Book Marketing

In the broadest sense of the word, marketing encompasses everything involved in taking a product to market—from research and development to packaging, pricing, distribution, and customer communication. In book marketing terms, this includes:

• Researching your genre and understanding what sells in it and why
• Writing and editing a viable product
• Preparing your book in the various formats with a professional-looking cover and compelling description
• Pricing it to meet market expectations while ensuring profitability
• Researching and selecting the distribution channels that serve your goals best (i.e., Amazon, other retailers, direct sales, bookstores, etc.)
• Finding and communicating with potential and existing readers

This last part is what most people think of when they hear the phrase “book marketing”—advertising, public relations, word-of-mouth, signings, and so forth. However, all the previous steps are important to ensure your book is set up for success. When you communicate with potential readers and pique their interest, you want every aspect of your product—your book, from price to cover to ease of purchase—to resonate with the buyer so they have no objections and click that buy button.

If you found your way to this guide, you likely have hopes and dreams for your book. To start with, you want people to read it—more than just your mom or BFF. Preferably, though, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people will read it. You may dream of hitting a major bestsellers’ list, and maybe that will lead to seeing it on the big or little screen. Make your dreams as big as you want because playing small will bring small results.

Of course, that is all in theory. This industry is constantly in flux with new book marketing services coming online, established providers changing up their offerings, and algorithms being tweaked almost as rapidly as new books are being published. This means book marketing is never a one-and-done activity. Marketing will become a weekly, if not daily routine. Your book marketing strategy and the plan to execute it are living documents that you will want to review, revise, and adjust on a regular basis.

Ready to get started?

Identifying Your Ideal Reader

As much as we wish everyone in the entire world will love our book, reality tells us that’s impossible. We live in a diverse world with each human being a unique combination of life experiences, skills, education, interests, resources, hobbies, reading habits, and preferences. Fortunately, there are commonalities that your ideal readers—people who would love your book—share. Your marketing efforts will be more efficient and successful when you know what those commonalities are. Discover these by doing your market research, starting with:

• Surveying your current readers
• Studying your genre and its readers
• Doing online research and scouring data from booksellers and industry publications

Once you know your audience, create 2-4 reader personas—profiles that describe your target reader in as much detail as possible. You want to narrow each one down so specifically that you can give that reader a name and know, just by reading the profile, the best ways to market to them. By creating multiple reader personas, you can better target your message to each one and deliver it exactly where they’re most likely to see it. Are you wanting more Betty Bibliophiles to read your book? You now know where and how to reach them and what messaging resonates. Do Empty Nester Neds buy all your books and leave the best reviews? You have a persona outlining how to connect with more of them—which is definitely different from the Betty Bibliophiles.

Understanding your ideal readers and target audience fast-forwards success on the book marketing journey.

Developing Your Author Brand Identity

What is an author brand? It’s the image or persona the public forms about you and your offerings based on what it sees, reads, hears, and experiences. A brand develops organically, with or without your input, but you can better control your public persona by ensuring that everything you present supports what you want them to see and feel. This is called “branding.”

For authors, your brand encompasses your author name, logo, author bio, website, social media presence, book covers, and even your newsletter. When you give everything a consistent look, tone, feel, and message, you create a solid, cohesive brand. Readers will eventually be able to look at a book cover or an ad and know it’s yours.

To create a solid brand, start by researching other best-selling authors in your genre for inspiration—paying attention to imagery, colors, and fonts they use in their logos and covers. What style do they use for their author photos? What information do they include in their author bios? Incorporate your own preferences to show your unique personal style. You may even want to work with a professional branding specialist to design a logo and create a branding guide so you can be consistent in all your ads and messaging.

Remember, everything you put out in the public realm about you and your book—from your book’s cover to your author bio to your newsletter—contributes to your author brand, whether you intend it to or not. The more you understand and design these elements with purpose, the more you control your resulting brand identity. Learn as much as you can.

So far, we’ve covered what book marketing is, why you want to do it, and who is involved—your target audience or reader personas and your brand or author persona. The when of marketing is, basically, all the time. Let’s now get into the where and how, starting from pre-publication. Because it’s never too early to begin putting the pieces into place for a successful book launch and an ongoing author career.

Optimizing Your Book for Online Sales

Before you start promoting your book, be sure to optimize it for sales success. Your cover design, description, and price are key factors in the buying decision process, but you want to go beyond that first sale. Your front and back matter, interior formatting, and, of course, polished writing that informs or entertains invite readers to come back for more.

Cover Design

Like it or not, readers absolutely judge a book by its cover. Research the covers of books that are selling well in your genre, noting what they have in common, then be sure to incorporate those elements into your cover.

Description

If the cover has grabbed a potential reader’s attention, the very next thing they look at is the description. Again, research what sells in your genre and study the book descriptions, making note of what they have in common. If you struggle with this, you may want to invest in a professional blurb-writer to write a polished description for you for a fee.

Pricing

Be strategic in how you price your book to ensure the market will bear it and you will still earn a profit. Once again, refer to your genre to get an idea of the price range and ensure you price your book within that range. To decide on your price, know your goals. A lower price will grow your audience but at a reduced per-reader profit, while a higher price will bring more profits but your audience may grow much slower. Once you know your goals, create a pricing strategy that includes your normal price point as well as future promotions.

Optimizing the Interior of Your Book

Your book cover, description, and price have done their jobs, and now the potential reader is peeking inside your pages. It’s important your interior is just as polished as the exterior.

Modern readers are astute, and they’ll quickly move onto another title if they notice a book hasn’t been edited and proofread. Investing in a professional editor is worth every penny you spend. Book covers, good writing, and editing are the biggest things that can make or break a book.

Besides the main content, make the most of the rest of the interior:

Front Matter

Because the ebook sample size may be limited on ebook retailer sites, you want to ensure your front matter has high quality content. For non-fiction, this includes a table of contents that tells enough about the chapters to entice the reader to buy. For fiction, you want as much of the story as possible to show in the sample, so keep your front matter to a minimum.

Back Matter

The best practice here is not to stuff it too much. A link to the next book or your email list sign-up, acknowledgements, about the author, and then links to your other books suffice. If you want to include an excerpt of another book, do so strategically, making sure it ends at a place that the reader instantly goes on to buy it.

Book Formatting

Make your book easy to read. Format your interior with consistent chapter headings, subheadings, text messages, dialogue, and quotes. For ebooks, limit images as much as possible and be aware of how any may look when the reader changes font size.

Meta Data

When you set up your book with the online retailers, make sure your “meta data”—all the info they request that isn’t obvious on the product page—is optimized.

Choose the best keywords and categories so readers can find your book. There are tools that can help you with this, which may be worth the investment.

You know your audience, you’ve created a professional author brand and guide, and you’ve optimized your book as much as possible for online sales success. Whew! That’s a lot of work! You’re not done with the pre-launch yet, though. It’s time to start generating buzz for your book.

Book marketing ideas to generate big buzz before your book releases:

• Create a captivating book trailer or teaser video—or better yet, a trailer and a handful of teaser videos that you can share throughout your pre-release campaign.
• Start building an email list and sending out emails or newsletters. You'll benefit from an email list throughout your author career, and there's never any better time than the present to start building it.
• Create your author social media accounts and pages and leverage your platform to build excitement and spread the word.
• Run a pre-order campaign. You can set your ebook up on the retailer sites long before you’re ready to release it to allow readers to pre-order it. To encourage readers to pre-order your book rather than waiting until it is live (therefore, building momentum for your release day sales), offer an incentive. Use your imagination for ways to give back to those who believe in you early on.
• Secure as many reviews before release day as possible, and then share them everywhere. Suggestions include creating a reader review team, submitting to publications, and securing quotes from other authors. You want to do them all, if possible, because each type of review serves a different purpose.

Once your book launches, you want to maintain reader excitement and keep the sales momentum going and growing. Develop a solid ongoing book launching strategy and a sustainable plan that you can continue managing while working on your next book.

Social Media Marketing for Authors

In today’s world, social media is one of the primary channels for reaching your target audience. It provides a way to network with readers as well as other authors and industry contacts, to talk about your book, writing, and life in general in a fun and personable way that builds relationships, and to directly promote your book through both organic posts and paid advertising. Some people loathe social media, and if that’s you, don’t worry—you can still have a successful author career without it, but you will need to focus more resources on other marketing and book promotion services.

For the rest of us who either tolerate it or love it, it’s important to build a strong presence on at least one major social media platform (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube). You don’t need to be on all of them. Consistency is most important, so if you only have time and energy for one platform, give it your all. Choose the one(s) that you enjoy spending time on most and, preferably, where your audience also spends time.

Create engaging content and post regularly. You can also reach readers through paid advertising, and each platform provides the opportunity to highly target who sees your ads. Paid advertising requires some trial-and-error to discover what works for you and your books. You may want to invest in a webinar or course to learn the various methods and what works for books like yours.

Building Relationships With Booksellers, Libraries, and Reviewers

Just like no other business succeeds solely on its own, neither does a book or its author. You need other businesses and people to bring the book to market and to support its continued growth and success. In other words, build a professional industry network with booksellers, librarians, other authors, publishers, event hosts, publicists, cover designers, and vendors such as printers and swag makers. If you write non-fiction books, this is in addition to the network you have within your industry and career, which can also help you market your book.

• Connect with other authors early on and begin forming relationships. Most authors are friendly and love to help others—just be sure to reciprocate and pay it forward as you gain knowledge and experience.
• Reach out to booksellers and librarians and ask if you can bring them a copy of your book for them to read, or ask for a meeting to discuss your book and how you can help each other.
• Engage with book blogs and influencers, build rapport by commenting on and sharing their posts, and ask how you can help each other grow your audiences.
• Attend author conferences, reader and book conventions, and signings, making a point to get to know other attendees, including authors, readers, and industry representatives.

Email Marketing for Authors

Email marketing arguably may be the most important and best use of your book marketing resources, including time, energy, and money. Your email list is one of your most valuable assets. As long as you back up your list, it can’t be taken away from you—and no matter what happens to retailers or social media platforms, you will always have a way to communicate with your readers.

One of the best ways to build your list is through a lead or reader magnet—this is a free digital gift in exchange for the person providing their email address and giving you permission to send them promotional emails.

CraveBooks offers a fantastic way to start building your list through our Reader Giveaways. Readers sign up to enter the book giveaway, giving permission to share their email address with the participating authors.

Once you’ve started collecting email addresses, create engaging content to send on a consistent basis. This can be in the form of automated sequences combined with regular updates, such as monthly or weekly emails. Use your author newsletter as an opportunity to connect with readers and show them you’re a real person—this rapport will lead to them being more likely to buy your book, even pre-order it when available.

Paid Advertising Strategies

In recent years, paid advertising has become an increasingly important part of the book marketing strategy. You can purchase paid ads on Amazon, as well as on social media platforms (as discussed previously), but paid advertising is not limited to these pay-per-click options.

Book promotion sites, such as CraveBooks and its many partners, can promote your book to readers specifically looking for books like yours. Through email marketing and social media, these services can expand your reach to tens of thousands—even hundreds of thousands—more readers who might not otherwise learn of your book. And they don’t stop at a single promotion.

CraveBooks, for example, offers an array of book marketing services to authors, supporting you in increasing book sales and revenues.

While funds may be limited when you’re first starting out or establishing your platform, there is a paid advertising option for every budget. So don’t ignore this book marketing tactic when creating your book marketing plan.

Kickstarter

More and more authors are exploring the benefits of crowd-funding their book through sites such as Kickstarter. You can learn more on the Kickstarter site, as well as find many Facebook groups with authors experienced in running successful campaigns.

Direct Sales

Besides publishing your books on Amazon and other online bookstores, consider selling your books directly on your own website. Through services that deliver your ebook files, such as BookFunnel, or apps connected to your website, you’re not limited to selling only print books on your site. By selling your books direct, you eliminate the middleman and keep more profits. You can also add bonuses and free gifts to entice readers to buy directly from you. Be sure to collect email addresses, too. Your email list combined with the ability to purchase directly from you means you’re never at the complete mercy of the big corporate giants.

Guerilla Marketing Tactics

Besides the mainstream marketing tactics, consider other ideas, such as:

• Ask your local coffeeshop and other businesses relevant to your genre/topic to keep bookmarks at their checkout counter.
• Find coffeeshops, cafés, and local pubs that do open mic nights and ask if you can do a reading of an excerpt from your book. Be sure to pick out an exciting section and leave off at a point where listeners need to know more so they buy your book.
• Create branded merchandise—for yourself and others. Use an intriguing image or quote that inspires people to ask questions, then wear your brand when you’re out and about.
• Send a press release to your local newspapers (yes, they still exist!). Most publications have had to downsize their staff so much that they may run your press release exactly as you submit it—or they may send a reporter out to interview you. Even if their reach is small, you can clip the articles and share them on social media and your own website, giving you clout and credibility.
• Create a virtual event that’s fun and exciting, such as a game (think trivia night, book bingo, or an online scavenger hunt), and get your reader group and social network involved in spreading the word. Creative and valuable prizes always help to attract new potential readers—think out of the box for something desirable they can’t get elsewhere and won’t break your budget.
• Wrap your vehicle with a beautiful design from your book. If that’s too big and in-your-face for you, consider door magnets or vinyl decals. Then every time you’re driving around town as Mom or Dad’s Taxi or running errands, you’re advertising your book. Offer decals for your readers, too—they'll put them on their car windows, laptops, or ereaders, spreading the word for you.
• Become an “expert” in your genre or your topic and post valuable information on blogs, LinkedIn, and in Facebook groups, sharing what you’ve learned along the way. Give back and pay forward what you’ve picked up from others.
• Seek out social media influencers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube and propose a partnership for them to feature your book.

Guerilla marketing means thinking creatively for innovative ways to promote your book that go beyond the standard that everyone else is doing. So put your imagination to work and come up with more ideas to support your book marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Writing a book is a huge accomplishment that very few humans manage to achieve. “The End” doesn’t mark the end of your road, however, if you want to bring your book into the world. The publishing process is an endeavor of its own, and then you need a solid book marketing plan to spread the word to potential readers, grow your audience, and create a solid platform that will support an ongoing and successful author career.

Remember, marketing your book starts long before your release date. In fact, if you have any say in your launch date, set it out far enough to give you plenty of time to create your book marketing strategy, prepare a solid book launch plan, and begin executing those tasks that need to be done prior to launch. You want to create as much pre-launch buzz as possible.

Once your book has been released into the world, maintain a consistent marketing plan. Make the most of social media, paid advertising, and book promotion services such as CraveBooks. Brainstorm guerilla tactics that will make you and your book stand out from the crowd.