What’s Next: Marketing Your Book Post-Publication
Congratulations you have accomplished an amazing feat: writing and publishing a book. Seriously, it is hard work. But your work isn’t done. You need to continue marketing your book post-publication.
Hopefully, you already employed pre-publication and during publication strategies, like having a launch team. But don’t be like many authors and hit launch hard and then forget about marketing after that.
1. Post Updates on Your Author Website
If you don’t have an author website, build one. Stat! If you wrote a nonfiction book about a topic dealing with your place of business, you can also house your author website as a page on your business website. (Example: if your book is about healing from trauma, you can have a book tab on your counseling website to promote your book.)
So now that you have an author website or a page on your business site to discuss your books, you need to update it so Google will continue to index it.
Ideas to update it:
- Post reviews from Amazon or elsewhere to the page
- Write and post reviews suggesting other books your readers will enjoy
- Change up your author bio (your author bio should be on your author website or author page on your business site)
- Post tips on how to get the most from your book (nonfiction)
- Post mini-stories on your characters life before or after the book (fiction)
- Post social media Q&A sessions (see #4)
- Post promotions to books from other authors (see #2)
- Run contests and giveaways (see #3)
2. Cross Promote with Other Authors
Contact other authors with similar books in your genre and cross promote each other in your newsletters, on your social media platforms, and on your author website.
Make sure when these authors promote your books that they tag you in all social media posts, and make sure you do the same for them.
If you do giveaways, you can even do multi-author giveaways so instead of giving away your book, you give your book and a few by other authors. And then these other authors do the same for you.
This expands the number of people who are aware of your book.
3. Giveaways, Contests, and Fundraisers
Run promotional discounts or offer your book as prizes.
Think of seasonal times when you can market your book post-production by giving a seasonal discount. Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years, etc.
You can also occasionally give away your book for free. For example, you can run a contest asking some question about the content of your book that people may know without having read your book (if nonfiction) or asking some question about topics that arise in your novel’s world (if fiction). The first person to get all the questions right either gets your book for free or gets a discount.
Find out about local silent auctions and list your book.
Run charitable donations and say you will donate X amount to X charity for every book purchased.
Don’t forget to also post these on your author website even if you run them from social media (you want Google to know your website is being updated often).
4. Run an Author Q&A
Email your list asking them what questions they would like to ask you about you, your characters (fiction), your book’s topic (nonfiction), etc.
Then post one question and answer on your social media feed every day with a link to your book.
When you have finished answering all the questions on social media, compile them all together to create a blog for your website.
5. Author interview
Reach out to influencers in your book’s topic (nonfiction) or your book’s genre (fiction) and ask if they want to interview you for their podcast or radio program. You can even provide them with the interview questions if that makes it easier for them.
6. Celebrate milestones
When you’ve hit a milestone (number of books purchased, number of reviews) or received exciting news (a great review, an email from a fan), celebrate and post it on social media with a link to your book.
7. Get your book in local bookstores
Visit local bookstores and tell them about your book and the success you’ve had so far and see if they would be interesting in having your book on their shelves.
8. Write another book
Having more books boosts your author credibility and gives you a reason to market your previous book(s).
The main takeaway here is not to publish your book and then forget about it. Hopefully, your launch team helped you gain initial traction on Amazon and/or in bookstores. But you need to have post-publication marketing strategies in play.
