So you’ve got a book. It’s written to genre expectations and it’s edited. Now for the biggest question: how do you actually get people to buy it?
There are lots of great options for promoting your book, which means that you’ll once again need to think about what your primary goal is for this book to help you decide the best way to spend your time and, potentially, money.
The main choice you’ll have to make, which will be guided by your goals and by what point you’re at in your career, is whether you want to pay for promo or not. There are lots of pros and cons to each, as well as methods for each, so I’ve divided them into two different post. Today, I’ll be outlining four ways to promote your book for free.
Social Media
This is probably the easiest way to advertise your books for free, since you’re likely already on at least one social media!
My two biggest pieces of advice for using social media as an author are:
Use the platform that you actually enjoy being on. For me that’s Instagram, because I genuinely enjoy taking pictures and filming Reels, but for you it might be something else. You don’t HAVE to be on a certain platform, and if you’re posting out of obligation, that will come through.
Share about your book BEFORE it’s ready to be published! Part of the fun of social media is getting a “behind the scenes” look, so share when you write a line you love, celebrate hitting word count milestones, and even vent about when you’re frustrated with a plot point or character arc. This makes your followers a part of the journey, which means by the time you publish the book, they’ll already be excited!
Some ideas for what to share: Favorite lines from your book, create a book aesthetic, introduce your characters, ask your followers to submit questions about the book that you answer, fancast your characters. Check out this short video on Instagram I made with more ideas! The general idea is, if you’re excited for your project, that will rub off on your followers and get them excited for it too!
Social media is also a great place to build hype by getting other people involved. This is often referred to as a “street team”—a group of people who volunteer to get behind-the-scenes access and help get people excited for your book. You may send them the cover design to share as part of a cover reveal, or even an ARC of the book itself to post reviews.
One note on design: If you’ve hired a cover designer (which I hope you have), be sure to check what rights you have to use the design for. Is it only allowed to be the cover? Can you edit it at all, and use it to design graphics or create character cards? It should be in your contract, and ideally, you’ve negotiated all this before hiring a cover designer.
Email list and newsletter swaps
Although social media has its positives, one huge negative is that you’ll have to contend with the algorithm, fighting to get attention and figure out how to get your posts seen. This is part of why it’s vital to have an email list.
The top resource I’ve found for starting a successful email list is Kirsten Oliphant at Create If Writing. I won’t go into full detail on email lists here, but instead direct you toward her many articles and podcast episodes. The top things I’ve learned in starting an email list, though are:
Have a “freebie” that connects directly to the type of audience you want to build. If you want to get interested readers, try writing a short story or novella in your genre that people get for free when they sign up. If you want to attract writers, try offering a resource to help them improve their writing.
Keep emails fairly short and format with lots of white space. Remember that you’ll likely be writing and designing emails on your computer, but most people are reading on their phones, and will quickly lose interest if it looks like the email goes on for ages.
Bring your voice into it! You don’t need to be “professional” and stoic, in email or anywhere online really. People signed up because they want to get to know you better as a creator and a person. So don’t be afraid to share stories from your life and write in a conversational style.
Once you have an email list, you can start looking for opportunities to do “newsletter swaps.” These are when you agree to feature another author’s book in your newsletter, and they’ll feature your book in theirs. There are hundreds of Facebook groups created for the purpose of finding swaps like this. To get the best results, try to swap in your specific genre—don’t just join any large reader newsletter, because there’s a good chance the person looking at it doesn’t read your genre. For my book The Mistletoe Connection, I primarily swapped with “sweet romance” and “holiday romance” authors, because that way the people hearing about my book were likely the type of person who already enjoyed that genre. Even general “romance” groups I tended to avoid, since that’s such a large range of readers.
Pre-orders
If you’ve been hyping up your book ahead of release, then you may have garnered enough interest for pre-orders! Setting this up doesn’t cost you anything, and means that while you’re hyping your book online, there’s no risk of a reader being interested and then having to remember to buy your book in a few weeks or months when it’s released. Instead, they can pre-order right then, and guarantee you a sale!
It can also be a great way to set yourself a deadline, if you’re the sort of person who needs that to work. I tend to have the book mostly finished before setting up a pre-order and release date so that I feel confident I won’t have to change it, but I know authors who set up a pre-order date before they’ve even written a book! It all depends on how reliably you can meet deadlines and how you’re motivated.
If you’re publishing with Amazon, pre-orders are fairly easy, and you don’t need to have anything finalized to upload. Click here for an in-depth explanation on how it works. Setting up a pre-order with IngramSpark, the service I used for paperback copies of my book, is a bit trickier. You have to have the final files ready to upload (well, you can do a placeholder file, but it will cost you to change it for the final file). Which means that setting the pre-order as a deadline isn’t really an option, but if you’ll have the book finished several months before it goes on sale, then it will work great! Click here for more details.
Interviews and Reviews
Depending on what your goal is with your book, this may or may not be a good avenue for you, and it will also determine what type of interviews you do. For me, one of the top goals of publishing this book was to grow my audience. I knew that doing interviews or requesting reviews from a variety of sources would help new people hear about me and my book, not just the same followers I already had. I also knew I wanted an audience of both readers and writers who I could provide resources to. So I talked to interviews who both focused on just the book—mainly book bloggers, booktubers, and bookstagrammers—and people who I could talk to about writing craft—including podcasts and writing blogs.
Mostly, I did lots of researching to find accounts and blogs that seemed like a good fit, and just reached out to ask. I certainly got told “no,” but often people were excited to work with me! For reviews, I had .epub, .mobi, and .pdf files of my manuscript to email to people, so they could read it however they want. There were a few bookstagrammers I sent physical copies to, but mostly digital was easier for everyone!
In the next post, I’ll outline some of the most common ways to promote your book that cost money, such as online ads and BookBub. Be sure to follow the blog so you don’t miss out!