By African American Books Author Denise Turney

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

• 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.