Best Book Marketing Plan | 2023

Before starting, Just one request. If this article was useful to you. Please consider supporting our campaign “Let’s empower our youth” by just suggesting a few books from your end. Details at the end of this article.

Have you recently published your book or are you in the verge of publishing your book? Are you looking for some effective book marketing and book promotion ideas that are cost effective or in some cases free? You have come to the right place. In this blog we at www.Sharingstories.in have put forth some of the best book marketing and book promotion ideas for you.

Publishing the book is just the first step towards your author journey. Getting the right promotion and marketing plan in place proves how effectively you can reach your target readers and thereby improve your sales. There are many ad-hoc book promotion and marketing ideas suggested by various people, that may prove effective. But, in this article we are placing a step-by-step approach towards your promotion and marketing.

“Your first promotion and marketing step should be taken at least one year before you publish your book. Sounds odd? keep reading. ”

How many books are listed in Amazon for sale?

We were able to find this number for amazon India. This is going to give you a fair bit of indication in regard to how competitive it is to sell books.

What does Amazon’s best seller for books mean?

Many authors come to us saying we want to be an “Amazon best-seller like my writer friend XYZ”. XYZ could be anyone who claims to be an Amazon best-seller. First, let us clarify this. An amazon best seller is the most loosely used term in the publishing industry, everybody, including first-time writers, claim to be an Amazon best-seller. “THIS IS TRUE TECHNICALLY, BUT, NOT COMMERCIALLY.”

Amazon best-seller is a ranking given by amazon for any product, including books, that has sold maximum units for a set period of time under a particular Category or sub-category.

In practical terms, let’s assume, you launched a book today and it is available on Amazon / Flipkart or any e-commerce platform. Since it is your first book, you must have informed many of your friends and family members regarding your book release. Say, ten of your family members buy the book today from amazon. Your book most likely must have earned a top spot in sales during that hour or that day. The book gets a bestseller tag. Just to be clear this is best-seller tag is for a sub-category in which your book is listed based on the genre of the book. Due to a lot of initial promotions from you and the publisher during the initial week which is directly responding to sales, you may retain the bestseller tag for few days or for a week maybe. Post the first week period, the sale drops, as your first circle of friends and family members have already bought the book. Hence, Amazon is not seeing any sales on the book. Hence you start slowly coming down in ranking. As per our estimates, the first month of a book release for a first-time author without enough personal branding is able to sell around 100 books.

So do not get blinded by the best-seller tag when someone claims it. The best seller-tag, if it remains for a longer period can definitely sell a lot more books. We are going to discuss some effective ways to do so. Keep Reading and please do share the article if you find it useful.

Common mistakes & mis-conceptions in Publishing

1. One-Book Wonder is a rare phenomenon. Do not spend a lot of money on your first book. If you are not able to sell enough books, you will start questioning your writing ability.
2. Most First-time writers sell about 250-300 books in a lifetime.
3. All amazon best-sellers have at least published at least 3 books before making it big.
4. Publishing is just the first step, Promotions plays a crucial role. Invest your time  to learn the art
5. Self-Published or Traditionally published, the author needs to promote their books to sell.
6.  Get a professional book Editor. Serious readers do not like poor grammar or spelling mistakes. 

Note: There could be exceptions to points 1,2&3. But, exceptions cannot be examples.

Book Promotion ideas before Publishing the Book

The best time to start promoting your book is at least one year before publishing your first book. An author’s promotion is equally important to a well-written book. Building a reader base and expertise in the niche you are writing in actually helps in your promotional activities during the book launch. We shall explain this in detail below. Continue reading.

Build an Author website

An author’s website is like a seed. Sow it early, nurture it and reap its benefits forever. Most authors can write one book, or a maximum of two books in a year. But, an author can write a 700-1000 word blog in a week. Start writing content around your book, NOT about your book through blogs using your own website. This will help create a filtered audience (website visitors) who are interested in the topic you are writing about. A filtered (Targeted) audience helps in faster and better sales.

As a practical example. Imagine you are a romance writer. You may spend 3-4 hours weekly writing a blog about relationship advice, first love, good touch, and bad touch, sex education, and so on. you can easily find blog topics using google SEO tools and Keyword Planners.

The older the website, the better it performs in google search results. If you are able to build an SEO optimized website, do proper keyword research, and write regular articles, at the end of one year, If you are able to write around 30-40 articles. This can easily generate 2000-3000 monthly website visitors. This means you are driving 25,000-30,000 targeted traffic to your website at the end of the year. If you continue to write articles, share them on social media for the next couple of years, then you would have done a great job in creating a personal brand in your niche. Positively, at the end of the third year, you can generate close to 50,000-70,000 monthly traffic. Luckily, if one of your articles gets trending, then the numbers can skyrocket.

After 2-3 years, You can do many promotional activities using your website directly and save a lot of costs. the best part is you completely own your website. You have 100% freedom to play with it.

Content Marketing on Quora…

Building regular traffic on your website purely based on your content is time-consuming. But there are a few shortcuts to this as well. Have you ever noticed a website called Quora? it normally pops up on google on the first page if we search for anything on the internet. It basically is a question-answer platform where users can post questions and people can post first-hand responses.

It is estimated that Quora drives 300million monthly visitors. This is huge. So start writing short answers on quora and subtly redirect the readers to your website for more details. Please note that Quora has very strict guidelines in terms of self-promotion. But if you are within the guidelines and are bringing value to readers it will be fine. FInd topics relevant to your book and start writing. There are other platforms like Medium, Reddit.

Start building your Social Media Presence

Instagram, Goodreads, Facebook groups, and Twitter are amongst the most active social media platforms for books globally. A few other apps could be more popular in your region. Pick one social media at once and try and post the content that you write and other creative stuff regularly on these platforms. Once you get the hang of one platform in about 2-3 months, slowly move to explore other platforms. We suggest Instagram and Facebook groups as a starting point. There are many useful resources in the internet for creating accounts, posting content, increasing followers, etc for each of these social media accounts.

Build a network of writers & book influencers

As a young writer, building a network will really help you while promoting your book and even could save a lot of money. If you are able to join relevant Whatsapp and Facebook groups, you can get a lot of relevant tips, suggestions and guidance at various stages of your publishing and promotional journey. There are many book promotion and publishing platforms out there. some guidance on what was effective and what was not could save a lot of money, time and effort. This network of young writers can help you fetch some reviews on Amazon, Instagram, etc and also help in taking your book to a larger audience.

Hire a Freelancer to handle Social Media & Content

If you are a busy person, or if you think I want to give more focus on my book. Then, hire a college student or a freelancer to write your quora answers and handle your social media account regularly. You could find many reasonable freelance writers and graphic designers and social media handlers available for both full-time and part-time jobs. You just set the expectations with them and they do the work on your behalf. This gives you more time to focus on your writing.

Get an engaging book trailer done.

Insta claims that a video post gets over 30% more engagement than photo posts. People are more hooked and interested in video promotions. So get an intriguing video trailer done for your book by some professionals. this could create the required buzz and intrigue around the book. Release video along with the launch of the book. Create the video trailer specific for the demand of each platforms like less than a minute and square format (1:) for Instagram, 9;16 for stories and 16;9 for youtube and so on.

Create a repository of book Creatives (Photos)

Before starting any of your Book Promotion and Marketing activities, first, get some really engaging photos for your book. An attractive creative helps people to stop scrolling their Facebook & Insta feeds and check out the content. You may try getting this done with your Phone and some basic props.

Build an Email List for your book promotion

Leverage your existing contacts. Over the years you must have acquired at least 500 email lists on your Gmail / Yahoo. Try and put them to the best use. Build a weekly/monthly email campaign with your blogs / Book updates to your mailing list. Also constantly strive to increase this list.

Note: Both Facebook & Linkedin allows you to extract the email ids of your connections. There are many youtube videos which can help you with this.

Book Promotion ideas after the Book is Published

Amazon Author Central Page

Amazon Author Central is a very fruitful book promotion strategy. Nowadays almost 90% of the book sales happens through eCommerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, etc. Amazon provides this amazing option of creating an author page through amazon author central and connecting it to the amazon e-commerce website where you buy your books from. When a reader comes to amazon.com to buy a book, it also shows other books by the authors, also showcases video trailers on the book and even suggests other popular authors in the same genre. This increases author visibility and increases sale chances.

Build an Author Portfolio

If an author’s website is outside your budget, try and get yourself listed on our author page of sharing stories and other websites catering to the writer community. This is a miniature version of your website. where it will be hosted on sharing stories and will accommodate all the basic details about the author, including author bio, upcoming book, and blurb, already published work, social media connections, and more. This has limitations in terms of design but can hold all information. Finding place amongst a repository of other popular authors adds credibility and reputation to your personal branding.

Get Reviews first

We cannot stress the importance of getting enough reviews on the book. No one will be interested in buying a book for that matter any product without good feedback. So try and leverage your friends and family circle to get as many reviews as possible for your book. Once your first circle of friends and family is exhausted, then reach out to various social media influencers who do paid book reviews. These reviewers charge you for the time and effort they take to read, write reviews and leverage the follower base they have built over the years.  Most reviewers do not dilute the opinion on the book. So do not worry to compensate for the value they bring in. Just be sure to check the monthly website traffic before paying any website for reviews. We have listed a few reviewer’s interviews on our sharing stories platform. Read to know more about them. Some of them have been reviewing books for over 8 years now.

Leverage the Bookstagrammers (Book Influencers)

Get yourselves out there.  Get as much visibility for yourself and your book as possible. This could be in the form of Author interviews, book summaries on websites, Book cover reveal, live sessions on social media. Some of these services must be free, while others paid. Choose wisely, do not spend too much money on these activities that do not give you enough visibility and engagement. Try and increase your visibility and pay that little extra only if you are able to access a targeted audience based on your genre. As a writer, you have limitations to what extent and how much marketing can be done using your own platform. Some writers feel shy about doing this. That’s when a bookstagrammer or popularly knows as book influencers come into play. They can promote your book on their existing social media handles and websites too.

Try Free Book Giveaway websites

Book giveaways is a good way to get genuine feedback on the book and is also good for word-of-mouth publicity.  The reviewers also drop in reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Instagram, and Facebook in return for a free book. This not just fetches book reviews but also gathers a lot of eyeballs. You can get some useful reviews on amazon which is useful in the long run for book sales as amazon customers value a verified purchase review highly.

Guest Blogging within the book community

The best way to increase your reach and standing a better chance for book sales is guest blogging. Try and participate in as many guest-blogging sites/magazines as possible. By actively participating in guest blogging within the book niche provides you access to the existing reader base of other platforms and it also increases Google rankings of your website through the backlinks. Guest-blogging is a mutually beneficial option that helps both grow together. During your pre-publishing place, identify platforms that allow guest blogging in regards to books.

Getting Book Listings on popular platforms

Apart from Amazon, Flipkart, Kobo, Google Books, etc, try and list your book on various book listing platforms like bookbub, sharing stories, etc. This increases the book’s visibility in the most effective way. Most of these platforms are free.

Run Paid CPC Advertisement Campaigns

After all the book promotional activities have been completed, now, focus on running sponsored ads on Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram. All these platforms offer something called Cost per Click (CPC) ads. What it means is that you will be charged for your ads only when someone clicks on the ads. This has two major benefits. One, serious buyers are most likely to click an advertisement that you run, while, others will just scroll through the ads. Just see them, but, do not take any action.  These platforms offer to choose the audience based on interest, this helps in choosing the right target audience for your book. Second, though only a fraction of people interested in your book clicks the ads, it does give you more eyeballs, as  many people will be seeing your ads. This improves the visibility of the book.

Run re-targeting Advertisement Campaigns

Have you noticed, when you search certain products on amazon, you start seeing these ads on your insta and facebook feeds? This is because of something called Re-targeting ads. This is like trying to sell a product to someone who already knows your brand. This helps in better conversions. This helps in reaching out to customers who have already engaged with a website. So it is important to accumulate a reader base for your re-targeting ads. This is a very effective means to drive traffic to your amazon landing page.

Get a Digital Press-release done

Once you receive a positive response from readers on your book, and you have sold enough books in the market, then move ahead and reach out to people from outside your friends and family circle. This can be effectively done using PR campaigns in frontline newspapers, magazines, and websites. This is sometimes a costly affair, hence we suggest this as the last part and make sure you get enough reviews and visibility before you move into this stage. Primarily spend money on digital platforms as it helps in easy one-click options to buy the book. This makes life easier and decisions quicker for a reader. Physical paper ads may take longer period to convert, as there are a few intermediate steps, like picking up the phone, opening the Amazon APP, searching for the book title, scroll to find the book, and then buy it. all these can be avoided in a digital advertisement.

Support Sharing Stories Campaign

If this article was useful to you in any manner, we request you to support our campaign “Let’s Empower our Youth” – Just suggest a few books which you would want your child to read before the age of 15. Drop your book suggestion by clicking the image below. 

Looking for Book Promotion & Marketing Support from Sharing Stories Community?