Your book is beautiful. It’s well-written, you’ve studied all the top trends in your genre, and your book cover is on point. But it’s not selling. Now what? How can you boost book sales?

Just because you have a good product, you still need to actively work to reach your readers. Readers want to read your book — now you just have to help them find it! Below are our top tips and tricks to taking your sales to the next level.

Collaborate with Other Authors

You can collaborate with authors in your genre by joining anthologies or shared words. Generally speaking, there are two types of collaborations: anthologies and shared worlds. 

Anthology collaborations involve all the authors submitting a story into one complete collaboration. Be sure to check in with the team leader in the collaboration to make sure you understand the details of the arrangement, such as royalty shares and when and if the rights to your work will be reverted back to you. 

Alternatively, authors can do shared world collaborations. These usually involve authors writing in one shared world (for example, in a paranormal romance, each book might be a different wolf shifter from the same pack). Each author will then publish the book from their own KDP account. In this scenario, your rights and royalties are your own and the books benefit from joint promotions.

Set Up Individual and Group Giveaways

Giveaways are a great way to get new eyes on your work. You can give away a freebie (or a reader magnet) or host a contest where the winner receives a relevant prize, such as a signed paperback copy of your book, an Audible code, or exclusive content. 

You can set up and/or join pre-existing group giveaways with other authors. These giveaways will usually be set up with books in similar genres, tropes, or readership (such as a contest “available for readers in Kindle Unlimited”). 

You can join group giveaways BookFunnel or StoryOrigin, or you can set up giveaways on your own via sites like KingSumo or Rafflecopter

Do Newsletter Swaps With Authors in Your Genre

You can swap for free with various Facebook Groups. You can also join sites like BookClicker or StoryOrigin. BookFunnel also has a new feature

An author’s newsletter list is the most direct form of communication between author and reader. One great way to grow your readership is by piggy-backing on other authors’ readers via newsletter swaps. In short, you send their book to our newsletter subscribers and they’ll send your book to their subscribers. Everyone wins! 

You can also join paid sites (often for a monthly fee) to interact with authors for solo features or mentions. Some popular sites are:

BookClicker

StoryOrigin

BookFunnel (this is a NEW service for them)

You can also swap with authors for free by connecting on various Facebook Groups.

Book Professional Paid Promotions

Professional paid promos are designed to maximize your book’s reach by sending it out to their pool of thousands of engaged readers. You can use paid promotions to boost a launch or increase your sales to books that have gone stagnant in your backlist.

At Publishing Profits we have a range of promotional services, check out our services page for more info.

Note that most of these sites are dedicated to certain genres or price points (ex: books discounted at $0.99 or for free), so you may want to consider pricing your books lower to join them. It may sound counterintuitive to lower your price to increase your sales, but this can work to get long-term readers who will then devour your (full-priced) backlist books, and stick around for new releases.

What’s the Deal With BookBub?

BookBub is such a popular and powerful tool, we’ve given it its own section! Here are the main features on BookBub right now: 

BookBub Featured Deals – Long considered the “goldmine” of promotions, featured deals are still generally considered to be worth their weight in gold, even if their relevance has dipped over the past couple of years. However, BookBub Featured Deals can be hard to book, since they tend to look for books with the following requirements: 

  • Wide books (not in Kindle Unlimited)
  • At least 50+ reviews over 4 stars on Amazon
  • At least 100 pages in length

There are exceptions to these rules, but unless your book meets those requirements, it can be hard to land a deal. Keep submitting!

BookBub Ads – If you’re good at setting up ads, these can be worth your time. Always be sure to A/B test your ads and continue to tweak them and measure results to see what works. 

BookBub Followers – An important thing on BookBub to note is that the more followers you have on BookBub, the higher your visibility is. If you have 1,000 followers, you’re eligible for a BookBub pre-order alert, which goes out to all your BookBub Followers. 
Protip: You can get more followers by adding ?follow=true to the end of your profile URL when you link it in various places (your newsletter, etc.). Anyone who clicks your profile will automatically start following you on BookBub.

Conclusion: Don’t Be Afraid to Take Risks

Lastly, the world of book marketing is ever-changing. It’s important to stay on top of the curve. What are other authors doing that you can try? Marketing success is going to look different for everyone, and the only way you’ll find what works for you is to try it, measure the results (important!), and see if it significantly boost book sales. 

For example, many authors swear by TikTok. It might seem like a foreign concept, but don’t be afraid to give new social media avenues a try–you never know where you might find your audience!

Go forth and boost book sales!

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