7 Ways to Market Your Book
Effective book marketing allows authors and publishers to realize the full potential of their work, but it can be hard to know where to start. Here are 7 ways that authors and publishers can get started with book marketing.
After spending countless hours writing and revising your manuscript, the next step is to get your book into the hands of readers. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “how do I get my books noticed?,” it’s time to explore a few book marketing basics.
From hiring professionals to strategize and deploy book marketing plans to taking control of your book marketing yourself through no- and low-cost tools, here are seven book marketing ideas that are applicable to traditionally published authors and self-published authors.
7 Ways to Market Your Book
1. Hire Book Marketing Services
If you’re a traditionally published author, the publishing house likely is managing a portion of the marketing and publicity for your book. However, their resources may be limited, and it’s often beneficial to supplement by hiring book marketing experts. Be sure to coordinate your efforts with the publishing house so you keep consistent brand messaging, don’t duplicate work, and avoid confusing any media outlets.
If you’re a self-published author, you may not feel you have time to manage all the book marketing and promotion yourself or the skills necessary to successfully promote your book on your own. You can hire book marketing experts who can help get your books noticed and increase book sales.
Book marketing firms and agencies as well as freelance book publicists offer a wide variety of services from pre-launch through long-term marketing beyond one book. Depending on your needs and budget, the book marketing agency or freelance expert may offer strategies and assets that you can implement yourself or provide full-service, hands-on support.
Examples of book marketing services may include:
● ARC (advance review copy) distribution
● Press release writing and dissemination
● Book trailers
● Creating a media kit and pitching to media
● Social media strategy
● Advertising campaigns
● Book launch parties and author tours
You can find professional marketers through book marketing sites, PR companies, and freelance sites. However, it’s important to thoroughly vet anyone you work with, to avoid exaggerated outcomes at best and book marketing scams at worst.
2. Create an Author Website
Your author website will serve as the hub for your book marketing. While social media platforms may experience changing algorithms and shifts in platform popularity, you have full ownership of your author website.
There are many website builders that make it easy to create your own author website—such as SquareSpace, Wix, and Wordpress.com—or you can hire a web developer to create one for you.
It’s important to purchase a domain with your name in it. If your author name is already taken, you could do an alternative that points toward your writing, such as “[YourAuthorName]Author.com” or “[YourAuthorName]Writes.com.” It’s best practice to have the domain use your author name rather than your book title so that it can remain the hub as you publish more titles.
Here are a few key details to include on your author website:
● Author bio
● Book details, including cover, book synopsis, and links to purchase
● Newsletter signup form
● Social media links
● Your personal Quilltips link
● Your contact form or email address
As you grow your platform and implement more book marketing ideas that help get your book noticed, you can add categories like appearances and press.
Pro tip: Even simpler, use your Quilltips author profile as your website. Check out Quilltips founder Gabriel Nardi-Huffman’s profile as an example
3. Start a Blog or Substack
Including a regularly updated blog as part of your website can help drive new readers to your website and keep them coming back to see fresh content. In fact, 70% of marketers report blog posts as the “most effective content type” for building demand during the early stage.
Substack has increasingly become popular because it’s easy to use, leverages recommendation features to help you grow your readership, and allows you the flexibility to offer both free and paid content.
A blog or Substack is a great place to test out book marketing ideas to see which ones readers engage with the most so that you can develop more of that type of content. You can write about topics related to the subject of your book—using search engine optimization (SEO) keywords is particularly helpful for driving organic traffic to your author website—give behind-the-scenes insights into your writing process and your personal publishing journey, and offer book reviews of the titles that are inspiring your literary craft.
4. Build an Email List and Launch a Newsletter
Your email list is a powerful tool for connecting with potential new readers and loyal fans alike, which is why 85% of surveyed authors maintain a newsletter. Newsletters empower you to directly reach out to subscribers.
Website builders like SquareSpace, Wix, and Wordpress.com offer email marketing, as does Substack. Alternatively, you could use an email marketing platform such as beehiiv, HubSpot, or Mailchimp.
You can use content from your author blog or Substack as the foundation of your newsletter. You can also use your newsletter to provide book update news, reveal book cover designs, announce virtual or in-person readings, and more. Be authentic, creative, and personal. Because of the intimate nature of emails, 29% of authors include pictures of their pets while 20% share pictures of their home or writing space.
5. Leverage Social Media
Social media remains a popular book marketing strategy for good reason: authors use social media to reach new readers (79%), build relationships with their fans (64%), and connect with other authors (50%). In fact, many authors are chronicling their writing journey on social media to fill the blogging gap in their marketing.
While Facebook (60%), Instagram (53%) and Bluesky (29%) are the top social media platforms authors plan to use this year, TikTok, in fourth place, continues to gain ground, increasing from 13% last year to 17% this year. Keep your eyes on Pinterest, though: the percentage of authors who plan to use it this year (12%) doubled from last year.
Interestingly, genre impacts platform choice. Facebook’s top genres are women’s fiction, religion or spirituality, and Christian fiction. Instagram’s top genres are women’s fiction, romance or rom-com, and Christian fiction. Bluesky’s top genres are science fiction, horror, and literary fiction.
Book marketing on Facebook, or your chosen platform, can be a fun opportunity to put your short-form storytelling skills to use, creating content that hooks potential new readers and engages those already following you. You can also include polls to see which types of book marketing ideas your readers are most interested in.
Post consistently, jump on trending sounds, use book marketing hashtags relevant to your genre and subject matter, and engage in the comments and DMs for the best outcome. Don’t forget to put your website in your profile.
6. Run a Goodreads Giveaway
Goodreads is “the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations.” In addition to enabling bibliophiles to see what their friends are reading, get personalized book recommendations, and create a “want to read” list, this social media site is known for its book giveaways.
Why should you consider running a Goodreads giveaway? Every day, 40,000 users enter Goodreads giveaways. By hosting your own Goodreads giveaway, you can tap into this excitement, promote your book before it’s published, and get your books noticed.
When Goodreads users discover your book, they can add it to their “Want to Read” list, follow your author profile, like quotes from your book, and write reviews of your books. Not only do these interactions encourage them to purchase your books and become evangelists for your writing, but their engagement could encourage their network and the collective Goodreads community to look into your work.
That’s a pretty good payoff for the price of giving away one book.
7. Empower Yourself with Quilltips
Quilltips helps bring author-reader connections to life through QR code marketing and custom author profiles. When you add a Quilltips QR code to your book cover, book launch flyer, or author website, readers who scan it can:
● Leave reader fan mail
● Send monetary tips
● Join your email subscriber list
● Follow you on social media
By fostering community through Quilltips, you can gain invaluable data insights into who your readership is and why your book resonates with them. This is particularly relevant for used book marketing, where you often have no data on audience reach and receive no second-hand book royalties.
Using Quilltips is significantly less expensive than hiring book marketing services from a book marketing agency or freelance book PR expert. On top of that, even a $5 tip from a reader who scans your Quilltips QR code will likely exceed the 5% – 15% royalties you’d receive through the sale of your hardcover book. Used in tandem with some of the other book marketing ideas discussed above, Quilltips can increase your profit potential and help connect you to your biggest fans.
Market Your Book with Quilltips
Getting started with Quilltips is quick and easy:
● Sign up for Quilltips here and build your free author profile
● Complete Stripe onboarding so you can receive payments (it only takes 5 minutes!)
● Generate and download your custom QR code
● Add your Quilltips QR code to your book