A Guide to Marketing Your Book
Written by August Hawley
Now that your book is more than just a mess of different files on your computer, it might be tempting to say that your work here is done. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There’s still a pretty big fish to fry, and it’s pretty elusive at times: how do you tell people about your book?
Luckily, you already know how to write a strong description and book page, how to create an attractive cover, a smooth interior, and maybe even attracted some solid reviews. But how do you tell people who aren’t already scrolling through poetry books that they should look into yours?
Marketing Yourself
Having a social media presence is pretty important as an author. Be it Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or YouTube, people knowing about you is a great way to get to know your book. And the more, the merrier!
There are tips all over the web (and sprinkled throughout this book) on how to run your social media as an author, and you’ll hear the same things across the board: make sure your posts look nice, post consistently, use hashtags, promote posts, blah blah blah. But getting followers online is more a matter of finding your niche—your community—in the first place.
Instagram is a great way to do that, since pretty much everything is public. The poetry hashtags tend to be pretty clogged with inspirational quotes and micro poetry, but there are still ways to find people with similar writing and interests to yours. By looking through who your favourite accounts are following, you find who they’re inspired by and, thus, more similar work. See what they do that makes people interact with their accounts.
And make sure you interact, too! By commenting on others’ posts, sharing them on your story, and even sending out messages here and there saying you like their work, you’re building a foundation in a flourishing poetry community on Instagram, and probably making some friends.
Websites, Bios, and Links
Building an author website might seem sort of redundant if you’re already active on social media—it feels old-fashioned, especially if you only have one book to sell right now. But if you’ve ever published work in a literary magazine, won a contest, or have ever considered running a blog. A website can function as a page readers can visit that links to all your social media, your book(s), magazines or websites pieces of your work might be on, a link to a mailing list, and to tell them a bit about yourself. It’s common practice, sometimes even mandatory, for authors to have a website, but domains can be expensive and if you don’t sell merch or feel the need to have a mailing list, there are other options.
Websites like Linktr.ee, Carrd.co, and Linkin.bio all offer you a place to store your master list of links, and are usually free.
Which one you use should depend on what you plan to use them for, but we highly recommend that if you sell merch or have a mailing list that you have a website. And regardless of which one you use, this should be the link in your Instagram bio, even if it’s tempting to just link directly to your book.
When you are linking to your book, whether on an official website or not, you should make sure it’s accessible to multiple regions. An Amazon link will lead to whatever version of Amazon is in your country—which might not be where your reader is from. If this is the case, you can make a universal Amazon link or link to multiple different countries’ Amazon websites, but making a universal link is most likely easier.
Check out websites like Booklinker, where you paste the Amazon link for your country and their website gives you a one-size-fits-all link for your website. It might not seem important, but making the buying process easier for your readers is both important and kind.
Ads and Promotions
There are guides to running advertising campaigns everywhere, but where and how should you be running your campaigns? There are a couple of options that range in both expansiveness and price.
1. Promoted posts
Promoting a post you’ve already made on Facebook or Instagram is a great way to get more and newer viewership on your posts, and since the two platforms are run by the same company, it’s easier now than ever, not to mention there’s a range of pricing options. The biggest pro of this option is that it markets both your book and your Instagram/Facebook profile.
2. Ad Campaigns
Another option is to create a real ad campaign. These campaigns can be done with pretty much any social media platform, and you can make the ads yourself or hire someone to make them for you. There’s also a large variety of price and expansion options, and a bonus of going this direction is that the ads will be shown on a variety of websites.
3. Sponsorships
If you’re short on money, this is probably the best route to go, especially if you’ve been marketing yourself and have an online community. People in your online communities might be willing to work with you—whether that’s paying them to talk about your book on their social media or exchanging a free copy of the book for leaving a review.
Giveaways and Author Teams
Everyone loves a good giveaway, and these posts are likely to increase traffic on your overall profile, especially depending on the rules you set for the giveaway (typically, a giveaway requires that you follow, share the post, and tag someone in the comments, but those rules are at your discretion!), it can get a lot of people interested in your book.
An especially good way to do this is to team up with someone else in your community. By getting another or several more poets with published books together to run a group giveaway is going to expose your followers to them, their followers to you, and make people interested in your book. Giving away signed copies is especially enticing.
Sales and Discounts
Putting your book up for a discount and advertising it either on social media or with actual ads decreases profit per sale, but boosting sales in any way boosts reviews, which can help continue to boost sales even after the discount ends. Whether it’s bringing the actual price down for a period of time, offering the E-Book for free, a sale will most likely increase readership, especially for those who were already considering buying your book and needed a final push to get them there. This is something you can only do if you’re self-publishing the book, otherwise, you’ll have to talk to a publisher about putting the book on sale.
Running a sale on Amazon is simple: once your book is available for purchase, go to your Manager Inventory and click the product you want to put on sale. Then, go to the “offer” tab, add your sale price, and then add the sale’s start and end date.
Marketing Team
The final, and most expensive, way to market your book is to hire a professional book marketer, team, or company. This option leaves you with the least amount of work and the greatest chance for success, however, it also leaves you with the chance to get scammed.
When researching marketing options, make sure to get a second source on the names, companies, and teams that you come across. Unfortunately, anywhere there’s money to be made, there are people willing to lie in order to make it. Everything should be double-checked.
No matter how you market your book, make sure you’re encouraging readers to leave reviews because reviews are free marketing in themselves. And if the first attempt or campaign isn’t a success, don’t stress too much about it. There are tons of factors in every aspect of advertising and marketing, and just because it doesn’t work the first time doesn’t mean you’re a lost cause.
AUGUST HAWLEY is a trans man who has been writing poetry and fiction for most of his life. Author of poetry collection Writing My Obituary and winner of the West Michigan Showcase, he’s pursuing writing and editing, but spends most of his time with his friends and gossiping with his mom. He lives in Michigan with his large family and his cat, Nemo.