes.
You might want to include giveaways or book bundles to make this event a success. Or if yours is a consultancy business, you can offer free consultancy to a few lucky attendees. You can also increase the chances of its success by running a paid ad campaign solely for this event. Note that the success of a book on many online forums is determined by its success in the first few days. So, investing in a few marketing tactics wouldn’t hurt. You will break even on this cost one way or another.
Run Amazon Ads
During your author life journey, you may want to use the largest book marketing and selling platform to your advantage. Even if you aren’t the biggest fan of Amazon or Kindle, you should still use it to spread the word about your book.
One way to market your book on this platform is by launching it there and sending your months’ worth of engaged followers here as soon as your book is published. These sales will boost your search rank on Amazon allowing it to present it in front of more people. This way, you will boost your book’s success on Amazon organically.
A shorter and lazy-person route to Amazon’s success is publishing your book on the platform and boosting it with on-platform tools. For example, you can make your book available for free for a limited time after launching it. As a result, more people will buy it boosting the number of your sales. Hopefully, they will like your book and will care enough to leave a review, boosting your Amazon rating even further.
Another way to boost your Amazon results is by running Amazon ads. You will have to set a daily budget and the ad spend will be calculated per click.
Wrapping Up
Book promotion requires a lot of effort, but if you do it right and follow through, you can succeed in turning your book into a success. If you are feeling lost about when and how to start your book marketing, use this guide. Even if you want to hire book marketing and promotion services, you will want to engage in the campaign to boost its reach. This blog post details everything you and your book marketing partner can do to increase your book sales.
