Marketing
5 Effective Ways to Promote Your New Book - Part 1
April 26, 2022 Sabrina K. Marshall
You’ve accomplished the amazing feat of writing your book. All those endless days of racking the creative side of your brain for compelling storylines, endless nights reading and re-reading your manuscript, and multiple rounds of professional editing and proofreading services, to finally reach that moment of truth… publishing. But, the hard work doesn’t stop there, especially as a self-published writer.
Publishing your book alone doesn’t mean that people are going to know about it. In order to drive awareness and sales, you need to execute an effective marketing plan. In this blog, I will share the following 5 budget friendly marketing tactics to promote your book.
- Create an Author Website
- Purchase Ads
- Develop Amazon A+ Content
- Utilize Your Own Network
- Grow Your Social Media
1. Create an Author Website
Make sure you have a dedicated author website (and I don’t mean Facebook). An author website will be a useful marketing channel to promote you as an author, your books, merchandise, and other aspects that are related to your personal brand. This will be your central hub for promotions, while at the same time offering fans and media an opportunity to reach you. It’s the foundation of your marketing plan.
How to do it:
- Create a domain name - Consider your full author name, like SabrinaKMarshall.com, or something that's memorable and relevant to your target audience
- Buy your domain name from a site such as Wix or GoDaddy
- Get a Web Hosting account - Consider hosting companies like Wix, GoDaddy, or Squarespace. These are beginner friendly options that can help you navigate your way to get your page up and running in no time.
Design
The objective of the site is to provide detailed information about your book, increase book discoverability and sales, and to share your bio and contact information. Authors sometimes make themselves the focal point, which is fine, but as a newbie author, visitors will go to your site because they want to learn more about your books, so in my opinion the book should be the primary focus of your website.
Remember:
- Include social media icons linking to your social media pages
- Offer your visitors a reason to come back, for instance blogs or upcoming events
- Be careful not to make the website too image heavy, which could take the page longer to load causing people to leave the site too early
- Apply the fundamentals of search engine optimization (SEO), using keywords. This will help you rank better with Google.
Here are some examples of author websites:
2. Develop Amazon A+ content
According to Amazon, utilizing A+ Content may result in more visitors to your product page and higher conversion rates (that means more sales). If you’re a seller on KDP direct, then you have access to Amazon A+ Content, which is free. This tool allows sellers the opportunity to communicate additional product information that is unique and compelling to the potential buyer, nudging them a bit further toward their decision to purchase your book.
With Amazon A+ Content you’re able to add elements such as video, high-definition graphics, images, and text that’s informative and will help lead to a sale. Having this content conveys quality for your book and helps with better engagement. For books or products that have A+ Content, it can be found about midway down the product detail page, just before the customer questions and product reviews.
How to do it:
To create A+ Content for your book, go to the Marketing section of your KDP dashboard, choose your marketplace, manage A+ Content, and start creating content using the templates. There are a ton of tutorials on how to do this, such as this one. You can also read the A+ Guidelines to help get you started. It might seem a bit daunting at first, but take the time to work through the templates to create a quality A+ design to help your book stand out. It will be worth it! Here's an example for the Amazon A+ Content of the book Onyx and The Blue Mountain Mistery.
Here are a few more examples
3. Paid Advertising
If there’s anything you should do, it’s this!
Purchasing ad spots attracts traffic to your book. You’d first need to identify which platform would be the most effective to reach your target audience that would best lead to a sale. There are a variety of platforms to consider such as Amazon, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If done right, either platform can provide measurable and immediate results toward boosting the visibility of your book or product, as well as gain new customers in a shorter amount of time vs organic (non-paid) efforts. However, if done incorrectly this could cost you more money than it’s worth. Just remember to do your research, especially if you’re new to this, and be patient.
Amazon Ads
If your book is available on Amazon, I would suggest using Amazon Ads first. The advantage here is that your potential buyer is already inside the marketplace, which means they're just one click away from adding your book to their cart and checking out.
The fewer clicks a customer has to make in order to purchase your book, the better.
Amazon offers a few different options:
- Sponsored Products Ads - It shows up toward the bottom of the page, after the “Also Bought” section, and it also shows up in searches after entering a book’s title in the Kindle store. You’ll notice the difference with the word “Sponsored” on the image. Here’s an example of the sponsored products that showed up when I visited the Amazon page for Onyx and the Blue Mountain Mistery.
- Sponsored Brands Ads - This works well if you have multiple products to sell. These ads are well positioned at the top of searches, and include an image, which can be your author photo, headline, and your books if you have a boxset.
- Lock Screen Ads - These ads show up directly on the home screen and screensavers of reader's Kindle devices.
Of the three options, consider Sponsored Product Ads, which allows you to maximize your reach to new audiences while increasing the chance for the discovery of your books. Here you can customize your ad by targeting relevant categories or products on Amazon that are similar to your book. You set the daily budget and suggested bid, and you only pay when someone clicks on the ad. Keep in mind the ad takes time to “warm up” or set before it will start getting clicks, which could take a few weeks to really start working. Patience is of the utmost importance here. Again, if you’re new to this, you really want to take the time to understand how this works.
I found this YouTuber Royalty Wizard Amazon KDP to be helpful in explaining the basics.
Google Ads
This is the most popular form of paid advertising. Like Amazon Ads, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and you choose your daily budget. This platform will help you reach people who are searching Google daily... millions! Based on your keywords, it will show your ads to potential customers who have relevant interests, maximizing your chances for clicks.
The platform offers multiple types of targeting through various formats. Some to consider are:
Text Ads - words only based ads. Be specific, compelling, and relevant when writing your ad.
Image Ads - uses a jpeg or png to display your book in a visual way
Video Ads - provides a more engaging experience with potential customers
Google is a juggernaut when it comes to paid advertising, and has proven to be an effective tool for promoting books.
Social Media Ads
Facebook, the social media powerhouse who acquired Instagram in 2012, is also an effective means of promoting your book with easy to set up ads that are customizable and budget friendly. Using the Facebook Ads Manager allows you to manage both your Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads in one place. You can customize the ad’s target audience based on age, location, or interests, further improving the opportunity for reaching potential customers.
If you want to use one social media platform at a time, I would suggest starting with Instagram. With just a few selections, your Instagram Ad can be up and running to boost an existing post or story to active users. It’s a straightforward approach with effective results that could garner more followers, visits to your author website, and book sales.
Facebook allows you to show various types of ads such as video or still images that can be shown on Instagram and Facebook’s display network. It offers a greater deal of flexibility of what you can do between the two sites.
4. Utilize Your Existing Network
This seems like a no-brainer, but many people skip this step of reaching out to friends and family. Announce your book launch and provide the details of where to purchase it and when (if it's on pre-order). Give a brief overview of the book, maybe what you went through to write it, and how you feel about. It’s okay to brag about yourself, that’s what social media is for, right? Below is an example of a LinkedIn post announcing a book launch.
Use all your resources to announce your new book including emailing your contacts with customized messages about the launch, and posting on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube to reach your network of friends, family, acquaintances, and followers. Wait a few weeks then post again! Yes, be that annoying person that does this, but know your limit as it relates to the platform. For instance, I would suggest no more than 1-2 posts on LinkedIn, which is typically used for colleagues or business partners, and I would suggest at least weekly posts on Instagram and Facebook to break through the clutter.
Ask your family, friends, and acquaintances to spread the word.
5. Grow Your Social Media
When it comes to social media, we’ve already applied this marketing channel in #3 Purchasing Ads and #4 Utilizing Your Existing Network. There’s even more you can do with this channel. Growing your social media accounts consist of a carefully thought out strategy that includes regularly posting new content that is engaging and relevant to your book and to your overall brand. Grow your base of followers by creating useful content, Like and Comment on other people’s posts, and participate in conversations on relevant topics. The more you engage with others, the more likely you’ll get organic followers and more visibility to your book, which could mean more sales. It’s a longer route to get there, but it all adds up.
Know what type of content each social media platform prefers. For instance, these days, Instagram seems to prefer videos and Reels over static images.
Be Sure to Measure Your Results
The only way to know if all these marketing efforts are working is to keep track of which marketing channel is driving results. At the very least, determine if you’re getting new followers on social media, more traffic to your website, and more book sales from your ads.
Both organic and paid efforts will work for you toward creating a successful and effective marketing strategy to promote your book. When that marketing magic kicks in you should see the results of more sales and higher search rankings. You just have to keep at it, and be diligent. Most importantly, know when it's time to make adjustments to your marketing plan and ad campaigns.
This all means absolutely nothing if you’re not regularly measuring your results!
