Marketing
Marketing includes everything you do to promote your book, from the summary and review quotes on your cover to your author website, Amazon book detail page, and social media presence. It also includes advertising and giving away free copies for review.
These pages will focus on all of the above, except for social media, which is a topic big enough to warrant its own site. If you want to promote your work on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or other social media, take a look at some of the following resources:
- The Author Marketing Experts blog
- Ingram has some tips for getting started.
Keep in mind that social media promotion requires hours of weekly commitment, and in some cases, strong technical knowledge and an understand of how to work with (or around) ever-shifting ad rules and guidelines.
If you’re not up for this kind of commitment, consider hiring a promotional firm to manage your campaigns.
When Marketing Starts
Your marketing starts as soon as you choose the topic or genre for your book. Once you’ve chosen that, you’ve chosen your audience. You should be building your marketing strategy as you write, not as an afterthought when your book is complete.
Consider the following questions as you write, do research, and keep notes.
- Who is my audience? Write a description. You will be appealing to these people later when you try to sell your book, so you should know who they are.
- Where do they spend time online? Compile a list and try to become active in those communities, whether they’re dedicated sites, groups on Facebook or Quora or LinkedIn, subreddits, etc.
- Which books in your category are successful? You can find out on Amazon. Note the authors and titles, because you’ll be targeting ads against them later on Amazon, Facebook, or other platforms. Note what the covers look like, because your cover will have to tell readers at a glance that your title fits into this category. Note the book summaries and how they are promoted. What do they offer to the reader? Your summary (and your bio, particularly if you’re writing non-fiction) should convey the same sense of value or interest to the same audience.
If you take a break from your writing now and then to compile this information, you won’t be so overwhelmed when it’s time to start actively marketing.