Ten Smart Book-Promotion Services & Strategies that Work

by Penny Sansevieri
Book promotion has changed a lot over the years, as have the book-promotion services companies offer. Part of the reason is the surge of books we see every day in the marketplace. We know from experience that not only does it change how various programs work, but it can also impact strategies that we’ve come to trust, like Facebook ads, which don’t have the same impact they did two years ago.
So what’s working in book promotion now? Surprisingly, it’s not at all what you might expect.
The book-promotion services that work these days are less about what you’re marketing in the moment, and more about the foundation you’re creating. Let’s have a look:

Email Newsletters:

I know, it seems odd to start with something so basic, right? But here’s the thing about newsletters. They are a direct connection to your reader, unlike social media, which technically is not as direct a link as we’d like it to be. An email newsletter may seem like a lot of work, but it’s really not as bad as managing a bunch of social-media platforms (we’ll get to that one in a minute).

Your Reader Fan Base:

With book publishing growing, our window for using blogs for book promotion keeps shrinking. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t promote your book to the blogger market, but consider this: as the window for book promotion continues to change, one thing always remains steadfast: your readers. Building an excited and engaged reader fan base is a fantastic way to build momentum for your book. It allows readers to help you with your book promotion by posting reviews and sharing your book release on their social stream. The longer we go down this road of endless books being published (so far, around 4,500 a day), the more it becomes crucial to build a supportive reader fan base.

Why Your Book Cover Matters in Marketing:

Book promotion starts long before the book winds up on Amazon and you email all your friends to tell them to buy it. Book promotion starts when you’re writing the book as well as when you’re paying a professional to design the cover. While book covers may seem like an odd thing to mention in a blog post about the best book-promotion services, it matters more than you think. I’ve seen authors throw thousands and thousands of dollars at book-marketing campaigns that net them next to nothing in terms of book sales. Why? Because they have a bad cover. I can almost guarantee you if your cover isn’t right for your audience, you will not only hurt the book you poured your heart and soul into writing, but you’ll kill any chance of selling copies.
Don’t get so close to your project that you lose objectivity. If your book is already out on the market and you’re struggling to sell copies, consider whether your book cover needs a revamp.

Going Local:

A lot of authors want to hit the big time with big media and national exposure. While all of that is great, local media and events are often overlooked. First off, local media loves local authors. So whether it’s a story about you publishing your first (or fifth!) book or promoting your local event, local book promotion is a great launching pad for long-term success. Part of the reason isn’t because you aren’t national media-worthy, but because national media is harder than ever to get (I’ll talk more about this later). Also, many bigger TV shows have scouts researching local stories that are gaining momentum. Back when Oprah had her show, her producers often worked with many scouts all across the country to find their stories. So including local promotion in your book-marketing activities is a great way to add momentum to your book-promotion campaign.
In terms of local, you may also consider doing events, whether they are libraries, bookstores, or gift fairs. Consider doing events in other non-bookstore markets like gift stores, coffee shops, and other local stores that might be interested in your topic.
If you still aren’t convinced about doing local book–promotion, listen up. I recently met an author who had done no major promotion. She had done no ebook promotion, no ads, no national reviews. All she did was local promotion. Her bookmarks were in all local stores that would let her leave them, and she did a bunch of local events in bookstores, gift shops, libraries, and even a restaurant (on their slowest night, which helped to bring in foot traffic!). She sold 5,000 copies of her book in the first 90 days of her campaign. Her book-marketing budget was almost zero, which is what prompted her to market her book this way.
This example proves you can’t buy everything by outsourcing book-promotion services! Yes, you can get help in key areas, and of course I encourage you to do that if you don’t have the time to manage it all on your own, but don’t assume you can hand off all of your book promotion to a third party; cornerstone strategies still are best executed by the author.

Expanding Your Goodreads Presence:

Goodreads has been around for a long time, and with each month that passes the site grows more robust. Now more than ever it’s important to get yourself set up on that site and start networking with genre-specific groups. This site, more than any other social networking site, is really geared to readers and caters to them in a way that no other platform does. Start by being a reader, first and foremost. Yes, you have books that you want people to read, but being heavy on networking/socializing and lighter on pushy marketing will garner much more attention and, in the long run, sell more books.

Smart eBook Pricing:

Surprisingly, this is a big hurdle for many authors, mostly because they aren’t really sure what pricing works best for their market, but also because the guidance around this can be a bit confusing. Some years ago authors heavily discounted their books, sometimes offering them at ninety-nine cents. This trend hasn’t gone away, but it’s done less often. Readers aren’t as geared to finding bottom-of-the-barrel deals on ebooks like they once were. The main reason for this is digital clutter. Ebook-device readers that are jammed with more books than anyone could ever read isn’t the same as having a fully stocked bookshelf; it just feels like clutter. For this reason, the once coveted super deals on books aren’t gaining the same traction as they once were. Smart book pricing, however, is.
By smart book pricing, I’m not talking about discounting prices and running specials, although that’s good, too. What I’m speaking of here is smart book pricing overall. Book pricing at launch, for example, can be slightly lower than what your regular pricing will be. Even a dollar discount can give your book a helpful bump at launch time, Ebook pricing in general should be weighed against what the market will bear and where you’re just starting out. I’m not a fan of pricing ebooks over $9.99, so I suggest that if you’re just starting out, it’s advisable to consider that pricing or a tad lower. Remember if you’re a new author, readers are taking a chance on you, and might be much more inclined to do so if your book is offered at a price that feels more like an impulse buy.

Amazon Book Page:

This is an area that authors spend a shockingly small amount of time on. I think that in general we get outwardly focused on our book promotion and forget the all-important landing page we are sending our readers to. Your book page on Amazon should have a clear description, with white space and no paragraphs crammed on top of each other. I recommend enhancing your book page using your Author Central Page. From there you can access all kinds of stuff, like adding reviews to your page, including an author interview or book experts. Your book page should be a sampling of your personality and of information helpful to readers; helping them decide to buy your book is a terrific way to help drive more reader engagement on your page.

Amazon Advertising:

I have a real love/hate relationship with Amazon ads (also referred to as AMS ads). When they revamped their platform and the associated advertisement algorithm, the traction that some books got using AMS ads dropped like a rock. But since that time the platform has found its footing and the ads do much better, with, in some cases, higher return than we saw previously. A guideline for ads is that you’ll want to have 400 keyword at a minimum. Start your ads at ten dollars a day and no more than fifty cents a click until you get a sense of how the various keywords are doing.
I love doing AMS ads at campaign launch, starting them the week before the book launches, provided it’s on pre-order. I use them a lot when I’ve lowered the price of the book for a couple of days to coincide with an ebook promotion.

Keeping Your Social Footprint Small:

While this may sound counterintuitive, it’s my firm belief. and based on mountains of research, that we’ve become digital-weary. Users are leaving Facebook in large numbers or are not posting regularly, Twitter has become a bigger political platform than it ever was, and Instagram is staying delightfully in the middle of the road, meaning that of all of the social platforms, it has the most universal appeal.
The problem with trying to be on all social-media platforms is that it’s hard to engaged on all the sites, all the time. Engagement does matter. In the age of fake followers and fake accounts, users with the most engagement, even if their numbers are small, outperform accounts with millions of followers. But keep in mind that a smaller social-media footprint doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s less work. You’ll be less scattered, for sure, but you will still need to put the effort into that site, whichever one you decide to interact on. Engaging readers on one social media platform in a consistent and fun/informative/helpful way is a far better book-promotion strategy than trying to be everywhere. As I always say: it’s not about being everywhere; it’s about being everywhere that matters.

Knowing Your Audience:

Many authors I speak with have no idea who their actual reader market is. When I ask them, they often say, “Everyone.” You know who markets to everyone? McDonald’s, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. But they didn’t start out focused on everyone. Amazon, for example, started out as a book site, reaching readers. It wasn’t until they built a base of readers that they began expanding into other things. Knowing your audience is not only important when you’re writing your book, but absolutely crucial when you’re trying to market it. Zeroing in on your core reader is key to any successful book-promotion campaign.
So now that we know what works and what doesn’t work in book-promotion and book-promotion services, let’s take a look at what authors should not focus on related to their campaign.

Big, Robust Media Campaign:

Make no mistake, media is great. A good big-media hit can give your book marketing campaign a major boost. The problem with this is that media, especially big media, is overwhelmed with stories. I mentioned earlier how important local media is, and it’s important to remember that sometimes the biggest and most robust campaigns start small. The other element of this is that if you’re going to swing for the fences, make sure you’re ready to do so. If you want big media, you should have some media reels from prior appearances (even local media), a media room with talking points, a robust social media presence, and an active blog. This is why, when authors comes to me asking for a big, national media campaign right out of the gate with no prior media work and little to no social media presence, I do my best to encourage them to start with other elements that will help them build their platform. You may ask what it can hurt to pitch yourself to media anyway, even if you don’t have a platform. Well, some authors do this and get lucky, but that’s rare. Don’t exhaust your opportunities before you’re really ready for them!

Being Everywhere on Social:

Having a good, robust social-media presence can be a great boost to your book-promotion campaign. Picking the right platform for your audience is crucial. I sometimes see authors get on every social-media platform because more is better, right? Sometimes it’s just more. A focused social-media campaign, even if it means being on just one platform, can be really helpful to your campaign. Why? Because you can spend all of your time focused on one area, and I can almost guarantee you that being in the right place will give your book-promotion campaign the boost you need, leaving you with time to write another book!

Selling Your Book:

As crazy as it sounds, the worst thing you can do to market a book is to sell a book. The key here is to sell the benefits, not the book. No one except for your mom cares that you wrote a book, they care what the book can do for them. Selling the benefits is key to making the sale, because if you can get readers to care about what the book can do for them, you’ll make the sale.

Penny Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. (AME) and an adjunct professor at NYU, is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns.