20 Book Marketing Strategies That Guarantee Sales

A Comprehensive Guide for Self-Published Authors Promoting Their Book

A successful author’s vocabulary is not complete without the terms book promotion and book marketing strategies. Having sound, carefully considered, but at the same time creative book marketing strategies is one of the crucial factors that will determine the success of your book promotion campaigns. So devote a consistently substantial amount of time and thought to marketing your work and yourself. With all the channels and tools available to you, you should be able to tap into your target market.

No doubt that every book and author requires something unique in their marketing approach, but before you zero in on whatever that is for you, lay the foundation with sound time-tested strategies.

Here are twenty ways to give yourself the best chance at reaching your target audience, as well as gaining new fans:

1. Consistent output

Apart from those who simply have one story to tell, often in the form of a memoir, and don’t really consider writing books as their main gig, authors, especially first-time authors, should strive to be consistently productive. Here’s why: When you market one book (i.e., your latest book), you inevitably revive interest in the rest of the books in your library, and that often results in additional sales. This is especially true for books in a series.

Consistent productivity can vary from one author to another, because that productivity needs to be balanced by quality. You want to establish a reputation as well as sell books. Quantity and quality shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. You can commit to publishing a new book every three or four years, or within a shorter interval if your books are easy to write, or if you have an epic story that you can write and then break up into three for a trilogy or more for a series.

As far as the financial aspect of publishing a book goes, if you can get your priorities straight as far as what you spend money on, regularly putting out a new book should be easily manageable. Generally, you’ll need to shell out for professional editing, interior design, and cover design.

2. Genre-specific / genre-consistent writing

Naturally, if you commit to writing in a specific genre, it should go without saying that you are a fan of it and you read the books that belong to it. That’s one way to build a connection with fans of your genre. Besides, you have to scope out the competition, right? You have to be aware of what the other authors are doing right, as well as what’s lacking in all the books that are currently on the bookstore shelves.

As previously stated, consistently writing and releasing books helps you sell more books. Well, ideally, that consistency should extend to the genre in which you’re writing. It’s easier to build a fan base when your readers get what they want, even as you continue to expand your horizons within your genre.

That’s not to say you can’t write a book in a different genre if you have an absolutely brilliant idea and you are a fan of that genre as well. If you can manage to be productive in that genre as well, it may just work. Otherwise, build your reputation and sell books within your genre.

3. Competitive pricing

How your books are priced in relation to those in its genre is one of the important factors that affects how well your books will sell. Use the best seller list as basis for pricing: You’ll want to price within the average range, less than those by established, popular authors. If your book is a highly compelling read, and the cover and the back cover blurb convey that, some people may just opt to pick it up instead for that very reason and it’s slightly lower price.

4. Strategic monthly promotion

Modern life is noisy and busy, and messages can easily get drowned out, confused, or simply ignored. This is why your book promotions should be a sustained effort, and regularly scheduled. If you go for sporadic promotional activities, you’re likely to miss some of your target audience because they simply may be too busy to squeeze in some reading at that time.

Whereas, if you promote your book monthly, you stand a better chance of getting the attention of your target audience — if not this month, then the next or the next.

Monthly book promotions don’t all need to involve major events (some of which can give you logistics headache. In fact, they can be as low-key as posting an excerpt from your book on social media, an eBook promotion, a sale, etc. These will back up your bigger promotional activities, such as being a guest on a podcast, joining a fundraiser, or appearing on a local talk show. Alternatively, and this is especially true for nonfiction authors, you could already have your own podcast and/or YouTube channel, and the only thing left to do is to post regular content.

Choosing the right promotional activities and the best time to do them and allowing yourself ample time to plan them are key to successful book marketing. You should have a calendar of all the monthly local and national/global holidays and events so you can plan accordingly. Also consider working with a marketing expert to put together your promotional calendar for a whole year.

Silence and inactivity are not good for your book sales and your author’s platform, so keep communicating.

5. Intelligent use of social media

Just because there are many social media channels available to you doesn’t mean you have to promote your book/s on all of them. Choose the best platforms that suit your brand.

However, you still need to regularly reassess your social media marketing efforts. You may have to reconsider what you’re posting and where. Keep tracking to ensure that you are promoting on the channels that allow you to reach your target audience, where your messaging is working and where you can build a community. And just as importantly, be willing to adjust if your ideas are not generating the amount and quality of engagement you need.

For example, posts designed for community building are ideal for Facebook. These can include glimpses into your daily life and/or your writing habits, or interesting or funny content (yes, including memes). Meanwhile, posts designed to educate and entertain would be great for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. And of course, all announcements of promos and sales go on all your social media channels, although you’d want to create different versions for each channel to maximize their impact.

6. Video marketing

In the age of marketing via the internet, video is king. So let video work for you. And the good news? Videos are easy to make, edit, and post. Plus, short videos are popular, so you don’t need to take so much time to create an Instagram Reel, a YouTube Short, or a TikTok video, which can all be viewed on other channels.

Let’s take a look at your best options.

Book trailers

A book trailer is one of the go-to video marketing moves for authors. Just as the term suggests, it embraces the same principles behind movie trailers and uses images, sounds, video, animation, music, and words to convey what a book is about and hook the viewer so that they buy and read the book. To do just that, your book trailer has to be engaging, intriguing, and compelling.

Personal/BTS video

A personal video or a behind-the-scenes video can make for compelling video marketing. Announcements and thank-you messages can also be communicated via video. Make it a habit to post a short video to keep the conversation with your audience going — until your next major author event or promotional campaign.

Facebook Live events

How about a Facebook Live video where you read a chapter from your book prior to its release. Then later, once your book has been released, you can read something from your first draft. Facebook Live is also a great venue for you to broadcast from your next event so you can still connect with readers who are unable to attend.

Amazon Video Shorts

Yes, Amazon is not just a place to sell your book. Connect with your readers through video content that is focused on your book/s. Amazon customers will find your video on your product pages while they shop. To ensure the success of your videos, focus on your book/s and talk to your potential readers about it, why you wrote it, what the research and writing was like, and so on. You can also invite people who buy your book/s to write product reviews, which would be a great help in increasing conversion.

7. Email marketing

Email is relevant, and email marketing is a smart strategy because your email list of subscribers gives you an easy way to reach out to your audience. All you need is the right content to share with them. The right content can be promotion of new releases, author interviews, book excerpts/chapters, and subscriber-exclusive content via newsletters.

When you send regular newsletters to your subscribers, you keep them engaged, and engagement increases the chances of them reading your books.

8. A working author page

No matter how great your ads are — hard-to-miss book cover, killer book title, and compelling topic — you could still fail to reach your audience and sell your books. The most likely reason for this is a bookstore author page (whether on Amazon, AbeBooks, or eBay) that isn’t optimized.

To address the problem, write an irresistible book description, write a captivating headline, and, for nonfiction books, include a compelling itemization of the benefits that your book has to offer. Oh, and leave ample amounts of white space for emphasis.

Generally readers browsing through titles will do so in the space of seconds and decide within that amount of time whether or not they want to read your book. Your goal is to make them stop scrolling and zero in on your book.

9. Use of free promotional avenues

With so many free or affordable promotional avenues and tools to authors these days, it would be a crime for you to miss out on them.

For starters, there’s Amazon, with its numerous great features to help you promote your book/brand and improve your visibility in searches. You can start with Amazon Author Central, which you should optimize to promote your brand. And as we have previously mentioned, incorporate video into your promotional avenues: Add Amazon Video Shorts to your Amazon book page.

How about a book club? Some book clubs may agree to promote your books in exchange for a free of discounted copy of your book. Or you can work with your local bookstore: Have them host your author meet-and-greet event, and in exchange, you can promote them to your readers.

As long as you do your research and get creative, a brilliant idea or two should come to you. You just need to act on them with the proper amount of consideration and enthusiasm.

10. An eBook format of your book

Logistics may prevent some readers from buying as many physical books as they would like. That’s an issue you can easily fix.

And even if your book does not have an eBook market (e.g., a coffee table book, tactile children’s books), having an eBook version gives you access to Amazon’s book marketing strategies that aren’t available to authors whose books are sold in print version only.

11. Book reviews/testimonials

Get your book reviewed — by critics, readers, and peers. Positive book reviews will serve as additional reference for your target audience, so be sure to highlight them. Share reader reviews on your social media and include critics’ reviews in your website. You can also include a tab in your website for all the critics’ reviews for your book. As for reader reviews, try soliciting reviews in video form to bolster your video marketing efforts.

12. Cleverly configured Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads best practices would have you choose Detailed Targeting, which allows you, the advertiser, to target a specific audience.

In practice, however, this is not that great of an idea. Here are why:

• The details you think would help you reach your target audience will keep your Facebook Ads algorithm from yielding optimum performance, and over time, your ads will perform worse.
• Your targeted audience could be removed at any time, without warning, resulting in a volatile algorithm performance.
• Detailed Targeting is more costly.
• Scaling Ads (i.e. spending more) will be more challenging.
• Your Detailed Targeting audience is inaccurately populated, since many of your target audience are actually not.

This is where Unrestricted Targeting comes in — an approach recommended by Jane Friedman, author and Publishers Weekly columnist. This strategy seeks to get the limiting details out of the way so the Facebook Ads algorithm can perform at its best:

• Analyze your ad and evaluate such elements as words used, tone, image style, and image content (e.g. age, gender, personality, emotions, object, landscape, etc.)
• Look at the landing page your ad will send people to
• Consider other relevant data points

The algorithm will then use all information accumulated to build an audience that will respond positively to your ad. This way, you get a more accurately determined audience, and the algorithm will only perform better, targeting more people who share similar characteristics as those who positively respond to your ad. This results in higher conversion — i.e., more books sold.

13. Ads that yield great results

Outside of Facebook Ads, refrain from running ads just because you’re supposed to run ads.

If you wish to run an ad, first, establish a goal — a target audience, a target result. That goal should help you select the best ad to run. You can, for example, run ads on Amazon to increase people’s exposure to your book, but you have to do it right.

Also keep in mind that people are wary of ads and have a strong tendency to ignore them, so unless your ads reach the right audience, you will have only succeeded in wasting money and effort.

14. A letter to readers at the end of the book

The pages following the last page of your book is an opportunity for you to connect with your readers. Don’t waste it. Write that letter to your readers: It will give your readers a way to continue accessing your brand, joining your mailing list, getting in on promotions, learn where to find you on social, and have an idea of what unique features they can enjoy if they visit your website.

Think of your letter at the end of your book as a bridge between that your reader crosses toward becoming a fan who will move on to your next book or work their way back through your catalog if they started with your new book.

15. Seamlessly interconnected strategies

If you have a number of books on Amazon, a great website, and a well-managed social media presence — essentially a great brand, but you’re not selling books, what’s the problem?

Here’s a list of elements that are missing and preventing a tightly closed loop between your product (your books) and your brand:

• A poorly set up Amazon Author Central Page (or worse, no Amazon Author Central Page)
• A poorly designed and non-optimized website (i.e., no call-to-action, no newsletter/mailing list sign-up, no blog, or at least a practically invisible one that neglects SEO).
• Absence of a letter to the reader at the end of the book. It’s a bridge you shouldn’t neglect building

All of the above create a slack loop of strategies that make it easy for readers to move out of it and move on to other brands and books.

Ideally, the letter to readers in the back of your book should take readers to your website. From a well-designed and optimized website, readers should end up in your mailing list and in your socials, learning more about you and your work and becoming a part of your community, snugly in the loop when it comes to promotions, new releases, and events.

Your readers are people who, just like most other people, can get easily distracted, thanks to the countless distractions being offered by modern life. You want to direct their attention to your books and your brand instead of allow them to wander off.

16. Momentum that’s built one small step at a time

The best seller list is a monumental goal for any first-time or relatively new author. And one of the best ways to approach monumental goals is to take things one small step at a time. Not only that, but to celebrate each small success of being able to move on to the next step. That’s how you effectively build momentum and gear up for the bigger successes.

So: while big, highly visible promotional events/activities may earn you the attention of many people, they don’t guarantee you a throng of readers. On the other hand, if you take smaller but consistent steps, you have more control over how effective each step is, and you have a clearer idea of how you’re doing. For example, if you do a reading of your book at your local bookstore and meet the people who show up and sign their copies of your book, then you know have firsthand knowledge of how successful the event is — and you even see the faces and know some of the names of the people who bought your book! From there you can move on to other events that allow you meet your target audience or at least give them a chance to get to know you, maybe even pick your brain, as is the case if you are a guest on a podcast or you do a Q&A on your social media or at your book reading/signing event.

17. Sustained branding and reputation building

For nonfiction writers in particular, this goes beyond your book. To effectively build a strong author platform and a reputation that guarantees engagement and book sales, you need to maintain a top-quality blog and a strong social media presence. You can also host a podcast and/or regularly post videos.

The goal is to establish yourself as an expert for your topic. Prove that you know your topic inside and out — includes any new developments since your book was published.

For fiction writers, focus on your genre and blog about it and/or create social media content around it. For example, you can solidify you status as a genre fan by creating a list of your all-time favorite characters, reviewing the works of your contemporaries, and/or sharing your reading list and updating your audience as you move down the list.

18. Great value in the form of relationships

Yes, you need to sell as many books as you can. But that shouldn’t be your only focus. It’s precisely because your readers are consumers that you have to avoid focusing solely on selling. Why? Because today’s consumers are more value oriented. They don’t want to be simply sold a product to. They want to be engaged with — heard, seen, valued.

Your readers are more than just people who buy your books. They are people to share your writing with, people to tell your stories to, people to educate and share your ideas with, people to convert, people to inspire and lead to a better place in their lives … To do that, you have to know them, see them so you can create a book that makes them want to read you. That’s the start of your relationship with them. You sustain that by staying in touch through your social media channels, mailing list (newsletters), and author events where you get to talk to them face-to-face.

19. Collaboration with other authors and experts

Collaborations create relationships as well, this time with fellow authors and people from your field. These collaborations will help cement your reputation as an author — as someone who is well regarded in your field. That’s a powerful argument for your target audience to read your book. It’s also an exciting proposition for your existing fans — something new for them to sink their teeth into.

20. Bonus/supplementary content

Content is also king in this day and age. So why stop with your book?

Here are some bonus content that’s sure to engage your audience:

• Full interviews of people cited in your book.
• Free downloads of pertinent material instrumental in the writing of your book
• Correspondence
• Deleted scenes
• Alternate endings
• Character sketches (both using words and drawings)
• Recipes
• Odds and ends involved in your writing process

Heck, you can even share your playlist of your background music while you were working, along with doodles while you were trying to get into the zone or actively avoiding writing (humor counts).

The Takeaway

Selling your book and building a fan base is not an undertaking that you go into lightly. You need to work at it — do your research, work on yourself and build your reputation, and build networks among your peers and contemporaries. Just as importantly, your book marketing strategies should have a heart and soul, because that’s how you truly provide value to a value oriented audience and build relationships that go beyond sales figures.