In Part 6 we talked about the best ways to approach ARC readers while taking timing into account. We also talked about cover reveals and how to use your cover in a marketing campaign with the goal of generating more pre-orders.
But what else can you do in terms of marketing before your book is out? Let's dive into it!
Small giveaways and promos
After the cover reveal, a lot more people will finally look at you as a ‘real’ author and as someone who’s about to enter the fold with a real book and a proper marketing strategy – someone who knows what they’re doing.
The best way to keep this momentum going is to continue to do other smaller marketing campaigns, even if they don’t lead to sales, just to keep your name out there. If you’re not familiar with the seven touches of marketing, it’s a principle that for someone to make a purchase, they need to ‘see’ or... ‘touch’ something seven times before they buy it. So by keeping yourself in the spotlight, you’re increasing the chances of more people ‘touching you’ and therefore, also boosting the odds of them buying your book or pre-ordering it.
One way to do this when you have no reveals and the book release is still a good few weeks away is to run small giveaways with some freebies and promotional materials. Here’s what I did:
- 1) A ‘map reveal’. Since I publish epic fantasy and epic fantasy readers like fantasy maps, I did one, with a video with effects and everything. People loved it and shared it a bunch.
- 2) I hosted a giveaway for free book markers of the book that I had made myself. All people had to do was join my mailing list. Before this giveaway I had 5 people on my mailing list. After the giveaway I had 85. It was a pretty solid start, even if the book markers cost money. People like to win things and want to support you and joining a mailing list doesn’t cost them anything. In the end, I only gave away 10 book markers and I still have the rest to this day.
- 3) I hosted another giveaway for a set of book markers plus the fantasy map, under the same premise. I grew my mailing list to about 150 people with this.
If you want to go all in and really keep your name out there, you can do more formal campaigns that cost money. The best one is a Blog Tour.
Book (Blog) Tours
In traditional book tours, authors go from city to city and sometimes even country to country to promote their book, sign copies, perhaps do readings or be interviewed. A blog tour is similar. It’s the internet equivalent of that.
Fortunately, we live in a day and age where you can find anything online. This includes your readers, of course! And since you’re a self-publisher, you don’t have the backing of a traditional publisher to pay for you to go around and promote your book. But you don’t need that. For a much smaller fee (depending on the service you choose), you can pay a professional book tour service to organise a tour of blogs for your book release.
This means for a set period that can be as short as three days and as long as a month, you will have one or multiple blogs posting online about your book every day. It can be just a review, an Instagram post, anything. These book tour services have relationships with several bloggers and influencers and they rally the reviewers to take part.
The great thing about having a book blog tour for your book scheduled for the release week is that every single day there will be people talking about your book, which means you will likely avoid getting a sales spiking on release day and then seeing your sales plummet just on the day after. I did a 14-day blog tour and it was great. Even if the blog post was just a picture of the book cover on Instagram, it’s still internet traffic and buzz, contributing to the 'seven touches' of marketing I talked about in previous parts.
The not-so-great thing about book blog tours is that the reviewers are under no obligation to actually review the book, so you won’t have all the traffic you wanted and the reviews will probably be fewer than you were expecting, but I still think it’s better than nothing, though. It's still a pretty good head start.
There are many different book blog tour services out there. They all have different price points, durations and different niches they cover. If you write in a fantasy niche and you get a blog tour service whose typical bloggers involved tend to read mostly thrillers or romances, this might not be great for you. At the same time, if you go for a blog tour service that specialises only in your niche, then you probably would have been able to find those bloggers and reviewers yourself in the first place... and without paying.
All of this just to say it’s really up to you what you want based on what your goal is, and there are plenty of services out there that can help. You might even decide you don’t need one. For my second book in the series, I’m not going to do a blog tour anymore, but for Book 1, I certainly don’t regret having done it, since it helped beef up my initial reviews on launch week. The more reviews and ratings you have, the more ‘credibility’ you have, and the more likely your book is to be bought by people. If more people buy it, then it will trigger the algorithm on Amazon and you will get started on your self-publishing journey the right way--upward!
If you’re wondering “wait... shouldn’t I be hosting a book release event in person as well?”, my answer would be: no... but also yes...
In-person book release event?
What I mean by that is that the traditional book release events tend to be very overhyped but ultimately fail super hard.
Without an existing audience and the backing of a big traditional publisher, I don’t think you should count too much on in-person events working out for you. I know horror stories of authors who organised book launch events on social media, got about two hundred people signing up and saying they’d attend. The author spent days putting everything together with a local bookstore, and then... nobody showed up. Not a single soul.
The author was left feeling awful in the day that was meant to be for celebration. On top of that, the owner of the bookstore was pissed because they took a chance by agreeing to host an event for a no-name author who overpromised and underdelivered massively, which is always terrible for business. And the author was left feeling even worse because of that.
I’ll tell you what I think you should do: make plans with your loved ones.
I'm including in here everyone who supported you throughout your writing journey and are genuinely happy for you. Celebrate! Order pizza, bake a cake with the book cover on top of it... whatever you want. That’s what a book release party should look like!
After all, you are now a published author and I’d like to tell you everything gets easier but... oh my sweet summer child... it doesn’t.
Before we go into the actual publication technicalities, there are still a lot of things to figure out like: should you upload your book exclusively to Amazon or make it widely available everywhere? What should your pricing strategy be?
Those are topics for Part 8!
(Continues in Part 8)
