Lessons Learned From Working With Authors on Book Marketing

You’ve completed your book, edited it, and designed the cover. Now, you’re ready to promote . The good news? The Internet has made it easier than ever to market your book and get your name out there. The bad news? The Internet is a big place, and it’s hard to know exactly where to start. The following online promotion strategies can help.

1. Optimize your website.

Setting up a website for yourself, as an author, and/or for your book is a basic step in online promotions. Make sure you optimize it though. One way to do so is buying your domain name, which should be your pen name or book title. You should also pay for web hosting. When choosing a host, go for a service provider that makes it easy to add relevant metadata in your site. Those metadata should contain keywords that potential readers use when looking for books in their favorite genre.

So many authors I work with have a website but don’t go deep enough on the technical end of setting up the website with title tags, html structure, and meta tags that allow the pages to get indexed on Google and gain organic traffic from Google.

All other marketing you do will just provide more signals to Google that your website is an “authority” and help grow traffic and build your email lists (which can also be  set up on your site). If you haven’t built an email list before, this guide might be helpful.

2. Utilize Author Groups.

Never underestimate the benefits of having a network of writing and publishing professionals. These people can help you improve your craft and turn it into a profitable career. 

You can create and expand your network by joining online groups for authors and publishers. In these groups, you can discover upcoming releases, share blog ideas and learn other marketing tactics from your fellows.

Be selective about which Facebook group for writers you join and which members you connect with. Choose online communities that offer quality advice. As for members, find those you can collaborate with, especially in book promotions. In that way, both parties benefit from the endeavor.

Perhaps you are already part of many author groups. However, the real trick to making these groups work for marketing is via partnerships. Ask in the group if other authors are willing to partner with you on giveaways or bundles, especially authors in the same or adjacent genres. Then, using your combined email lists and social media connections, you can drive huge reach and sales by coming together and creating a bundle of your books. We’ve done this with great success for a number of authors we’ve worked with.

It’s important that authors taking part have some built-in audience already, otherwise you won’t be promoting to anybody. It works best with people with similar audiences.

3. Gain exposure through book giveaways.

Goodreads Giveaways is a great starting point to dabble into book giveaways if you’re just starting out or don’t want to do a lot of heavy lifting. Goodreads attracts millions of views each month. When you sponsor a giveaway, your book and free offer are advertised on the platform and marketing emails. This has great reaching potential.

The best way to do a giveaway is via social media. This requires an existing social media audience who likes your books. If you have an audience, you can ask people to “compete” for entries by tagging friends, inviting friends to participate, and more. This can help you take an audience of 2k and multiply it to reach 10k. We’ve seen even bigger results with some campaigns.

Don’t just leave everything to the site though. Promote your giveaway on your social media pages, too. Feature it on your website or blog. If you have an account on Wattpad, Tumblr or Commaful, you can announce it there, too. Place posters at nearby libraries and cafés as well. 

The more creative you get with giveaways, the better the results.

4. Get into guest blogging and blog tours. 

Guest blogging and blog tours are pretty commonly done and most authors I work with know how to do them already.

The best tip I can share is to start small and niche if you’re not well-known yet. For example, Wired for Youth is an easy target if you’re writing a nonfiction book. They clearly have traffic and they’re still updating the blog, but they’re still small and would be an easy target to land an interview or post on. Start small, build up momentum, and then once you have some reputation, use early interviews as examples to pitch larger blogs. For best results, you should pitch on blogs or sites that have a sizable audience. I’ve had authors start with tiny blogs and end up in places like the Huffington Post.

Guest blogs and blog tours do two main things for you. First, they help build credibility for you when people Google your name and your book. The posts will show up and prove you’re legit. Because you are targeting specific niche blogs, you will also build a good targeted audience from the posts as well.

It’s a great way to build some reputation and start a flywheel effect for yourself when you do it early on.

5. Run a book launch party.

Book launches are events designed to kick off your book release, hold your readers captive, and ultimately give them a good feeling about your work. They’re also a great opportunity to get your friends and family invested in your creation. More importantly, they help you sell copies.

People think these are a gimmick and often skip the launch party. If done right, the launch party is actually huge for morale and makes it feel real for authors. Don’t do it right when the book launches. The trick is to do it when you have some local followers already.

This is fun, gets fans involved and builds community.

6. Utilize Twitter To Connect With Readers

Twitter is a great way to build an audience and build your network. There are a few ways to utilize Twitter, depending on the genre you’re targeting.

To come up with Tweet ideas, study popular influencers in your genre. If you’re writing YA, for example, study popular YA writers. You can search popular hashtags used within YA to find these influencers, like #YALit or #YoungAdult.

Studying popular writers in the niche will inform you of what the audience wants to see. Learn from the best and try to emulate the tweets that work well, but with your own ideas and your own unique spin.

If you already have an engaged audience on Twitter, you should start seeing immediate results. If you don’t have an audience yet, your initial tweets will be going into a void. The easiest way to build an initial audience is to regularly engage with influencers in your genre. Vary who you reply to, you don’t want to just engage with the top influencers, but also up-and-coming influencers. By adding value in these tweets, you’ll begin to get noticed by their audience and thus build your own. This doesn’t happen overnight.

Consistency is the key to Twitter.

7. Start collecting leads for your next book. 

Running a marketing campaign has two stages: before and after release. If you’re working on a series, you can treat your current promotional period as an opportunity to market your current release as well as the following one. 

After your first novel is published, plan a book tour, a Facebook ad campaign, a sponsored story, or a video about the theme of your book. If you’ve written a social issue book, speak out on your social media profiles about topics relevant to your book. 

Given the current limitations of what is available to attend in-person due to the pandemic, consider hosting online events about your book. These may include utilizing Zoom, or other live platforms within social media. Another option could be to request a guest spot on a current online event from one of your contacts, or reaching out to another event organizer in your genre.

Depending on the restrictions in your location, consider attending live events about your book. These may include reading at a bookstore, hosting a film screening, making an in-person talk at schools or having a conversation night at a local bar.

This is going to be a long process. Thus, you should stay visible and open to anything you can do for your book once it’s published.

Online promotion strategies work effectively when they’re collaborative. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your loved ones, fellow writers and industry professionals for help. 

Hayley Zelda is a writer and marketer at heart. She's written on all the major writing platforms and worked with a number of self-published authors on marketing books to the YA audience.