Marketing Your Book!

I love author and book marketing. It is my favorite strategy of Best Seller Bound. However, I know many authors do not like marketing. I completely get that. As authors, all we want to do is write. However, books are a business and we wear many hats. If you want to sell books, you have to market and promote your books. 

I wish there was a surefire way to achieve success overnight. You're not going to hit the big bestseller list overnight. I wish that was possible for everyone. However, writing and publishing a book isn't a lottery ticket. It takes strategy, time, visibility, and patience. 

Here are a few tips to help you market your books.

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is crucial. You want to target readers who want to read your book. Knowing your audience will not only save you time, it will also save you money.

Here is what you need to know about your audience:

• Demographics
• Values and Goals
• Challenges and Pain Points
• Interest
• Geographical Location
• Where do they hang out on social media?
• Emotional Experience
  • Emotions are an important part of the reader/buyer experience. Your books promise an emotional experience and that is what the reader wants. Are your readers looking for action, adventure, motivation, etc? Think about the emotional experience your book delivers and use that as a focal point of your marketing. Creating an emotional experience that a reader enjoys is something you should consider when you are writing your book.

Focus and Research

Instead of focusing on the big best-selling list focus on the smaller list. Set goals on hitting the best-selling list of online retail book platforms. Here are some tips to help you hit those retail lists.

• Check the list daily 
  • Search for books in the best-selling list that are in your genre.
  • Check the reviews, look for keywords, and any emotional cues left by the reviewer. 
  • Go look at the author's social media pages.
    • How are they promoting their books on social media?
    • How big is their following?
    • What social media platforms are they active on?
    • Do they post a lot of videos?
    • How do they engage their audience?
    • How does their audience engage on their pages?
  • Most successful authors have a mailing list 
    • Have you started building your mailing list and are you consistently growing it? 
    • Check out my blog post on building your mailing list?

Bonus Tip

Video is where it is at. Get on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Some authors are killing it and it doesn't matter the genre you write it there is an audience for you on both of these platforms. If you need tutorials on how to create videos, check out YouTube.