16 Actionable Book Marketing Tips for Self-Published Authors

You’ve typed that final “the end”, taken a photo of it and posted on social media, had a sip of wine to celebrate your latest accomplishment, and started musing about whether critics will dub you the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

Your book is finally finished and now your work here is done, right? Not if you’re just starting out as a self-published author.

The fact is that writing a book is only a small part of being a self-published author. After all, there’s no use in writing the best book out there if no one’s going to know about it or read it other than your friends and relatives.

That being said, you need to make sure you (or your book launch team) get the most out of book marketing. To make your life easier, I’ve created a list of 16 book marketing tips, divided into 4 different phases (before writing a book, writing a book, pre-launch, and post-launch), to help you sell more books.

16 Book Marketing Tips to Help Market Your Book

Before writing a book

1. Research the current book market

Check out which titles your potential readership is enjoying these days and how well your competitors are doing. See what sells and what doesn’t. This is particularly important if you’re writing for profits.

The easiest way to check the pulse of the existing book market in order to validate your book idea is by browsing the existing Amazon book listings. Also, you should try being there where your potential readers are – consider Reddit or book-related Facebook groups.

Speaking of Facebook groups, 20Booksto50k is one of the best places to learn more about the experiences of other authors and maybe even get a piece of advice or two. It’s a community of indie authors “teaching each others how to sell more books”.

2. Choose the right tools for writing your book

Proper book formatting can be a challenging task even for the best of writers out there. Of course, you can hire an editor to do that for you, but if you’re on a tight budget or want to make their job easier, there is a great choice of tools you can use to write and properly format your book.

After all, you need to type that text somewhere and the days of using pen and paper are long gone. That being said, there’s a wide selection of book-writing software to choose from, some of the most popular tools being Scrivener, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Pages, yWriter, Ulysses, and other.

In addition to book-writing software, there’s a bunch of writing apps and tools that can help you polish your writing, such as Grammarly and the Hemingway App.

3. Plan and outline your book

Creating a good outline for your book is essential for its success. In this phase, you could also survey your friends and other authors and get feedback on your initial book idea.

Writing a book

As this article deals primarily with book marketing, I’m not going to share tips on how to write a book here. And it would probably be unfair to do so, being that I’m not a published author myself (yet). But being an avid reader and someone who has done a lot of research on book marketing, I can share tips on what matters most (in addition to quality content, of course) when trying to market your book – book cover and blurb.

4. Create a visually-appealing book cover and an enticing blurb

Think of the cover and blurb as your book’s teaser and trailer. In addition to other readers’ reviews and recommendations, covers and blurbs are what the book lovers base their decision to buy on.

A blurb is a short promotional piece, usually 100-150 words long, printed on the back cover of the book and written to grab the reader’s attention, pique their curiosity, and convince them to purchase the book in order to keep reading. Basically, it’s the only piece of copywriting used directly on your book. It’s often followed by book reviews by other authors, publishers or editors.

Given the fact that 65% of people are visual learners, while presentations with visual elements are 43% more persuasive, it’s absolutely clear why your book needs a killer cover design in addition to an enticing blurb.

Pre-launch book marketing – How to prepare for publishing

5. Build your author or book website

An author without a website is like a book without a cover. That’s why it’s absolutely essential that you have your own author website. In the age of social media, many authors think they don’t need to have a website and should only promote via Facebook and Instagram or Amazon.

Having a website, however, enables you to customize it the way you want to and use it to publish your own fresh content. Plus, it enables a bunch of additional possibilities when it comes to book marketing, including affiliate links, landing pages, reviews and testimonials, lead magnets, and much more.

Some authors even decide to dedicate a completely separate website to their book. All in all, having a website can help you turn your readers into fans.

In addition to the author website, you should create an author page on Amazon with your photo, bio, and a list of all the books you published. Starting a Goodreads profile will also help build your reputation as a respectable author.

6. Build your email list

They say that “money’s in the list”. And they say it for a reason. Having a list of followers who are already familiar with what you do (and actually like what you do) is essential when you’re looking to market a new product. It’s true of book marketing as well.

You can use your email list to announce or promote your new book, get reviews from your current readers, pitch special offers and promotions, and so on. To make outreach and follow-ups easier, you should consider using an email automation service.

Building an email list takes time, but in the long run, it is the most effective way to market, especially if you don’t plan to stop at one book only.

7. Find reputable reviewers

Before you officially publish, you should get a certain number of people to read your book and give you their feedback in the form of a review. While it’s perfectly fine to have your friends and family give you their opinion, if you’re doing serious book marketing, you need someone with a high reputation and an already existing base of readers.

Plus, a compelling review from a reputable source will look really good on that book cover!

8. Make your book available to pre-order

If you think you should only start promoting and selling your new book once it’s published, think again. Since you’ll be promoting your book prior to launch date anyway, why not ask people to “pre-order now”? It’s much more likely that they’ll purchase immediately than that they’ll remember to come back once it’s officially out.

9. Make sure your book is adequately priced

When working on a strategy that will help you sell more books, one of the most important factors to consider is the price.

If you’re trying to sell on Amazon, many self-publishing authors advise launching your book for $0.99 and increasing the price after a week or so to $2.99 or higher.

In the case of first-time authors (with no name in the business), you should consider using Amazon’s Free Book Promotions. Even though you’ll be putting your book out for free, you should be able to get serious exposure by being featured on another author’s page. Hopefully, after you gain some recognition this way, you will be able to put an actual price to your book.

Post-launch book marketing – How to sell more books

10. Reach out to influencers

Getting book endorsements from influencers can have a great impact on your book marketing efforts. Find an influencer with a base of followers that are likely to be interested in the genre you’re writing in and try to get them to promote your book.

Some micro influencers might be willing to do it for a free copy of the book or a guest post on their blog, but in most cases, you’ll have to pay for their service.

11. Leverage the power of social media

Whatever genre you’re writing in, it’s highly likely that your audience spends a lot of their free time on social media. That being said, make sure to leverage it and get your book out there in front of them.

Even though you can use pretty much any social media channel to promote your book (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, or Pinterest), maybe you should try focusing on just two and do a killer job there, instead of doing mediocre cross-promotion on all platforms.

12. Use online quizzes to promote your book

Online quizzes are not only fun and engaging, but they can also be an excellent means of promoting your product or service. The fact that they’re extremely popular on social media means that they can be combined with the tip above.

Dr Tami Meraglia used quizzes to promote her book, The Hormone Secret. By doing so, she was able to grow her email list of people looking to improve their hormone health by 34,657 people in 6 months at a cost per lead of only $0.19. This led to her hitting the bestseller list and kickstarting her online business.

If you’re also looking to use quizzes in your own book marketing strategy, you can effortlessly make your own quiz in just a few minutes, by following our quiz maker tutorial.

13. Take advantage of paid advertising (AMS, BookBub, and Facebook ads)

Whether you decide to get Amazon to promote your book to their customers via AMS ads, or you want to set up BookBub ads (BookBub is a book market with the significant following), or are a fan of good old Facebook ads, paid advertising is the way to go.

You just need to make sure you target the right demographics and reach the people who might actually be interested in reading and purchasing your book. Otherwise, you just risk squandering huge sums of money on paid ads.

14. Get more book reviews

Whether it’s Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook, or your own website, getting (positive) book reviews can be essential to your success.

Ideally, people who liked your book would naturally leave a review. But still, you may have to be more proactive about this. Consider asking followers and people on your email list for reviews (or reminding those who already bought the book) or offer a free book copy in exchange for a review.

15. Network with other authors

As with any other business promotion, book marketing also relies heavily on networking and cross-promotions. Make sure to connect with other authors in your niche or genre (whether on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or any other social media) and see whether you could promote each other’s books.

16. Write another book

Why stop at one? Publishing multiple books is great for building your own personal brand. Plus, it’s much easier to market and build a following for a series of books than for just one book (unless it’s a ground-breaking masterpiece and you’re a new Hemingway).

Publishing books in series increases your chances of growing a fanhood.

Conclusion

Above, I’ve presented you with 16 book marketing tips you should strongly consider using in your next book launch campaign. Still, keep in mind that in book marketing, as in every other type of marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

While some of the tips will work for your specific book promotion needs, others won’t. Moreover, you should never rely on just one or just a few tips – make sure to combine enough of those to be able to create a profitable book sales funnel.

Speaking of the importance of a great funnel, here you can read more about the funnel Peter Diamandis used for his Abundance book relaunch campaign. It helped them grow their email list by more than 46,000 people, sell 18,350+ books and generate over $430,000 in sales.

Click on the button below to start building your own email list and generating sales right now!