How to Market Books: A Step-by-Step Guide
by Mary Kole | Former literary agent, now a freelance editor, writing teacher, and IP/story developer for major publishers and creators.
So you’ve written your book, revised it, made it available for sale, and now it’s time to figure out how to market books. That’s where marketing comes in. In this blog post, I’ll be exploring the best ways to market your book so that you can get your work into the hands of readers. Let’s dive in!
How to Market Books: Create a Website or Blog
The first step in learning how to market books is to create an online presence. This can be done by creating a website or blog for yourself, as well as setting up social media for writers accounts on sites such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. This will allow people to easily find information about you and your book. Additionally, having an online presence gives you more control over how people perceive and interact with your work. For example, if someone writes a negative review of your book on Goodreads or Amazon, you can choose not to feature it on your own website or blog, spotlighting the more promising blurbs instead. (Book reviews do call attention to themselves but are not necessarily the most important part of how to market books.)
How to Market Books: Start Developing an Audience
Once you have established an online presence for yourself and your work, the next step in how to market books is to start building a target audience who will be interested in reading and promoting it. There are several ways that you can do this—one way is by joining writing groups or forums related to your genre or topic and engaging with other writers who may be interested in reading and reviewing your book.
You can also use a social media platform for writers to connect with potential readers; post excerpts from the book or share interesting tidbits about the research process behind it. You could also consider using influencer marketing—partnering with influencers who are popular in the genre/topic of your book—so that they can help promote it to their followers. This often costs money, but if you do not have your own TikTok channel, for example, this could help you reach the BookTok audience, which is very active in terms of generating book sales. Lastly, don’t forget about traditional methods like public relations and word of mouth—these still remain effective ways of getting more eyes on the book!
How to Market Books: Plan Your Launch Strategy
Once you have built up some anticipation for the release of your book, the next step in how to market books is planning a book launch strategy. Decide when the ideal time would be for releasing the book (e.g., near major gift-giving holidays, especially if your book has a timeliness angle) so that it gets maximum exposure. Consider whether discounts would be beneficial, or running a book promotion on a website like BookBub, if you can get a placement, or doing some paid book advertising.
Develop promotional materials such as press releases and other printed materials like bookmarks. Create giveaways for readers, potentially with the help of a blog tour or influencer marketing campaign. All these steps should help make sure that when the day finally arrives for releasing the book, everything runs smoothly. This all takes planning, but that’s how to market books—with a lot of due diligence done ahead of time.
In conclusion, how to market books is no easy feat—but if done correctly, it can be immensely rewarding in terms of getting audience exposure and book sales. With enough planning and effort put into developing an online presence and audience base before the launch date arrives, you should see great success once readers begin getting their hands on copies of the work. The best part is, once you’ve done one or two rounds of how to market books, you will have some strategies tucked away for all of your future book launches.
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