Marketing Your Book

Marketing your book involves a lot of focused work and planning  – and without that added effort, nobody beyond your friends and family may ever be reading your book.

We want to help you create a successful marketing plan that will get the cases of books out of your garage and into your reader’s hands.

The first, and most important, area of your marketing is to focus on creating a solid marketing plan. This plan should detail whom you’re marketing to and how you’re going to do it.  Below, we have outlined a general breakdown of how you can create a successful plan to market your book.

This step may seem simple, but you shouldn’t be tempted to skip it. If you’ve previously published books, then you might have a good idea of who your readers are. The digital world gives you the opportunity to perform in-depth research in a way that authors 10 years ago only would have dreamed of doing.

Get onto social media sites, Amazon or Goodreads and look at who is reading your book. If this is your first book, then look to see who is reading similar books.

Ideally, you want to be able to describe a core group of readers. For example – Parents and Teachers of children ages five through eight. The more specific you are, the more successful your entire marketing plan will be in the long run.

2. WHERE IS YOUR AUDIENCE?

Now that you’ve established who your target audience is, you need to narrow down where you can find them. Are they on social media sites? Which blogs do they read, if any?

For example, if you are targeting mothers and teachers – which websites do they spend time on? Narrowing down where your audience spends their time will help you establish where you need to focus your marketing – saving you time and money.

3. WHAT ARE YOUR STRATEGIES & TACTICS?

How will you market your book to your audience? We have already established the who and where – but what about how? There are endless different marketing strategies and tactics. You will need to decide what is most appropriate and effective for your book and its audience. We have listed a couple of different examples below to help get you started.

STRATEGY: Build a presence for your book on a parenting blogs A, B and C.

TACTIC: Get people to write reviews, testimonials, or quotes. Place those reviews, testimonials and quotes on said parenting blogs.

STRATEGY: Announce book release to local teachers.

TACTIC: Establish an email list of teachers from school districts A, B, C and D.  Start sending book information; announcements and chapter sneak peaks to the email list, using a branded email template. 

4. ESTABLISH A TIMELINE

Starting your marketing before your book is actually released is ideal. And if this is possible, planning out all relevant timings is important. How long will you need for editing, formatting, cover design, and other book related matters?

You don’t want to start marketing too soon before your book launch, but you do want all of your promotional activity to peak at about the same time. Planning out specific timings for each of your tactics will help you achieve this.

As we stated before, the amount of strategies that you can use are endless and they need to be very targeted towards your audience. From social media to selling on Amazon or using speaking opportunities – each different strategy and tactic takes planning.