Marketing & Promotion

It’s hard work and there’s no magic formula to boost sales, but you’ll also find a passionate audience and a strong sense of accomplishment.

However you decide to publish, it’s unwise to rely on someone else to build your career, or to be responsible for growing your readership.

Whether using a third-party service to conduct a giveaway or managing it on your own, it’s important to protect the rights of your entrants.

Editorial reviews are one of the most underrated tools in a self-publishing author’s arsenal. Learn what they are and how to manage them.

Online or in person, the basics of public speaking are still what matters most: be captivating, interactive, and take your audience on a journey.

Promoting a book isn’t a one-off event. It’s a series of actions: long-lead strategies, mid-range tasks, and sudden opportunities.

One author’s experience with the pros and cons of promoting a new book to his community in the era of limited social gatherings.

Your friends and fans want to celebrate with you. When public gatherings aren’t an option, you can take the party online at virtually no cost.

You’ve got something that corporate brands don’t—yourself. Nurture a relationship with your readers, and they’ll do the marketing for you.

A big mistake authors make is assuming that the influencer needs to read a copy of the book—or have a copy—in order to support it. Not true.

When you're a one-person marketing team, try these foundational tips for approaching libraries about having your book added to their collections.

A debut novelist surveyed readers on Facebook. The result? In publishing, as in life, first impressions matter—and we do judge books by their covers.

Skip the book signing; there's greater reward in identifying and connecting with the audience that already shares a passion for your topic.

To read your work aloud well, you must train like a pro. From public speaking coach Gigi Rosenberg, here’s a guide to what you need to do to show up with confidence.

You don’t need an influencer’s clout to make your book and brand successful, but it can help expose your work to a larger audience. Before you reach out, here are some important do's & don'ts to keep in mind.

Most people don’t read websites; they scan. The same is true for your book description. In this guest post, Penny Sansevieri offers tips to make your promotional copy appealing enough for readers to linger.

With low barrier to entry, livestreaming can be a great way to give your audience a chance to fall in love with you and your message. Here are some essential tips from the team at Best Seller Builders.

Knowing your audience is key to book marketing and sales success.

Obtaining readers for your book is hard enough. Once you have their attention, how do you make the most of it? Dave Chesson suggests "reader magnets"—incentives that turn strangers into subscribers.

In this guest post, author and nonfiction writing coach Boni Wagner-Stafford explains why defining your objectives up front leads to a more focused and effective book marketing strategy.

It's been proven by research: reviews help drive book sales. And reviews on Amazon can help your book turn up more often in customer searches. So you want reviews—great reviews—but they need to be authentic. Here's how to get them.

Libraries represent a valuable opportunity for a book discoverability and sales, but librarians may not know your book exists without marketing outreach.

Sharing your in-progress book cover on social media to solicit meaningful direction is like throwing a bomb into the creative process.

Authors who want to sell their work must often do the marketing themselves, and some methods are easier than others. In this guest post, essayist, memoirist and short story writer Beth Alvarado discusses the ways and reasons why you should take an active role in marketing your own book.

There are a lot of publicists out there. How can you pick the right one? This is a crucial decision, so it needs to be approached with care.

Just like print editions, audiobooks have established outlets for marketing and promotion. Attorney and audiobook editor, director, and distributor Jessica Kaye tells writers and publishers how to make their audiobooks as highly visible and widely available as possible--without the use of advertising.

Amazon has updated its advertising tools for authors, with mixed results. Kindlepreneur's Dave Chesson breaks down the pros and cons of the new advertising modes, improved dashboard, and better ad targeting in Amazon Ads.

Here is a step-by-step guide to building an email list of thousands within one year—primarily through giveaways and Facebook ads.

One of the hardest things to do—for any individual, organization, or business—is to define a vision and strategy. It involves diving deep into one's strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the market opportunities and threats. Talking strategy usually means dealing with uncomfortable realities, as well as risking disagreement with others.

Building a supportive network takes time and courage. It’s worth starting to cultivate community early on, even if your instinct or preference is to work alone.

Many authors use Facebook and Amazon to advertise their books. If you’ve tried these platforms without success or hesitate to spend the money, consider experimenting with BookBub ads.

Meaningful swag offers the reader something connected to the book and something that’s memorable—but you need something that doesn't break the budget.

I regularly read and report on marketing trends that affect traditionally published and self-published writers. Today I'm sharing the most useful articles I've found and shared thus far in 2018.

Readers start their journey to find new books in a broad sense, but eventually gain experience and understand more about what they are looking for. By understanding the awareness level of a reader, we can better position our books and gain long-term fans.

It can be challenging to make back the cost of your books and the price of a table when exhibiting at a book festival. So, finding cheap but cool things to use at book events is essential.

Publishers and authors can use sophisticated language to describe books—to sound unique, clever and smart. But readers describe books in more direct ways.

Novelist Cai Emmons discusses how a van tour to meet booksellers in person helped her overcome her timidity toward book marketing.

No matter how many books have been written about a topic, there is probably some important facet that has not yet been covered thoroughly or well. A key driver behind success is understanding how you fit into the existing landscape, what distinguishes your work, and why it is likely to appeal to a particular audience.

This post was first published in 2012 and is regularly updated. First things first: an author's website, whether it gets

Public speaking skills are more akin to musical or athletic skills than intellectual knowledge alone. Mastery does not take place simply in your brain; it takes place in your body, in the “doing” of it.

I used to laugh at the “Christmas-in-July” ads until I promoted my first holiday-related book. We actually started the promotion in July, and July turned out to be the perfect time.

It’s one thing to know how to setup something technical like an advertisement, an email system, or your book’s sales page on Amazon. However, crafting them so a potential reader will take action is something else.

Unless you are Harper Lee, you are probably going to launch more than one book during your career. For the introvert, learn six ways to keep your head above water not just for your first book, but also for the long haul.

Silence—or, in fact, just saying less—is an art that can be strategically practiced by authors who seek attention. It is also a critical strategy when trying to influence people who hear about new books all day, every day.

Hiring an outside publicity firm is a big decision, and knowing what to expect on the front end can help you make the right selection and get more out of the experience.

Book relaunches can take a variety of forms. If done right, they enhance your overall brand, as well as your book sales. Their first and foremost benefit is the new publication date. Having a new book opens up access to bloggers and media who might not have been available to you with an older book.

“If you build it, they will come” is the biggest crock of sh*t ever foisted. The second biggest is my own mental script: “If I write it, The New York Times bestseller list will come.” Nope. Wrong answer.

Sometimes going back is going forward—especially if you refashion the old, sloughing off what became untenable. This is why I’m going back to blogging. While every writer won’t find my reasons of interest, plenty of writers might want to explore their possibility.

Book launches are intense and can feel very high stakes, so use the time between them to take a step back and consider how to build a career over many years, and many books, to come.

New authors have no symbolic capital. They are not (yet) known for producing quality books that seduce readers. Is it possible for self-publishing authors to create symbolic capital? Absolutely yes, and many have. In today’s increasing online world of book shopping, it is book reviews that build symbolic capital.