There is no doubt that in this digital age, mastering the art of marketing is essential if you want to promote your books as an author. However, one factor that puts a significant strain on authors is marketing. That’s why today we are going to discuss in detail what book marketing is and some important factors to consider for a successful marketing campaign.
Primarily, marketing a book involves communicating with readers and explaining to them why they should buy it by providing an easy process to do so. Surely it doesn’t sound so terrible if you put it that way? But the devil is always in the details, like everything else.
And if you want to be sure that you are well aware of the fundamental of marketing, this blog is for you. So, here’s how to spend your dollar on marketing your book.
Understand Your Target Market
Of course, writing is your passion, but by making your book available for sale, you are also making it a product. While the writing itself may be as creative as you desire, if you want to reach your audience, you will also need to pay attention to the business perspectives of your book.
To that end, you should be certain that you clearly understand before you even begin what type of book you are willing to write and, most importantly, who will read it. Everything about your marketing strategies will be influenced by the answers to these two questions.
So, let’s start by discussing how to make sure you are familiar with your preferred genres.
Research Book Genres
Browse Amazon for some time as a reader. Explore what books are most popular in the categories you are interested in. For example, what characteristics do they share—not just in terms of content but also in terms of their titles, book covers, and synopses—and what have they avoided? Would you be able to obtain more visibility by writing in a specialized genre as opposed to competing with the greatest bestsellers?
Additionally, if you are writing nonfiction, be sure to obtain an idea of the titles you will be competing with and the content they offer. What are their perspectives, and how specific are they? Are they workbooks or self-help manuals? How are the books arranged? Make sure to note every observation you make so you can go back to them later.
Research Book Readers
When you have a general idea of what you want to write about, it’s time to concentrate on the target audience for those genres. Think about the characteristics of a typical reader: their income level, their reading habits, and what other hobbies do they share.
By doing this, you can create a fictitious character in your mind to whom you can refer when making all of your future marketing decisions. Then, anytime you decide to attempt anything new, consider how you could best connect with that market segment. After all, the best marketing plan is targeted; if you try to promote your book to everyone, you can get lost in the middle of nowhere!
Identify And Choose The Correct Target Audience For Your Book Marketing Campaign
Knowing the characteristics of your target audience can help you create a product that meets or, even better, surpasses their expectations. And the first step in promoting a book is, of course…
Create A Book Appeals To Your Target Audience
Recall the recent market study you conducted. Now is the time to put it to use. Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, every genre and category will have its own guidelines for what works best for marketing and what people want. Check your study notes from earlier and see if you have followed the best-selling authors in your category in terms of storyline, writing tone, structure, story arcs, character development, and content quality.
Now is the moment to fill in any gaps, if there are any. A developmental editor with experience in your genre will be able to evaluate your marketability and point you back in the correct direction if you are ever unsure of whether your book is on the best path.
Focus On The Book Cover
Let’s face it; people do indeed judge a book by its cover. As a result, your book’s cover is among the most important elements of your marketing strategy, as it will be seen everywhere, including Amazon search results and advertisements. Moreover, an eye-catching cover is not easy to create; it must be appealing, readable at small fonts, and accurately reflect the type of book. Every genre has its own cover standards, and it’s simple to let readers know that your book will satisfy their needs by mimicking the style of the bestselling titles in terms of overall design trends, fonts, and colors.
Even if that’s a lot to handle, you don’t have to do everything by yourself. You can work with a qualified designer to create a unique book cover for your upcoming book. At Writers Clique, we provide specialized book cover design packages to satisfy your needs with the help of a professional team that has devoted years to honing their skills and researching the literary industry.
And don’t forget about the interior of your book! You are set to go if you are familiar with the industry standards for book interior design. If not, you can get in touch with us to have our team of editors professionally edit and format your manuscript.
Establish A Solid Social Media Presence
You need to be up-to-date to succeed in this digital age. So, establish a solid online presence to gain the recognition and visibility you are craving for. Here are some ideas to help you get started:
Create An Author Website
Create your own author website as the first step in positioning yourself for success. This will serve as the main hub for all your activities, enabling you to simply point visitors toward all of your books, mailing list, social media pages, blogs, and other resources. It’s important to have a simple, user-friendly design as the goal is to make it simple for visitors to discover your books. And keep it updated! When authors publish new books, they usually forget to update their websites, which leads to outdated book listings and disconnects your readers.
Create A Mailing List
The value of a mailing list cannot be emphasized enough. Even in today’s social media-dominated world, mailing lists remain the best technique to expand and connect with your followers. However, failing to understand how to utilize them properly will only cost you reduced sales. So, begin working on developing your mailing list from the start.
Offer Giveaways
The challenge, of course, is getting people to join the mailing list once you have it. This is why giveaways are pretty helpful. You give something for free to new subscribers as a giveaway. You can offer anything from a short story, a workbook, or your entire book, but it must always relate to the books you are trying to sell. This enables new readers to evaluate the kind of content you are providing to your existing audience, along with the dedication and hard work you put into your work. The best approach to expand a mailing list is with giveaways, so have one prepared as soon as you start asking for sign-ups!
Build Your Presence On Amazon
A dominant force in the publishing industry is Amazon. Even if you want to sell globally and establish your presence across several stores, Amazon will still account for the majority of your sales. When you master its use and get to the appropriate level of visibility, Amazon will even take away some of your marketing chores by automatically recommending your books to customers who are interested in your genre. Interested? The following ideas will help you make the most of your Amazon marketing potential.
Create Your Book’s Page On Amazon
Your Amazon sales plan must start with a solid book page since that is where readers will decide whether or not to proceed and purchase your book. You must optimize your page to ensure that you truly get their attention. This involves starting with a brief book description that will draw readers in with an intriguing concept, a compelling conflict, or a beloved character; or, for nonfiction, by showcasing your knowledge or the topics your book will address.
To entirely focus on your target audience, you must also pay close attention to your categories and keywords. For example, it is important to find categories and keywords that accurately describe your book while also falling into the zone where they are neither too popular to be ignored by readers nor too obscure to be overshadowed by all the New York Times bestsellers. After all, if you attract the kind of readers who are already looking for what you have written, you will find it much simpler to encourage them to buy your book.
Go For KDP Select
Whether or not authors want to participate in the Amazon KDP Select program is an important decision that all authors must make. Self-published authors can simply participate in Kindle Unlimited and can offer discounts with KDP Select. However, this requires a 90-day exclusivity period with Amazon, which doesn’t matter much as it is still a significant marketing opportunity that should be explored thoroughly even if you don’t sign up for it.
Create A Personalized Amazon Author Page
Optimizing Amazon Author Central Page holds significant importance. After all, as you would be generating a lot of traffic to your book page, you can also grab part of that attention for yourself as an author.
Get Pre-Orders In Place For A Successful Launch
Did you know that a book’s success is usually assessed during the first month of publication? You must promote far before the release date to ensure a solid start. Furthermore, because you are already marketing your book, why not capitalize on the early interest and convert it into sales?
Pre-orders allow you to increase your sales rank before you even start. Additionally, it will enable you to tweak your categories, book description, and keywords before the book launch so that you can figure out precisely what works. All of this puts your book in a much better position to get the start and success it deserves.
Gather Book Reviews
By this time, you have a product in the shape of a book that meets the needs of the literary market, and you have created channels for people to buy your book and get in touch with you. Although creating a buzz about your book is great, don’t assume you can now sit back and relax. This is the time when you put in all your efforts to gain the visibility and recognition you truly deserve.
Connect With Other Writers
Your biggest allies are also the first individuals you should start contacting. These people won’t be your rivals; instead, they will frequently turn out to be your best allies. Since they are familiar with the literary industry, they can provide support and motivation in addition to developing into reliable business partners. So, engage in conversations on social media and in person at conferences and events; you never know what type of writing-related buddies, critique groups, or other connections you will develop.
Start Gathering Reviews As Soon As Possible
No matter how wonderful a book is, it will never become a bestseller if it has few or no reviews. However, early reviews are essential to your book’s success. In order to do this, you need to concentrate on two things: getting early copies into readers’ hands and encouraging that group of readers to post reviews on your Amazon book page.
Your email list would be essential in both scenarios. Ask your readers if they would be interested in receiving an advanced reader copy, and ask them to give you an honest review when it is published. Similarly, when your book has been published, remind your readers once more of the ability they have to contribute to its success by posting a brief review on Amazon.
Experiment New Things
There are a ton of strategies to promote your book. Keep an open mind and be flexible when it comes to marketing. Experiment with several strategies; retain and toss what doesn’t work. If you ever feel like it isn’t your cup of tea, look for a professional book marketing agency to undertake this job on your behalf.
Learn The Best Book Marketing Strategies
The days of publishing a book on Amazon, sitting back, and witnessing the sales pouring in without engaging in marketing are long gone. Thankfully, writers have a wide range of promotional alternatives at their disposal, but you must become familiar with them in order to know which ones are effective and which ones are not.
Utilize Amazon And Facebook Marketing
Learning and implementing Amazon and Facebook marketing holds significant importance in this digital age. When customers are browsing, Amazon ads can be shown on the product pages of other books as well as in the search results. When used properly, they can significantly increase your sales as they are an effective method to connect with readers who are already considering purchasing books.
Facebook ads are displayed only on Facebook. But they can be utilized to directly sell your book to your readers without sharing a chunk of your revenue with third-party platforms. Moreover, they are also an effective technique to promote your giveaways and attract new subscribers. Alternatively, you can test different market segments with a variety of ads to discover which ones perform the best for your books.
Communicate With Your Audience For Success
Once your readership becomes strong, you should capitalize on them. Being approachable and accessible to your readers will go a long way toward generating the kind of buzz that will motivate them to recommend your book to others.
Get Involved With Your Audience
The methods that will work best for you will depend on where you have built the majority of your readership. There are countless ways to interact with your fans. For example, are you mostly active on Facebook? Create a closed Facebook group and invite your followers to join. The most important thing is to provide them chances to communicate with each other as well as with you. If your readers experience a sense of community and connection, they will eagerly share their experiences with others.
Create A Street Squad
Even your most devoted supporters might want to join your street squad. A street squad is a group of readers who offer early suggestions, write honest reviews of your books, and generally work to spread the word about you and your books. They are among your most important resources as an author; take care of them, and you may even count on their support in the future.
Hire A Professional Book Marketing Agency
Don’t assume you can relax and take it easy just because you have experienced some early success. Success breeds success, but only if you put in the effort. A professional book marketing agency stays up-to-date with emerging marketing strategies and doesn’t get scared while trying new things regularly.
To optimize and expand your efforts, though, there are a few more strategies you should concentrate on in addition to simply being well-informed.
Go For Writing A Series Instead Of A Single Volume
If you write a series, the first book of your series can bring your readers back to look for the second or third volumes. However, it takes approximately the same marketing efforts to drive sales of a standalone book as it does for the first book in a series.
This implies that you should think to consider turning that one book into a series or perhaps an extended universe if you want to leverage the power of your marketing fully. For example, suppose if you sell only one book at $3.99, you will only make $2.79 after Amazon takes their part. However, if you manage to capture a reader’s attention and they decide to buy all five volumes in your series, you have now made $13.96. If you multiply that by 1,000 readers, the cost rises to roughly $14,000. A standalone, sold to 1,000 readers, with the same level of marketing, will only net you less than $3,000.
So, one of the simplest methods to expand your efforts is to create a series, which allows you to streamline your marketing plan and free up more time to produce other books. Additionally, the more books you produce, the more money you can make from selling those.
Final Thoughts
So, keep up the good job, and if everything goes according to plan, you could even discover that you are too successful and have too much marketing work on your plate, which is actually not a horrible thing to have at all if you think about it! However, if that’s the situation, you can easily outsource a portion of your job to a professional book marketing agency. Marketing agencies can help you develop ideas for how to grow your book sales and outline the measures you need to follow to get there.
A professional book marketing agency will help you create a louder message to better market yourself and your book while also having you and your books published in more prominent media venues to help spread the word. There is no reason to believe you won’t be able to achieve your goals if you put in the necessary effort and have the appropriate experts on your side.
