Writing a book takes time and a systematic presentation of ideas, facts, and information (depending on the genre of the book). The success of a book gets measured by how many sales it starts getting after its launch. If after spending your time and effort in writing a book, you find little to no sales, then it is obvious to feel discouraged. To avoid such a situation, it is best that you pay attention to the active marketing of your book so that the sales start rolling as soon as the book gets launched. These book marketing ideas will serve you the most significant ways through which you can promote your book to the masses. So sit down calmly, remove any other thoughts going through your mind and start paying close attention to the ideas listed below:
1) Professional Website Will Catalyze Sales
With many free applications to create a website nowadays, many book writers still do not pay attention to creating a professional profile online through a website. When you build a website and display your profile, your personal identity is enhanced. You can also sell your book directly from your website by integrating a plugin for handling sales. You can direct traffic from other online marketing methods to your website for getting the sale process completed. With a website, you will have more freedom to convey things and interact with your site visitors. So create a website first before doing online marketing of your book.
2) Send Out Press Releases to Spread the Word
Any experienced marketer can give out many reasons for integrating press releases as an effective advertising method for your book. One solid reason is that the content that goes into the press release will get the attention of hundreds to thousands of people within just a few days. Reputation building of your personal brand and book due to publication in news sites online is yet another good reason. Based on the choice of your press release distribution service, you can get the results accordingly. So make use of premium distribution services only.
3) Create a Social Media Strategy for Sales
On social media, you can adopt both short-term and long-term marketing strategies. The short-term marketing strategy is to join relevant groups for promotion, use social media ads, pay big group owners and influencers for promotion. The long-term strategy will require building a large following on your social media profiles by methods like utilizing hashtags, creating and posting valuable content regularly, interacting with other people, etc. Once you have a sizeable following on social media, any book you publish can be promoted very quickly to thousands of your followers on social media.
4) Use Google Ads for Promoting Your Book
Depending on the genre of your book, you can run both search and display ad campaigns through Google ads. To run search ads, you can select keywords based on your genre, for example, you can select keywords like “fiction books” if your book genre is fiction. If you don’t find running ads your cup of tea, you can outsource it to a digital marketing agency for better implementation of ad campaigns.
5) Make Productive Use of LinkedIn
By creating a LinkedIn profile, you can connect with other book writers and can collaborate with them to use their network to get your book promoted. Depending on the genre of your book, you can connect with the known names in the respective genre to get their aid in promoting your book.
6) Get Book Promoted Through Influencers
Find the social media influencers who have built a following in a niche that closely matches your book genre. Agree on a promotion deal with them to get your book promoted through them. With the trust level these influencers enjoy from their followers, you can see surprising results from this book promotion strategy.
7) Make Initial Efforts to Build Reviews
A sizeable percentage of people will look for online reviews of your book before buying it. If there are no reviews, they might make the decision to abandon their purchase. So get some reviews out online by giving a few free copies of your book followed by asking for reviews in exchange for a free copy.
8) Guest Writing on Niche-Relevant Sites
Depending upon what type of book you have written (fiction, thriller, bio, science, marketing, etc), identify popular sites in the same niche and pitch requests for guest posts, either free or paid. As guest posts on sites allow including your bio at the end of the article, you can leave a link to your book at the end of your guest posts and can thus get targeted traffic to your book. The more guest posts you are able to contribute on high-traffic and relevant sites, the more traffic you can direct to your book through such guest posts.
9) Make Use of Amazon and Amazon Ads
Amazon needs no introduction as it has become the largest eCommerce platform in the world. Listing your book on Amazon can bring you regular sales consistently provided your book doesn’t get lost in the crowd of thousands of other books on the Amazon platform. It is important that you get a few initial sales and reviews on Amazon to start getting more sales organically. For this to happen, promote your book through Amazon ads to generate a few starting sales and reviews.
10) Free Distribution of Mini-Version of the Book
Select a small part of your book, convert it into an ebook and get this ebook distributed on many book and PDF-sharing platforms. People who come across your book on such platforms will find information on buying the entire book from specific portals mentioned in your ebook and this process will get you more book sales.
11) Give and Take Niche Interviews
Give interviews related to your book niche to known influencers in your niche and also take interviews of famous (or semi-famous) personalities related to your niche. Upload the video and audio versions of such interviews on Youtube and podcast sites respectively. As many people search for the name of influencers and popular people on search engines, Youtube, and podcast sites, these interviews containing promotion of your book will generate more sales of your book.
12) Reach Out to Niche Youtube Channels
Identify Youtube channels in your niche with a high number of subscribers, reach out to them and ask for marketing opportunities. Pay them some money to put a video review of your book and this will lead you to more sales from the videos posted by big channel owners of your niche.
13) Promote Your Book Using Bookbub
Bookbub has a user base of over 10 million people. When your book gets selected for promotion by Bookbub, it will get a tremendous promotion because of the huge base of Bookbub readers. If you haven’t heard of Bookbub earlier, type “Bookbub review” in Google and you will find many insights on this site.
14) Solo Ads and Big Lists Marketing
If you type “solo ads service” in Google, you will find many sites where people in different niches offer promotions to their email lists for a certain pre-decided fee. As these people have big email lists, you can very easily get your book promoted to many people through email marketing done by these solo ad providers. Make sure to ascertain that the niche of the solo ad provider closely matches your book niche to get good results.
15) Use a Network of Other Semi-popular Authors
Many semi-popular authors have a good following on their social media profiles and they are more flexible in promoting other authors. You can connect with them and can leverage their recommendation (of your book) to grow the sales of your book.
16) Contests Held Well Yield Good Results
Contests have remained popular on social media sites. With the help of various applications, you can successfully organize and track contests on social media. If the rewards are attractive to people, you will get your book promoted through such contests to thousands of people pretty soon on social media.
17) Show Up at Book Festivals
You can make good use of book festivals to promote your book to a targeted audience attending such events. To drive more sales through such festivals, you can offer discount coupons to the attendees of such festivals. You can also send a representative to such book festivals if you cannot participate due to some or other reason. With a basic Google search, you can easily find upcoming book festivals in your state and country.
18) Get More Customers with Other Book Reviews
Many people search for book reviews of old and new books online. If you start reviewing books in your niche through articles made on your site, you will get many people to these review posts whom you can also promote your own book. The more review-type articles you write, the more traffic you will get from whom you can promote your book.
19) Take the Help of Affiliates to Market Your Book
Open an affiliate program on your site and offer commissions to people who bring new sales. With so many affiliate plugins and applications, it is very easy to run an affiliate program nowadays.
20) Podcast Ads and Shoutouts
Podcast ads are less known and hence more economical. You can run your ads on podcasts matching your genre to make your book known to more people. You can also tie up with big podcast names from your niche to get them to announce your book through their podcasts.
21) Featured Interviews in Newspapers
Many newspapers do paid interviews of upcoming celebrities, authors, athletes, etc. You can approach newspapers to explore the chances of getting your interview published using which you can easily get your book promoted to a wide audience along with building your personal brand.
22) Get Sales from Goodreads
Goodreads is a mega site for book lovers with millions of readers. You can interact with a big reader base in many ways on Goodreads. Goodreads also gives paid advertising options that you can utilize to promote your book to a target audience.
23) Promote on Reddit
Though most subreddits have a strong policy against self-promotion, you can still do subtle promotion of your book by creatively asking for questions and reviews related to your book. As subreddits have an active and targeted user base, you can get many sales if you choose good subreddits along with clever marketing.
24) Common Offline Promotion Strategy Still Works
While it is true that the share of online marketing is rising in all sectors, offline marketing still holds the potential to drive a sizeable chunk of sales on its own. The prime reason for the significance of offline marketing despite high costs and low targeting is that any product, service, business, or brand promoted offline is looked up to as more credible. Publishing ads in newspapers/magazines, sponsoring events, speaking at conferences, etc are some of the common methods that you can try out for marketing your book.
Use these book marketing ideas and see your book sales climbing up. If you want to thank us for this wonderful article, thank us by sharing this article on your social media profile. To give any suggestions or to discuss any doubts, the comment section is waiting for you.
