How To Promote Your Book

Whether you’re a best-selling author or a first-time novelist, promoting your book is critical to your book sales. Well written books typically don’t just sell themselves, they need awareness and promotion to succeed. So how do you go about promoting your book? The best book promotion strategy is a combination of self-promotion and paid promotion. Let’s take a look at each.

Self-Promotion

As an author you’ll want to reach out to friends, fans and followers with news about your book. Here are some ideas for self-promotion:

Post updates about your book on your website, blog, or social pages.
Trade guest post with another author, where you each agree to review each others books and post the reviews on your blog
Set up a book giveaway on Amazon Giveaways and post about it on Facebook
Send an email to your fan base. (Pro Tip: If you are not collecting your fans’ email addresses on your site, you should start now.)
Put a link to your book in your email signature.
Have a book release party
Set up book readings at your local bookstore or library
If you know of book clubs in your area, offer to visit any club who selects your book for its members
Answer questions on Quora and include a link to your book in your bio.
Participate in forums on sites like kboards.com and include a link to your book in your bio
Pay to advertise your book on Goodreads, Facebook or Amazon Advertising. (Typically, these ads will cost you $0.25 to $0.50 per reader who clicks. It’s not a great return, but it’s useful for some authors)

Paid Book Promotions

Paid book promotions will give your book huge exposure to readers of your genre, and that exposure tends to all hit at once in 1 or 2 days. Book promotion sites, such as www.JustKindleBooks.com, build up a large following of readers who they reach out to by email and social media. To book a promotion you simply complete a submission form on the company’s website and then pay via credit card or Paypal.

You can find large lists of book promotion sites on the following webpages: PaidAuthor, KindlePreneur, indiesunlimited, and ReadersintheKnow and here.

Before you submit your book you’ll need to prepare your pricing and timing. Typically you will want to lower the price of your book for your promotion. You should schedule the price drop in KDP or Apple Books before creating your promotion. And your price drop should last 5 days. Why 5 days? Many times emails get opened late and social posts get shared several days after they are originally posted. For these reasons, it best to keep your price as stated in your promotion, good for atleast 4 days after the promotion runs. Also you should schedule your promotion to start on the first day that your price drops.

On the day of your promotion, the book promotion company will include your book on their homepage, in their newsletter, Facebook and/or Instagram pages and other social media channels such as: Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, Mix or Medium.

When choosing which book promotion site to use, consider the following criteria: 1) Does their newsletter have a decent number of subscribers? 40,000 or more is nice to see. 2) Do they have a lot of Facebook followers? Again 40,000K or more. 3) Do books in your genre go over well with their readers? 4) Will they offer you a rerun or refund if the promotion does not perform well? It’s worthwhile to email the site with these questions if you don’t see them answered in their FAQ.

Three benefits of running a paid book promotion

Sales, Sales, Sales: A promotion helps you reach your greatest potential audience to drive more sales.
Reviews: A rule of thumb is that 1 in 100 people who buy your book will leave a review. So more sales equals more reviews. But did you know that with free books only 1 in 400 people who download your book will leave a review. You can help increase your total reviews by putting an ask in your back matter. Simply ask readers to review the book. Reviews carry trust and authenticity with users who land on your book’s detail page. Reviews help sell your book.

Fans and Future Sales: The more readers you attract to your book, the more you will have going into your next title. Running a book promotion now helps to build your fan base for the long run.

Recommended Book Promotion Sites

We recommend the following book promotion sites because of the size, effectiveness, and reputation: