Category Archives: Book Marketing

Book marketing is an artform, all by itself. It starts with writing a great book, poetry or researched nonfiction material. Author Denise Turney has spent decades marketing books. At her blog, she shares what she has learned. Reading these blog articles could save you years of mistakes and hard lessons. Specific areas covered in the articles include scheduling podcast interviews, attending writing conferences, book fairs and major book festivals. You will also learn how to conduct effective interviews, whether you are interviewing and talking about your books on the radio, on a podcast station or on television. Those are a few benefits you can gain if you read the articles at this blog and keep up with the new articles author Denise Turney creates and shares here.

Successful Book Marketing: Knowing When to Shift

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Book marketing is not magic. Books don’t sell simply because you want them to. It doesn’t matter how passionate and sincere your intentions are. To sell your books, you have to take smart actions. You also have to recognize change. This article covers actions you could take to finally yield the sales you’ve been wanting and waiting for, perhaps for years. Knowing when to shift is a part of that success.

Book Marketing Keys – Consistency and Spotting Change

After publishing and marketing books for more than 20 years, I have discovered that consistency is key to successful book marketing. Another key is recognizing and adjusting to change in smart ways. Regardless of the marketing strategies that you employ, consistency and recognizing and adjusting to change play a role.

  • As a beginning step, to gain more sells, get clear about the number of books you want to sell each day, week, month and year. Write it down. Clarity is a huge part of success. You’ll see this more and more as you continue marketing.
  • Use a spreadsheet or another tracking system to build book marketing analytics. If you think this ties into clarity, you’re right. Details to add to the tracker include date, the number of books sold each day and the sales source (indie bookstore, Cushcity, Amazon, Mahogany Books, Harriet Bookstore, Barnes & Noble, etc.). Other details to include are the advertising and/or marketing resource used to gain these book sales. Book marketing resource examples are BookBub, Amazon Ads, AALBC ads, book festivals, speaking events and cultural fairs.
  • Identify book marketing resources you will try. This is where your spreadsheet increases in value. As you monitor your marketing results, you’ll notice which resources are working and which need change. For instance, you might need to adjust ad spend on one resource or you find that you need to run a marketing promo using a different resource on a different day of the week.

Pay Attention to Book Marketing Spend

Consider completing free online trainings that book marketing resources (e.g., Written Word, Reedsy, Amazon) offer. If you join discussion forums at these sites, you can gain valuable insights and tips about ways to get more from these marketing resources without increasing your spending, which brings up an important point.

Pay attention to how much you spend to meet your book sales goals. Strong book marketing resources have sales spend analytics embedded into their reports. By adding these analytics to your main spreadsheet, you can spot trends and times when you need to shift fairly quickly, maybe within minutes of reviewing the data.

Really pay attention to your spend versus book sales. To experience successful book marketing, you (or someone you hire) needs to accept facts. This is no time for magical thinking. As shared at the start of this article, it’s not enough to want to sell a lot of books. You have to take the right actions, and generally not just once, but again and again.

It’s Time to Change

Let marketing spend head in the wrong direction for too long and you could start to feel frustration, anger and even hopelessness. Yet, it doesn’t have to go this way. And even if you already are in a situation where you’ve spent more than you’ve earned, you can turn the tide. You can choose again, making smart decisions, setting yourself up for better outcomes.

Should your marketing analytics show that you’re spending $50 a day on marketing but only earning $20 a day in royalties from your book sales, accept what you see. Shift. Adjust your spend, focusing on marketing resources that yield the best return-on-investment (ROI).

Add more free marketing strategies to your sales plan. This includes speaking events, book signings and handing out postcards, bookmarks, brochures and flyers at events that attract your books’ target audience. Just don’t continue digging a hole; shift. It’s a part of the book sales process.

More Book Marketing Strategies That Work

Here are additional book marketing strategies that work. Choose three to four when starting out, noting which strategies yield greater gains for you.

  • Meet book buyers in person. Attending book festivals, writer conferences and cultural events are great ways to achieve this. To connect with book buyers face-to-face, you could also schedule speaking events. These are events where you are the keynote speaker. Looking for places to start speaking at? Colleges and universities, as well as social organizations, are places that seek speakers. In addition to teaching about a topic that your books are related to, you could read from your books or give a spoken word performance. Check online and offline event calendars, contacting organizers of events you’d like to speak at.
  • Sell and sign your books at the end of the events. To continue book marketing efforts, encourage attendees to sign-up to receive your newsletter.
  • Pass out bookmarks, flyers and brochures at events you attend. Add your author website URL to these marketing tools.
  • Send postcards and snail mail to local booksellers, asking if you can schedule in-store book signings. After you schedule an appearance, start telling your family, friends and book supporters about the event, encouraging them to attend. You’ll see that the more you help businesses, book buyers, organizations and other retailers get what they want, the more they may assist you.

Surprising Way to Sell More Books

This next book marketing strategy might surprise you, although it shouldn’t. However, it took me years to fully grasp the impact of this strategy.

To continue selling books, keep writing and publishing quality books. This may be the single most important step in gaining more book sales. Similar to how recording artists have to keep coming out with new music, to enjoy a rewarding book writing career, keep creating and publishing new quality books.

Want a long, rewarding writing career? You’ll have to shift here too. Write enough books and you’ll discover that each of your books might not be a hit with readers, regardless of how much you market them. Instead of moaning about a book that’s not well received, shift. Start writing in a different genre, about different characters or in a different style that readers prefer more.

Stay Motivated, Stay Focused

And learn to spot trends and industry changes. Learn to recognize when a marketing resource or strategy is no longer working. Depending on how long you’ve been writing and publishing books, you saw this change when e-books first came out. Amazon and large bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders (remember Borders?) created change too.

If you refused to shift even while facing these changes, you might have seen your book sales drop, if not stall. To steer free of this, check your spreadsheet analytics daily. Just reviewing your analytics daily can help you know when to shift. It’s also a great way to avoid slipping into magical thinking (believing that you’re going to sell a lot of books simply because you want to).

Stay motivated through the changes and shifts by reading books that inspire and encourage you. Also, listening to tapes that help keep you focused on your goals is a way to win.

20 Ways to Connect with Book Buyers & Sell More Books

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By Books Author and Novelists Denise Turney

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Book buyers are a robust team of people. They know what they like and they’re eager to jump into a good story. Check this out. In 2020 alone, print book sales in the United States surpassed 750 million units, according to Statista. Furthermore, Publishers Weekly reports that, during 2020, print book sales increased by 8.2%.1

Can You Spot A Good Thing

A lot of people know a good thing when they see it. And, little beats a very good story. In fact, it may be hard to find another entertainment form that costs so little and offers so much the way that books do.

Even better, Publisher Weekly goes on to say that, “With all major categories posting increases, unit sales of print books rose 8.2% in 2020 over 2019 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. For the year ended Jan. 2, 2021, units hit 750.9 million, up from 693.7 million the year before.”2

Proof of the deep engagement derived from good story rests in the numbers. Not only did Statista and Publisher’s Weekly see an uptick in print book sales in 2020, they also saw a rise in ebook sales over the same time period. During 2020, in the United States alone, 191 million ebooks were purchased.

Good News For The Book Industry

That’s good news for the book industry. Lockdowns and companies turning to remote work likely had impact on the rising print book sales. That shared, it may take a while longer to determine whether or not book buyers prefer to read their books in print while they are at home. Should this be the case, brick and mortar bookstores and online book retailers might notice a drop in print book sales as larger numbers of people return to the office.

Who knows? Book buyers just might prefer to engage with e-books while they are commuting on trains, subways or while they have their mobile device hooked to a speaker system in their car as they drive to and from work.

Of course, talented authors who are passionate about their work will continue to find ways to identify, locate and connect with people who are passionate about the stories that they write. That’s not all.

Authors who believe in the stories that they write, be those stories fiction or non-fiction, will endeavor to discover new ways to find and engage with new book readers. These are people who have never read a book before. Or they might be people who have never read a novel or the genre of book that the author writes in.

Yet, that doesn’t make finding eager readers and book buyers easy. On top of that, actions that authors, book publishers and book publicists could take to connect with book buyers keep changing. The good news is that many of those book marketing changes are expanding the industry.

Working With Media Outlets

In other words, traditional ways of marketing books still yield good results. For example, authors can still generate book sales if they promote and attend book signings, particularly book signings at large festival and literary events.

And press releases can also gain traction, depending on the topic that the release is tied to. For instance, if an author hooks his press release to a major holiday or current event, the press release could get picked up by a local, regional, national or international media outlet. Authors who work these press release pick-ups the right way could see those media pickups lead to more exposure through radio and television interviews.

Ways To Connect With Book Buyers

However, book marketing actions have expanded beyond traditional book marketing pathways. Below are more traditional as well as newer ways that authors could connect with book buyers:

  1. Build a literary newsletter – Refer to The Book Lover’s Haven to find an example of a literary newsletter. The Book Lover’s Haven is a free literary newsletter that I started designing more than 15 years ago.
  2. Conduct podcast interviews – You can do these from the comfort of your home. Check out podcast directories to find podcast that focus on subjects that you write about in your books.
  3. Interview on traditional offline radio stations.
  4. Reach out to bookstores and schedule in-person book signings.
  5. Apply to have your books carried in Range to see if retailers and military stores will carry your titles.
  6. Attend book festivals and sell your books at these events.
  7. Teach a virtual writing course and spotlight your books at the virtual event.
  8. Do literary newsletter book advertising swaps with other authors.

More Ways To Connect With Book Buyers

  • Start paid advertising at online retailers that run online book ads.
  • Blog and post a link to your books in blog articles that you write.
  • Push out book marketing messages using text messages.
  • Send customized book marketing postcards to members of your target audience.
  • Post flyers about book signings and other book marketing events that you attend.
  • Take our social media ads to promote events that you’re attending.
  • Design an author website.
  • Sit on author panels at virtual and in-person literary events like writer’s conferences.
  • Start a program on an offline radio or television station. Focus on literature and mention your books at the start and end of each show.
  • Run ads on literary podcasts and other podcasts that attract your book’s target audience.
  • Make your books available in two or more formats such as print, e-books and audiobooks.
  • Perform live shows like Facebook live, etc. that center around an event in your book.

Consistency And Persistence Pay Off

There are a myriad of ways that authors, publishers and book publicists can connect with book buyers. A key is to be persistent and consistent. Social media may have proved this well. After all, it’s not enough to reach out to people once or twice a year. Instead, authors benefit when they reach out to book buyers several times a week.

It also helps when authors share valuable content and connect with readers simply to say, “Hello!”

Build Strong Book Buyer Relationships

Therefore, to deepen connections with book buyers, authors should focus on building relationships. Fortunately, several of the aforementioned book marketing actions do help to build relationships. Another good point as it regards book marketing is that readers know when an author has focused on creating a quality story.

A well written story suggest that an author respects her book readers. Whether authors see a well-crafted story as a marketing tool or not, it still stands that a quality product may be the best marketing device there is. So, start from the beginning. Write a good story. Then, start taking smart actions to market your book, finding its readers and turning them into happy book buyers.

13 Easy Ways to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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You’re going to have to free yourself of magical thinking if you want to start selling more copies of your books. Why? Wishing that you’d sell more books won’t get you book sales. It’s not enough just to want to sell your books. You have to take smart actions. This might help. Think of selling books as another artform, of sorts, a measurable artform.

Furthermore, selling books is a mix of online and offline marketing and promotion. That is, unless you plan to only focus on selling books through a single retailer like Kobo, Apple Books or Amazon. If you want to go wide, you’ll want to list your books with a wide range of online and offline bookstores and retailers.

Work with Book Distributors to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

Another action that you’ll want to take is to list your books with a broad range of book distributors. Ingram, Baker and Taylor, Bella Distribution, Heritage Group Distribution, CBL Distribution, Casemate and Publishers Group West are among dozens of book distributors. If you’re new to the book world, distributors get your books to online and offline bookstores and other retailers.

Because of the role that they fill, book distributors are as close to a must as you may get if you want to go wide and start selling more copies of your books. Therefore, entering into a contract with legitimate book distributors is an early step in the book sales process. Want to keep yourself honest? Create a spreadsheet and track which book distributors you contact, including the date and form of outreach (email, telephone, snail mail, etc.) that you use to introduce your books to distributors. Follow-up with distributors you haven’t heard from.

Before you reach out to book distributors, create a marketing strategy. For example, your marketing strategy might highlight social media marketing efforts, including the number of social media followers your literary accounts have. Other items you could include are scheduled book signings, public speaking events, scheduled book club discussions and the numbers of books you’ve already sold.

Although these aren’t part of the 13 easy ways to be start selling more copies of your books, they are keys to early and ongoing book success. For starters, write a great story. If you’re writing nonfiction, do sufficient research and lay discoveries out in an easy-to-understand way.

Due Your Due Diligence

After all, it’s what’s inside the front and back flaps of your book that readers most want. So, nail the book writing part. To ensure that you pull this off, make sure that an experienced and talented book editor reads your manuscript before you publish it. Another tip is to run a spell and grammar check on your manuscript, even before you send it off to a skilled book editor. Working with an editor who is familiar with the type of book you wrote (mystery/suspense, romance, science fiction, etc.) can yields great results.

Next, create an engaging synopsis, book title and book cover. Don’t skimp on these actions. They will play a direct role in your book marketing efforts and your book sales. Here’s another tip that I want to share with you.

Years of book marketing has taught me the importance of researching book editors, book publicity specialists and book marketing services before a deal is inked. The last experience that you want to have is discovering that you just paid two or three times more than you needed to for editing, cover design or book marketing services. You also don’t want to ink a deal with a specialist who does shoddy work.

Hence, do your due diligence. You’ll thank yourself later.

Easy Ways to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

And, now for those 13 easy ways to start selling more copies of your books. Steps shared in this article deal with promoting a book that you want to market and sell online and offline.

  1. Create a website that you’re committed to updating at least weekly – Years ago, you could have simply designed an author website to sell books on and walked away, letting the website pull in book buyers. Those days may be over. To keep your author website relevant, update it no less than once a week. Ways that you could do this are to add a daily writing tip or fact about a character from one of your novels to the author website. Or, you could add a quote from one of your characters to your author website. Just commit to updating a data point at your website once a week or more. And, add strong meta data like targeted keywords to your website.
  2. Start a book blog – At this blog, you could write about book conferences, book festivals and book signings that you’ve recently attended or that you’re planning to attend. You could also share insights that are related to your latest book. Another step that you could take is to post feature interviews with other writers at your blog. As with your author website, the point is to keep the blog updated. In fact, you could link your blog to your author website and keep both updated with this one easy step. That’s what I do at chistell.com. This single, easy step pulls in thousands of potential book buyers a week at chistell.com.

Additional Ways to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

  1. Send postcards and direct mail to bookstore buyers – Even further, build relationships with bookstore buyers. These relationships can make it easier for you to get your new books into bookstores months from now. To keep these relationships healthy, consider sending book buyers (including library book buyers) holiday greetings.
  2. Reach out to military exchanges through organizations like RangeMe to see if you can sell your books at military stores.
  3. Teach a course at a local college. Ask if you can sell and sign your books at the end of the course.
  4. Schedule and conduct podcast and radio interviews – Yet don’t just conduct interviews. Make sure that you interview on podcasts and radio stations that pull in your book’s target audience.
  5. Design a literary newsletter – Building a newsletter can help you to develop your own mailing list. Consider adding a free newsletter subscription form to your author website. Items to include in your literary newsletter are diverse, ranging from feature author interviews to book reviews to upcoming book events to discounts to holiday messages. Sign up for The Book Lover’s Haven to get a feel for more of what you could do with a literary newsletter.
  6. Attend book events – It’s true. You could sell thousands of copies of your books online, without leaving home. However, it’s also true that getting outside and attending book events is a great way to introduce your books to new readers. In fact, you could sell dozens of books at book conferences, book fairs and festivals.

Even More Ways to Gain Book Sales

  1. Use Sign-Up Sheets – When you attend book events, bring sign-up sheets with you. Let people know what you’re using the sheets for. As an example, you could use a sign-up sheet to grow your literary newsletter subscriber list. You could also use a sign-up sheet to email in-person event attendees information about your books, including how to order copies of your e-books.
  2. Feature your books on book promotion websites. Again, do your due diligence before you pay for services at book promotion websites.
  3. Do newsletter cross-promotions with other authors whose books are in the same genre as your books.
  4. Newsletter book market services – Pay for newsletter book marketing services. Make sure that you work with newsletters that have a high open-rate. It may not do you much good to pay for an ad in a newsletter that boast 10,000 subscribers but only has a 3% open rate. Also, work with services that have tapped into your book’s target audience.
  5. Zone in on Social Media – Just 10 to 15 minutes a day on social media can increase your book sales. Test different social media sites to discover which sites generate the best return for your books. Also, pay attention to what days of the week and times of the day are best to post book marketing material. Examples of this material are book covers, book reviews and book quotes.

Amazon Ads and Selling Books

Other actions that you could take to start selling books are to add your book cover, book title and author website URL to your email signature line. Definitely ask family and friends to tell people they know about your books. Reaching out to school book buyers is another way that you could generate book sales.

If you’re promoting a book that sells on Amazon, consider taking out Amazon ads, namely sponsored product ads. You could also build an Amazon store to introduce your entire line of books to readers. But don’t just start Amazon ads. Budget for the ads. Study relevant keywords. Be patient during this process, as this isn’t a quick process. Take your time and find dozens of relevant keywords. You also might find success with relevant Amazon ad categories.

Stay Motivated

It could take one to three weeks to start seeing results from your ads. So, keep your daily spend low or no more than $5 a day when you start working with ads. Download and review monthly reports until you start to notice which keywords, categories and similar products are working to bring in book sales.

Above all, don’t be dreamy about this. In fact, don’t be dreamy about any part of the book marketing process. It’s work. There’s nothing magical about it. Before long, you’ll witness the link between your efforts and the results that you’re seeing. Should a step not yield good results, consider altering a part of the action or replacing the action (in-store book signings, discussion board link shares, etc.) with another action.

Keep at it. There are readers waiting to read great books!

11 Ways Authors Get More from Podcast Interviews

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Authors get more from podcast interviews by being intentional. Research helps a lot too.

If you’re an author who started publishing books before the 1990s, podcast interviews might be the last thing you think about when you consider ways to market your books. Admittedly, podcasts weren’t the rave before the 1990s, but can you believe it?

Podcasts go all the way back to the 1980s. Back then, the shows were called audio blogging.

Exploring the Power of Story

Think about it. Doesn’t all great development involve story? If you’re being intentional and working to heal from trauma, you know you have to revisit your trauma story. On the other hand, if you want to fulfill a dream, you do more than see yourself doing what you want.

To strengthen your motivation, you boost the goal by creating a story that’s directly linked to what you want. You see, it’s the story that attracts us. Doesn’t matter if you create and retell the story to yourself or if someone else shares a story with you.

Story is powerful. It digs up deep emotions in the storyteller and the story’s listeners. And it’s this that makes podcast interviews so appealing. So, as an author, when you get a chance to connect with a host and listeners on a podcast, make the most of it.

Linking Interviews and Great Storytelling

To get more from these interviews, share stories that stir deep emotion in the podcast host and listeners. In fact, this may be the single best act that you can take to engage podcast listeners. One way that you could find out that you’ve done this is when a podcast host keeps asking you questions, minutes after your show was scheduled to end.

That or the host might ask you to come back on the show for another interview. For sure, that’s a great end result. But, after you’ve finished the interviews as an author, what can you do to get more from podcast interviews?

As a start, share the link to your podcast interviews at your social media accounts. You could even use a free design tool like Canva, Snappa or a free Adobe to create a unique design that includes the name of the podcast that you interviewed on. Also, add your name, book title and website URL to the design.

11 Ways Authors Get More from Podcast Interviews

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Get creative and tag the design with a catchy slogan that links your books to the podcast name. Feeling good? Create three to five designs. Add a different design to your social media accounts each day. That gives you a minimum of five days with unique ways to share the word about your interviews. Talk about a winner.

Check out these 10 additional ways that book authors can get more from podcast interviews. See how many you may already be doing. Take advantage of these ideas you could use to expand your readership, all by getting more from your author podcast interviews.

  • This first step actually happens before your podcast interviews. Good news is that you can also use this step with radio interviews. And this first step is to spread the word about your interview before the interview occurs. Fortunately, there are many ways that you could do this. For instance, you could call family and friends and ask them to catch the show. Or you can forward a link to the podcast interview to friends and neighbors. Flyers, social media message designs and postcards are other tools that you could use to ask people to listen to your podcast interviews.

More Ways Authors Get More from Podcast Interviews

  • After podcast interviews end, add them to your author website. This shared, it’s a good idea to add a media page to your author website. Use this page to highlight all of the podcast interviews that you do.
  • Talk about podcast interviews you do while you’re at work. If you’re a full-time author, share details of the interviews with people in your community while you’re socializing.
  • Create a media sheet that features your best podcast interviews. To get more from podcast interviews, include this media sheet with ARCs to introduce your books to book clubs, book bloggers and bookstore book buyers.

Podcasts as Virtual Discussion Backgrounds

  • Similar to the media sheet, develop an interview sheet to share with other podcast hosts. This action could help you to get more from podcast interviews in the future. Another reason that this might prove helpful is that hosts will see that you continue to spread the word about podcasts you’ve interviewed on long after the interview ends. That, in turn, demonstrates that they could gain more leverage from interviewing you as you continue to tell others about their shows.
  • Post an image that you designed of the podcast interview on your website background. Furthermore, you could use the design as a social media background. For example, you could use the design on your Facebook author page.
  • Speaking of background designs, use a design tool to develop a Zoom background that spotlights your most recent podcast interviews. Always include your book author website URL on the background designs to get more from podcast interviews.

Share Great Stories to Get More from Podcast Interviews

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  • Write and send a press release that showcases your last interview. There are free press release distribution services around. As a tip, you could try a few of these sites and see what you gain from the press releases.
  • Finally, you can mention the last online interview that you’ve completed on the next upcoming podcast interview that you have. However, don’t talk about past interviews during current podcast interviews for too long. Simply mention the last interview that you did, making sure to tie it to the messaging that you’re covering during your current interview.

As a last tip, actually enjoy author interviews. Have fun. A good podcast host will make this easy. You might even find yourself laughing during the interviews. Also, as was shared at the top of this blog, to get more from podcast interviews, be sure to share great stories. You could even share great stories that highlight parts of your novels.

Repurpose Marketing Content to Attract Readers and Sell More Books

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Eager to save time as a book promoter? Repurpose the marketing content at your website. In addition to saving time, when you repurpose marketing content, you attract readers using at least two data forms. Learn how to turn blog articles and other content into videos, posters, postcards, interviews, quizzes and press releases to sell more books.

Mapping Out Your Online Book Marketing Plan to Sell More Books

Let’s look at what makes an online book marketing plan, particularly the process of scheduling marketing content development and distribution. During this review, keep your goal top of mind. Your aim is to sell more books.

The below schedule is a general scheduling example. As you focus on selling more books, you’ll add specific actions to your content schedule. Pay attention to how many of the below steps use content you’ve already created.

  • Monday – Rewrite five existing blog posts, adding SEO phrases into the posts. As a tip, type phrases related to your book’s focal areas into Google. Examples include science fiction games, romantic mystery for retirees and novels with the best travel destinations. See how many search results come up for the phrases. Scroll down the search results and check the “People also ask” section in Google. These could become new blog article titles or article headings for repurposed content.
  • Tuesday – Develop scripts for social media videos that cover a month of video production. Use re-written book descriptions to fill-out the video content. After you write the social media video scripts, write a description for each video. Plug two to three SEO phrases that surfaced during your Monday work.
  • Wednesday – Shoot a month of social media video content. You’ll be working with lighting, sound and background branding materials. For example, you might shoot videos in front of your company logo. Depending on how long the videos are, this could take four or more hours.

More Ways to Sell More Books

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  • Thursday – Start writing content for your next four weekly literary newsletters. Include a video in each newsletter. Also, add a feature interview in each newsletter. And incorporate coupons and product/service discounts into the literary newsletter. To make your newsletter robust, fill it with data, price discounts, part of a rewritten blog article, etc. that book lovers appreciate. Use crisp subject lines, the type of subject lines that stir emotion, to encourage newsletter opens and reads, a step that can help you sell more books.
  • Friday – Schedule social media marketing feeds. To save time, use an automated social media posts scheduler like Hootsuite, Vistaprint, Buffer, etc. While scheduling social media posts, add a mix of videos, quotes, information on upcoming events, feature interviews, newsletter releases, etc. To bring social media marketing posts alive, embed not-to-be-ignored pictures into the posts. Images and videos attract book lovers, helping you to sell more books.

That’s just a start. Keep reading to discover ways to maximize your online and offline marketing efforts without spending a lot of time.

How to Repurpose Existing Marketing Content

This is where repurposing your existing marketing content really comes into play. To sell more books without investing an hour or more a day into your marketing efforts:

  • Add quotes to images on your author website and distribute as flyers on social media. You’ve seen those posts on social media, the ones with flowers, a sunrise, a woman climbing a mountain, etc. that are topped with a motivational quote. This time, let the quote come from a blog post, press release or interview that already exist at your website.
  • Place existing book covers on drinking mugs and t-shirts and sell those at your author website. Another thing you could do to sell more books is to use this swag as giveaways.
  • Upload products designed with your book covers to Etsy, Pinterest, etc. to attract readers and sell more books. Make sure your author website URL is on each product.
  • Edit book marketing videos into short snippets. Upload the snippets to TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
  • Distribute existing marketing videos across a range of video platforms. For example, you could distribute your marketing videos to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook Live, iHeart Radio, Google, Apple, Spotify, etc.

Organic Ways to Repurpose Marketing Content and Sell More Books

  • Build marketing videos into mobile holiday catalogs, sharing the videos on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. As with other ways to repurpose material to sell more books, the most you’ll generally do is edit, cut and paste existing marketing material.
  • Use published blog articles to create free e-books. Add your author website URL to the bottom of each page of the e-book. Also, add a page that list all of your titles to the back of the e-book. You could sell more books by simply showcasing your titles to more readers.
  • Create bookmarks and branded calendars that include snippets from your published blog articles.
  • Develop speaking presentations and trade show brochures using material from your literary newsletters, press releases and book descriptions.

To keep content at your author website fresh, re-write 10 blog articles a month, starting with older blog posts. As with your other marketing efforts, be consistent. In addition to repurposing marketing content, create new videos and blog articles. It’s an effective way to attract new readers and build relationships with these readers which, in turn, helps to sell more books.

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Implementing Your Book Marketing Content Plan

Building out your online book marketing plan takes time. If you’re pressed for time, you could hire an experienced marketing writer to create content for you. And, of course, you can repurpose your existing content.

Stay on track with a marketing calendar. For instance, you could start with the daily schedule presented earlier in this blog post. Then, plug in article titles, SEO phrases, image quotes and video script topics. Also, add due dates, getting clear about when you’ll complete action items.

Keep going. And stay open. Be flexible. Take free online book marketing courses from people who actually sell hundreds of books a year. Over the course of a year, you’ll find areas in your marketing plan that you need to tweak. Take advantage of new technologies, saving time and making it easier for you to attract readers and sell more books.

How You Can Promote Books Without Spending Money

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Forget relying totally on paid book ads. Explore these ways to promote books without spending money.

First, let’s acknowledge what you have done. After all, book marketing is tireless work. It starts with writing a riveting novel or a hard hitting, informative non-fiction book. Kudos to you if you have knocked out this part of the book marketing process. Take time to celebrate. Then, roll up your sleeves and prepare to work, announcing your books to readers.

Taking the Book Publicist Route – This One Will Cost You

If you want to punt book marketing efforts to someone else, you could pay a marketing agency or publicist to do to that work for you. But taking that route will cost you. In fact, Writer’s Digest shares that the average book publicist rate is $100 an hour. Also, to get traction from a book publicist’s work, you may need to hire the publicist for three to four months prior to book publication and another three months post publication.

On average, you can expect to spend $5,000 to $10,000 for a book publicist. Take this path, and you’ll definitely want to vet a publicist or a marketing agency thoroughly. After all, you want to get your money’s worth from every book marketing effort that you invest in.

And, if you do pay for book marketing, check to see that the book publicist or marketing agency has deep experience marketing (and selling) books. For instance, check their references. Even more, check that they have influential media and book industry contacts. This helps them land you newspaper, magazine, radio and television interviews.

Free Ways to Promote Books Without Spending Money

Ensure they have gained 5,000 or more sales for other books that they’ve marketed. At the minimum, an effective marketer should have generated 1,000 book sales in a year. If not, they might not have the best skills. Before you sign a book marketing contract, speak with authors who have worked with the book publicist or book marketing agency you’re interested in inking a deal with. Do your homework.

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That’s a good first step if you choose to pay someone to promote your books. Just don’t miss out on free promotion tools. Are you ready? I’m going to share several ways to promote your books, marketing techniques that won’t cost you a cent.

Fortunately, you could knock out a few of the below steps over a few weekends. I didn’t add this one to the list because it’s not free. But you definitely want to have a sharp official author website. Media contacts will visit your website to learn more about you.

In fact, add your website URL to postcards, magnetic automobile stickers, your email signature and all printed material related to your books. Other steps include:

Marketing Tools to Promote Books Without Spending Money

  • Add a book blog to your official author website – You could use a CMS like WordPress to do this. However, if you do add a blog to your official author website, write and publish a new post to your blog weekly, if not more. Include SEO phrases in blog posts in a natural, easy-to-read way.
  • Schedule podcast interviews – Check directories like Interview Guest Directory (interviewguestsdirectory.com) to find podcast that interview authors for free. Schedule interviews with these podcasts. iTunes, Google Podcasts and Blog Talk Radio are other places that you can look for podcasts to interview on, letting listeners know that you have new books for sale.
  • Get on the radio – Similar to podcasts, reach out to radio stations that interview authors. As a tip, contact DJs who cover topics similar to the topic your book focuses on.
  • Use television – Share content from your nonfiction books with viewers at your local public broadcasting station. Also, reach out to local, regional and national television stations if your book has a holiday theme, relates to current events, etc.

More Tools You Can Use Without Spending Money

Take advantage of author newsletter book ad swaps – Exchange book ads with other authors. For example, you could advertise an author’s book in your newsletter and, in exchange, have that author advertise your book in her or his newsletter. Also:

  • Share book designs on social media – Use free book design services at places like BookBrush (bookbrush.com) and Canva to create designs to share on social media. Post about your books on social media to build your audience of potential book buyers.
  • Work with book directories – Add your book literary directories. This directory has free and paid listings (https://www.selfpublishingreview.com/2014/07/author-directory-sites-the-complete-list)
  • Start a literary video channel – Launch your own author video channel on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Akin to operating a book blog, update your video channel weekly.
  • Launch a literary newsletter – Tools like Constant Contact, MailChimp, Emma and Benchmark make it easy to create and distribute literary newsletters. While these tools aren’t free, they do cut down on the time it takes to create and distribute newsletters. Yet, you can also create a literary newsletter using Word or PowerPoint and distribute manually to your email list for free, but this takes work and more time.
  • HARO (helpareporter.com) – Help a Reporter Out (HARO) list websites and media outlets that are looking for people to interview for articles, etc. Some HARO contacts include books in their catalogs.
  • Search paid book marketing sites – Some paid book marketing sites offer free marketing services. You might have to look for them. For example, BookDoggy (bookdoggy.com) will feature your book in their newsletter and on their website for free. All you have to do is include a BookDoggy ad in your literary newsletter that has 3,000+ subscribers.

Stay Encouraged

Whether you’re marketing books to land on the New York Times bestseller list, Essence top selling books or Amazon bestsellers, you’ll have to invest time. The same applies if you only want to sell a few thousand copies of your book.

The point is to keep introducing your books to new readers. That’s not all. To increase your book sales, you’ll need to keep your book in front of readers who are already familiar with your work. This is when blogging, starting a podcast and creating a literary newsletter can really pay off.

Another way to grow your book sales without spending money is to write new books. In fact, authors with 12 or more books in their catalog tend to sell more books than authors with less than 8 published books. Stay encouraged. Keep advancing. Keep writing!

How to Launch New Books to Boost Book Sales

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By African American Books Author Denise Turney

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One of the easiest ways to boost book sales is to publish a new book. To yield good results, you need to launch new books successfully. Then, you need to work to sustain your efforts. If you want to keep sales coming, you have to keep marketing and promoting your titles. This applies whether you’re a self-publisher, hybrid publisher or publishing a new book through a small press or a traditional publishing company.

Prepping New Books to Launch

But first things first. After you write a book that hooks you, pass the manuscript to an editor. And don’t just focus on price when choosing an editor. Look for an editor who has deep experience editing the type of book you wrote. For instance, some editors work mainly with children’s books, while other editors focus on adult mystery novels.

If you’re seeking a way to save on editing costs, polish your book before you send it to an editor. As a tip, you could submit chapters of your manuscript to a professional writer’s critique group. Another way to tighten your manuscript before you send it to an editor is to ask beta readers to read the manuscript and offer you feedback.

Now, here comes the fun part. And, not just the fun part – but the time-consuming part as well. Are you grinning?

To boost book sales and launch new books successfully, you must consistently market and promote your books. It can’t be any book marketing effort. To succeed, you have to incorporate smart book marketing actions into your book sales plan.

Map Out Book Marketing Strategy to Boost Book Sales

The book industry is fiercely competitive. Yet, you can earn six-figures or more a year in the industry. Part of the work to boost book sales starts months before your book is published. So, map out how you are going to market you new book months before the book is published. To save time, you could create two spreadsheets in the same Excel workbook.

In one spreadsheet, list free book marketing tools you’ll use. Examples include social media platforms, free design tools like Canva and word-of-mouth. Before you start filling out the second spreadsheet, listing paid book marketing options, do some research. Find out which book marketing agencies and websites specialize in your book publishing genre.

Research Book Marketing Options to Boost Book Sales

Also, find out which book marketing companies showcase new books. Here are more points to consider during your research:

  • Does the firm market new books to read in print, audio and e-book format
  • How many followers does the firm have if book promotions are only on social media? (Check their social media platforms to see how engaged their followers are. As an example, look for comments, shares and how many of their posts get re-posted.)
  • Are the firm’s newsletter subscribers mainly other authors who have subscribed to their newsletter, people who may never buy another author’s books? Another stat to check has to do with newsletter subscriber engagement. To boost books sales, find out the open and click rates the newsletters have.
  • Is there a limit on the number of books a book marketing website spotlights in a daily or weekly newsletter? After all, if there are too many books in a newsletter and your book is listed midway or further down the newsletter, few people may read far enough down the newsletter to see your book.
  • What’s the cost to run a daily, weekly or monthly website literary ad? And how many impressions does a typical ad at the firm receive?

Also, find out the number of people in your book’s target audience the marketing firm reaches. This is important. Remember, book marketers can promise you the moon, stating that working with them could land your new book on a best seller list. Yet, a promise and an actual result aren’t always the same. So, do your research.

Schedule Book Marketing Initiatives

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After you finish researching free and paid book marketing options, create a schedule. Within this schedule, include the date you will start and end free and paid ads. For deeper impact, consider running ads on your backlist books too. In addition to running ads (free and/or paid), here are more ways to boost book sales after you launch a new book:

  • Take pre-orders for your new books
  • Work with an experienced website designer and build an official author website. Then, add a blog to the website. As a tip, update your blog with a new article at least once a week. And use relevant keywords in your blog articles to attract readers. Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that you can use to find keywords. To highlight your books, add your book covers to the top or side of your blog.
  • Take advantage of Amazon’s free marketing tools if you publish e-books and print on demand books through Amazon. For example, you could do a Kindle countdown deal or you could offer a KDP e-book for free for a week. If you do use Amazon book publishing tools, apply to have your new book become part of their marketing newsletters.
  • Create your own literary newsletter. Add feature interviews, book coupons, links to your new book releases, etc. to the newsletter.

More on Book Marketing Initiatives

  • Schedule online and offline radio interviews. Also, interview on podcasts that spotlight authors. To get more traction, consider interviewing on podcasts and radio stations that are looking for guests who cover topics that your book focuses on. For instance, if you wrote a novel about a character who has ADHD, you could interview on shows that focus on mental health, learning or brain function.
  • Attend virtual and in-person book conferences, cultural festivals and writer’s conferences. These are good places to meet new readers and boost book sales. Even more, these are good places to showcase your books. As a tip, if you do attend conferences and festivals, consider bringing free book excerpts. For example, you could bring 100 copies of a two-page excerpt and hand them out to people who stop by your booth. But don’t just hand out excerpts. Ask people who stop by your booth to sign up for your literary newsletter. In fact, you could bring a printed sign-up sheet so readers can add their name and email address to subscribe to your literary newsletter. (Keep a copy of the sign-up sheet in case someone says they never subscribed to your newsletter.)
  • Use tools like Canva and Book Brush to design book marketing flyers and social media posts to share at your website, on postcards and on social media platforms.

Manage Book Marketing Budgets While You Boost Book Sales

Keep an eye on your budget throughout the book marketing process. After all, you don’t want to spend so much money on book marketing that, even if you sell 1,000 books a month, you find yourself in a financial hole.

And, going forward, always do your research before you pay for book marketing. Also, follow-up to ensure that marketing actions you paid for actually occurred. One good way to achieve this is to ask marketers and promoters you run ads thru to email you links to the places where they ran your ad. Get ad stats too, stats that show how many people clicked on your ads and/or bought your books.

Looking for more book marketing support? Check out the below book.

Types of Content Marketing That Increases Book Sales

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By African American Books Author Denise Turney

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As an author, finding the right content marketing that increases book sales is a shortcut to literary success. By itself, this type of content keeps your name and your book titles in front of book buyers. This may sound easy enough as a writer. After all, writing is your bread and butter. But it’s not a slam dunk. On top of that, content marketing isn’t a one-time deal. It’s not like writing a bestselling book.

Scheduling Content Marketing That Increases Book Sales

In fact, to gain enough traction with content marketing that increases book sales, you need to publish new content weekly. You might get greater results if you publish content daily. Think about newspapers and how they keep fresh content in front of readers.

So, before considering the types of content marketing that can increase book sales, get clear about how often you’ll push out fresh material. Make it easy on yourself. Create a content marketing schedule. Items to include on the scheduler are:

  • Dates that you’ll publish book marketing content
  • Topic or content focus (book marketing tools, image metadata, simple video marketing techniques, etc.)
  • Key phrases built into the content
  • Links to relevant content at your website
  • Social media platforms that the content will be marketed on

Types of Content Marketing That Increases Book Sales

Building out your content marketing schedule helps to keep you on track. As you develop the schedule, you may realize that you need to bring on a freelance content marketer to create the content. In fact, this choice frees you up to write more books. But more about that later.

For now, let’s look at types of content marketing that increases book sales. The effectiveness of each type varies. Yet, each of these types of book marketing content could introduce you to new readers. To begin:

  • Blog content is a type of book marketing you can control. If you add a blog to your author website, you can increase your overall website traffic. Just be prepared to add new blog content each week, at the minimum.
  • Newsy book marketing content may be a good fit for marketing platforms like Outbrain, Newscred and Contentful. With these platforms, you can push book marketing content out to media and digital websites. Exercise financial discipline to avoid overspending.
  • Social media book marketing content is an effective way to connect with readers. And, you have options. There’s organic and paid social media marketing. As a tip, before launching into paid social media marketing, take free training courses offered by the social media platforms that you want to work with.

More Types of Book Marketing Content

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  • Email marketing still works. For example, you can introduce book buyers to your titles via digital postcards, coupons and direct email.
  • Simple video marketing is a winner. As an author, you could use simple video marketing to read excerpts from your books. Other options include sharing book marketing tips, your list of top 10 books and details on upcoming book festivals you’re attending.
  • Text messages are another option. As with other book marketing options, make sure you gain approval to send book buyers text messages before pursuing this option.
  • Digital newsletters work too. Not only can you launch your own literary newsletter, but you can also cross promote books in other author newsletters.
  • Offline book marketing content includes direct mail, print book catalogs, print postcards and flyers.

Link content marketing that increases book sales to your official author website. After all, this makes it easy for book buyers to keep up with what you’re doing. And it helps to build reader trust, not to mention grow your online and offline presence.

Working With a Freelance Content Marketer

As previously mentioned, you may find it beneficial to let a freelance content marketer write your book marketing content. Should you take this approach, research content marketing prices. For example, you might pay a freelancer 15 cents a word. Or you might pay a freelance content marketer by the article. Also, decide if you’ll include editing in the overall price that you’re willing to pay.

Another option that you could use is a web content agency. Take this path, and you could leave book marketing content scheduling, key phrase research and writing to the agency. As a tip, work with a book marketing agency that gives you access to a personal dashboard.

This way, you can log into your marketing account and review analytics. For instance, you could review how many clicks key phrases generate. You could also review the number of visitors each book marketing article gets. Also, pay attention to social media accounts that certain articles get better results on. For example, do your images perform better on Pinterest or on Twitter? Or do shorter articles about your books’ topics perform better on Facebook while longer articles perform better on LinkedIn?

Working with a Digital Content Agency

Some digital content agencies let you indicate if you want their platform to automatically post your content when it’s likely to gain the most views. You could do a split test and ask that some articles be published at specific days and times. For other articles, you could indicate that you want to take advantage of the platform’s automated posting dates and times.

See which works best. And don’t worry. Even while marketing bestselling books, it’s good to be flexible. After all, the types of content that help with marketing books today may not prove effective tomorrow. Furthermore, the best days and times to publish book marketing content may shift.

This brings up another point. Even if book marketing content works, helping you to gain more book sales, you’ll likely need to make changes. So, be flexible and resilient.

Stay Free of Magical Thinking with Content Marketing That Increases Book Sales

Accept what data shows you. Definitely avoid magical thinking. In other words, steer clear of thinking that just because you wrote a book or because the story is a winner that a book is going to become a bestseller. Also, staying away from magical thinking can help you to spot changes in your book marketing results.

Even more, not only can it allow you to spot book marketing changes, but it can also equip you with the courage to adjust to those changes. For instance, you might notice that the digital content agency that you’ve been using for two years is no longer generating book sales for you.

If you’re in the habit of treating everyone with respect, it should be easy to sit down and discuss these changes with the digital content agency. Who knows? They may have received similar feedback from other authors and are rolling out updates within days.

Flexibility and Persistence Can Really Pay Off

In addition to being flexible and staying free of magical thinking, be resilient and persistent. Soon, you’ll see that persistence is at the core of content marketing that increases book sales. You have to do what you say. Simply put, you have to be dependable.

Book buyers need to know they can read fresh book marketing content from you at certain times. Although you might not realize it, there could be hundreds or thousands of people reading your content. Some of these people may be hopeful book authors. Others may be avid book readers, people who just need to know a little more about you and your books before deciding to buy your titles.

So, be persistent. Keep trying new content marketing types. Every day, do something to grow your readership. There may be thousands of readers who will love reading your books, if only they knew about those stories.

How New Authors Gain Book Sales

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By Book Author Denise Turney

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Yes. New York Times bestselling books are often written by household name authors. Readers know what to expect from these authors. To readers, there may be less monetary and time risks involved with these titles. But that doesn’t mean that new authors can’t gain book sales. In fact, following are techniques that help new authors gain book sales.

Launching New Books

That’s good news. Unfortunately, simply writing a book, even a beautifully crafted story, isn’t always enough to gain book sales. Furthermore, publishing a book on a major platform like Amazon, Kobo or Barnes and Noble also is no guarantee that new authors will gain book sales, let alone enter the ranks of bestselling books.

Despite the genre, new authors could gain book sales if they publish books in January. To get more sales, the book genre is another factor to consider. For example, romance and self-help books may perform better when they launch in January. Children’s books and cookbooks may do well when published in December, and science fiction does well when published May thru August.

Getting to Top Selling Books

Yet, here’s the thing. During the end-of-year holiday season, authors of bestselling books are marketing and promoting their titles. That puts new authors in competition with household name authors which is why January launches yield results. In addition to launching new books at the start of the year, to move books for sale, new authors can:

  • Design catchy book covers using tools like Canva, Book Brush, Pic Monkey, 99Designs. Consider posting two to three book cover options on social media and asking people to vote on their favorite book cover. Another option is to share three book covers with family and friends and ask them to tell you which image they like best.
  • Also, write an attention-grabbing book description. It’s this overview that may determine whether readers simply flip a book over and put it back down or pick a book up and buy it.
  • In today’s digital book world, it’s important to add the right keywords to book overviews. Why? Keywords are what will help attract readers to new, classic and older books. In fact, keywords will impact search engines, Apple Books, Google Books, audio books and Amazon bestselling books.
  • And here’s another tip. If new authors aren’t gaining book sales, they can update their book description, trying different keywords within the description.

More Ways for New Authors to Achieve Top Selling Books Status

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Here are more ways for new authors to gain book sales. The first choice sounds easy. Yet, there are still authors who don’t have an official website.

  • Therefore, it’s important that new authors have an official website. When developing a website, consider using the author name as part of the website URL. It may not be a good idea to use a book title as part of a website URL if a new author plans to write more books.
  • To polish the story, let an experienced book editor look at the book. New authors and established authors are so close to their stories, it can be hard to spot mistakes in the writing. Even more, authors may overlook parts of a story that should be carved out. Another thing authors can miss that can hurt sales is an area of a story that could be stronger with dialogue or scene change.
  • Back to the official author website. Don’t just create a book author website. To get traction, add a blog to the author website. Add a new blog article that has relevant key phrases at least once a week. Here’s another tip. Website content management systems like WordPress allow authors to add a link to their book’s Amazon sales page.
  • Depending on the budget, new authors should consider trying paid ads. But watch the budget to avoid getting dreamy and overspending with minimal results.

Even More Ways for New Authors to Gain Book Sales

Places to test books for sale ads include Book Bub, Bargain Booksy, Cush City, AALBC, Facebook and Amazon sponsored ads. Here’s another tip as it regards ads. Run two ads to test which images and ad copy pull in more book sales.

  • Also, review book marketing analytics. This could keep new authors from entering states of magical thinking. After all, magical thinking can cause new authors to think that their new title will soon be among the Amazon bestselling books and New York Times bestselling books just because they wrote the book.
  • Create, publish and market book trailers.
  • New authors can also create their own Vimeo or YouTube Channel, offering writing and marketing tips.
  • Notwithstanding, the fact is selling enough books to see a title among the top selling books takes work. Which is why book marketing analytics aren’t always fun to review. But they offer insight into the types of book marketing techniques that are working and the techniques and strategies that need to be changed or stopped.

Pathway to Book Sales Online and Offline

Even more, podcast interviews, offline radio interviews and television interviews are effective ways for new authors to gain book sales. Other ways for new authors to gain book sales are to design and mail post cards using tools like Canva or VistaPrint. Thanks to the Internet, these postcards can be in print or digital.

Other options to announce books for sale include posting flyers on college and university bulletin boards. As a safeguard, authors should ensure they get approval from school administrators to post the flyers. And creating book newsletters is another way for new authors to gain book sales.

Definitely encourage family and friends to spread the word about the new books. This is not the time for authors to be shy. This raises another point. If new authors are assertive, there are a myriad of actions they can take to promote and market their books.

Keep the Momentum Going

For example, new authors can attend book festivals and cultural events that attract their book’s audience. Teaching college writing courses is another way to pull in more book sales. Additionally, there are book tours, book reviews and book swag to share with attendees at major events.

In closing, as the Internet and the world continue to change, new authors can develop innovative book marketing strategies. They can also take advantage of marketing apps and social media book marketing tools. To continue growing book sales, authors have to keep releasing new books. And, they have to keep introducing their new books and their backlist to book buyers and book readers.

Book Marketing Platforms that Work

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By Books Author Denise Turney

Book marketing is a long, ongoing process. If you want a sustainable career as a writer, you need to learn and start practicing smart marketing techniques. Fortunately, there are technology tools to help.

For starters, you can get real traction at the right book marketing platforms using two strategies. One approach requires more of your time. The other approach requires more money.

Types of Book Marketing Platforms

AALBC.com, Book Daily, Artist First and Good Reads are types of marketing platforms. So too are TED Talk, Mosaic, podcasts and social media.

Book clubs, television programs that focus on books, press release distribution services and bookstores are also types of marketing platforms. But it’s your book blog and author website that are your primary platforms.

Each platform that you work should point back to either your author website or your book order page. If your only book order page is at Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com, point platforms to your custom sales pages at those bookseller websites.

Getting Platform Results Is Not Free

That means that your social media profiles should include the link to either your author website or book order page. When you run ads through marketing agencies like Book Daily, add a link to your book order page in your profile.

If you have the time, schedule at least an hour a day to work book marketing platforms. The more time you invest at the platforms, the better. But don’t just posts. Find out who platform influencers are. Ask influencers questions, “like” what they share and follow them.

I’m a fan of social media posts schedulers like Buffer and Hootsuite. Just log into social media accounts and posts live once a day. You can get results with 5 to 10 minutes of work per social media platform.

Social Media and More Marketing Platforms

Pick two to three social media platforms to actively posts comments, ask questions and share motivational quotes on. See if your followers, shares, likes and overall engagement don’t go up.

Build your marketing platforms by:

  • Blogging once a week or more (add keywords into your blog posts)
  • Sending direct mail to book lovers
  • Creating and distributing a weekly or a monthly book newsletter
  • Scheduling at least one YouTube or Vimeo video posts a week
  • Guest posting on high traffic websites like Huffington Post, Forbes and Entrepreneur. Include a link to your author website in your bio.
  • Attending large book club events and cultural festivals. Pass out free bookmarks or book excerpts. Stamp your author website URL on all handouts.

Take two to three of the above steps at least once a week. If you’re short on time, pay marketing agencies to do your heavy lifting. Start small with spending. Avoid giving into smooth sales pitches and getting pulled into expensive marketing deals.

Measure Book Marketing Results

Make sure that you see measurable results, and not just an increase in traffic. Why is this important? Computer bots can send loads of traffic your way, lending the appearance that tons of people are truly interested in your book, when that’s not the case.

Don’t assume that just because your profile, website URL or book cover is at book marketing platforms that you’re pulling in the right traffic. An increase in book sales is a sure sign that book marketing platforms are working.

Requests for book excerpts, author interviews, more social media followers and increased reader engagement are other signs that book marketing platforms are yielding good results. If you receive more comments that focus on your book or its topics at your book blog after launching a book marketing campaign, it could be an additional indicator that platforms you’re on are pulling in your target audience.