Being an author is indeed a rewarding yet challenging career. It is a satisfying achievement when you’ve finally accomplished writing a book. However, the task doesn’t stop there. Even if you have finalized your book and are ready for printing and sales, you’ll have to do the most stressful part — book marketing.

The World of Book Marketing

If you are a new author or are publishing your first book, chances are, you’re working with a small publisher, which means that the marketing budget isn’t that much. So even if you have a small marketing team working on some promotions, you may have to market your books through your efforts as well.

As a new author, you may have little to no knowledge about book marketing. When you hear about book marketing, you may even be thinking about morning show interviews, full-page magazine ads, TV commercials to announce your book launch. No matter how excellent your book is, it wouldn’t get the attention and appreciation it deserves without proper marketing.

Before discussing how you can market your book, we must understand your goals, budget, and market. These are essential factors in marketing. There is no need to worry because helpful questions could give you an idea about book promotion.

Here are some pre-book marketing questions you need to know before promoting your book:

1. Who is Your Target Market?

While you can try to market your book to everyone, it is best to focus on the people who matter the most. This way, you are putting your marketing efforts to those who are likely to buy your book. Based on the kind of book you wrote, ask yourself, “Who will want to read it?” Answering questions will help you identify the people you would want to focus on.

You can also observe the authors or books that are similar to yours. Check out the demographics of their average reader. Take notice of their standard information such as their income level, shared interests, age bracket, gender – is it appealing to men, women, both, or the LGBTQ+ community?

2. Is Your Book The Right Product For Your Market?

As an author, you may need to ensure that some qualities need to be suitable for your target market. These qualities you need to match are:

• Tone and style 
• Story arcs and structure 
• Character types 
• Popular tropes 

Information Type and Density

It would help if you built a remarkable impact on your audience. Thus, make your book cover catchy and unique in the best way that you can. The instances may be where you may even need to redesign your book cover to ensure that your book’s marketability is good.

3. Where Can You Best Reach Your Target Market?

Depending on your target market’s demographics, there are many ways you can reach them. For example, if your target market is pre-teens to teenagers, the best medium maybe social media, especially Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok. On the other hand, if your target market is old adults, you may use print advertising, email marketing, Google advertising, and social media advertising.

Five Easy Ways to Market Your Books

Once you have the answers to the above questions, marketing your book should now be more manageable. Here are five easy ways you can market your books.

1.) Start By Creating a Good Brand

This way is one crucial step for writers. Potential readers will want to know more about you once you get the chance to catch their interest in reading your work. Thus, it is essential to cultivate a brand persona to help you build a relationship with your audience. In that sense, you are already creating an impact through good branding.

2.) Create a Mailing List

Connecting with readers on email who are interested is one great way to market a book too. So, you have to ensure convenience for all signup forms for a newsletter that you’ll put on your blog and website. It is best to use a newsletter list to inform readers about a new blog post, book promotions, recent media coverage, or the next public appearance. Maintaining an email list will secure the sales of your current and even future books to sell. Here, authors can develop a real relationship with email subscribers, and there’s a possibility to turn them into paying customers.

3.) Post Videos

Posting video content can build a personal connection with the target audience. Uploading videos of authors talking about their books could hook up the audience’s trust and generate the feeling of familiarity. Note that videos are valuable tools to educate potential buyers about a particular product, just like books. This marketing tool will help increase a consumer’s understanding of the product or services.

4.) Create a Website

Having a website is a must because it is where authors can establish the brand persona. The website will be the author’s home online. People will indeed look for a website to do background checking and learn more about the author. Of course, the website must contain important information like the author’s bio, photos, excerpts from the book, links where visitors could purchase books, and the author’s social media links.

5.) Build Awareness Through Facebook Marketing

If there is an existing Facebook account already, the next thing to do is create a business page. Also, keep in mind that there is also a need to spend money to market books. The good news is, Facebook works with any budget. Spending as low as $5 a day to promote a book could already reach a large group of people.

Final Takeaway

There’s no need to worry about book marketing in this digital age. Everything is accessible online, and there are many options to choose from when it comes to marketing. Moreover, having a proper marketing plan will surely help authors sell more of their books. Hence, marketers would have to leverage social media platforms since people are into using them nowadays.

It is not impossible to achieve more extensive sales by building engagement using different social media accounts for promotion. Therefore, it will be a sweet taste of success for authors who gave their all to come up with sound output to see that their books impact the marketplace.

It is important to have a good and appealing book cover when you market your book to the public. Check After Books in Order: Book Covers with 3 Easy Steps | Publishing Profits for some reference in doing some book covers.