Promoting a book is not all about the book launch, it’s about reaching out to your prospective readers and telling them why they should read your book and what’s it all about. With the increasing number of newly published books every day, the book market has become too saturated for the new authors and marketing a book is one of the biggest challenges an author can face after publishing it.

Digital marketing provides integrated marketing communication tools that act as a gateway point for publishers and fans to find out about your books and you. Monetizing your loyal and large audience is all that matters when it’s all about acquiring and retaining fans through various digital marketing platforms.

In this blog, we will be sharing some of the most effective ways by which you can promote your books online and amplify the visibility of your book among your target audience.

1. Create Your Blog or Website

Having a strong online presence can help you connect with your prospective readers and gives them an idea about yourself and your work. A website can serve as a basic platform to market your books and makes it convenient for your audience who wants to read your work.

A basic author website must include, an ‘About Page’ that gives your readers an overview of your work, a ‘Books Section’ that includes the details of your publications, a ‘Blog’ which can be used to share interesting and engaging articles about the topics related to your books and a ‘Contact Information Page’ having your email, suggestions column and the links to all your social media profiles and your publishers’ should you have one.

2. Build a Following on Social Media

Along with your website, social media platforms are one of the most important places where you can promote your books. Presence on social media can help you in building your community.

Through social media, you can keep your audience updated with your upcoming books and other book promotional events. Maintaining engagement is the most important thing to build a following on social media, if you are constantly posting about your book promotion, then your followers may lose interest. To keep your followers interested, you need to constantly post engaging content about interesting topics, you can also conduct giveaway competitions, quizzes or other engaging activities. Social media audiences can also be used to increase traffic on your website that will ultimately lead to more people buying your book.

 

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is an important way to build a community of loyal readers. As email is a personal platform, it can be a great way to know your readers personally and communicate with them individually.

The first step of email marketing is building an email list which you can easily do by putting together all your contacts (make sure you obtain their permission to send any form of marketing communication should they be based in countries with data and privacy laws), your social media contacts and by encouraging people to subscribe to your marketing emails on your website and your social media accounts. Once you’ve built your audience, keep in touch with them by sending them occasional newsletters with updates about your publications and alerts of your upcoming book promotional events.

 

4. Influencer Marketing:  

Create campaigns by reaching out to book readers, authors and bloggers with captive audiences. They can review your book and recommend it to their followers, you can also send them free copies of your book which they can use as a giveaway for their audience. Influencer marketing helps a lot in gaining traction.

5. Share Free Samples

Publishing or sharing free samples, excerpts or quotes from your book is an amazing way to develop the interest of readers in your books. It allows the readers to know about your book’s content in detail. Some of the potential readers are unsure about whether to buy a book or not. By sharing some of the chapters from your book online, you can help them in making their final decision. You can also share a video, reading a chapter or two from your book on your social media profiles and on your website.

6. Join Reading and Writing Forums

There are several online reading and writing forums for authors and readers where they discuss their favourite books, writing practices and share their knowledge of books with each other. You can join these forums and engage in conversations with people to share your work and reach out to an audience. Contribute openly in every discussion, offer your help, advice and share the link to your blogs or website wherever possible.

7. Promote your Books by Guest Blogging

Guest posting or blogging is a technique by which you write articles and blogs on websites that are not owned by you. This has become a very popular technique among authors to promote their books over the past few years. It’s a great way to benefit from an audience of a network of blogs and introduce yourself to passionate reading communities. To make sure that your blog or article is featured, you need to bring unique expertise in your content and write high-quality content. Do a little research about the content of a blog you’re writing for and analyse their standards. Once you identify the type of their content, write your article that fits their standards. Write as many blogs as you can and refer to your book in the author portion.

Writing and publishing a book is not an easy feat and it requires a lot of effort and hard work to create a masterpiece. That’s why it is important that you market your book to the right audience so that the readers can benefit from your page-turner. There are so many innovative and effective ways to market your books online. We hope that the above-mentioned ideas help you to build your audience and boost your book sales so that you can achieve the dream of becoming a bestselling author.

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