It’s hard to get lots of people to notice what you’re writing. There are so many authors and books that it becomes overwhelming for us. This can make the concept of marketing bizarre. There are a lot of tips and tricks out there that involve gimmicks to market fiction books but rarely do they bring in the reads.
Often, what truly works are the basics — the time and tested methods perfected to a ‘T’ that pulls in the audience and converts them into your regular readers.
So what are the successful authors doing that make their fiction book marketing so effective? Let’s look at the pillars of marketing a fiction book in detail.
5 Pillars of Successful Fiction Book Marketing
1. Start Your Pre-Launch Marketing Early
When selling a book, you need to think of marketing in terms of a funnel. Your goal is to get as many people as possible into the top of the funnel and then turn them into readers.
The first step in this process is pre-launch marketing. This is where you build up excitement for your book before it’s even published. You can’t just send out an email blast one week before your book launches and expect to make any impact on sales.
The best time to start marketing your book is before publishing it. If you can get people excited about your book before it even comes out, they will be more likely to buy it when it does.
You can start marketing at least a month before your book goes live, but if possible, start as soon as you have finalized your book cover and blurb. And this pre-launch marketing for your fiction book can mean anything from creating a website and social media accounts to writing guest posts and connecting with other authors. It’s important to start early because it gives you time to build up an audience before your book comes out, which helps you get more sales when the time comes.
Read more: Pre-Launch Book Promotion Checklist: 7 Things to Do to Create the Buzz
2. Have Separate Social Media Accounts for Your Author Persona
If you haven’t already done so, create social media accounts for yourself as an author — which are separate from your personal profile. While there isn’t any hard and fast rule that you can’t share personal posts on this profile, the predominant reason for creating this profile should be to promote your fiction books.
This persona should be consistent across all social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You want to create a unique identity that will resonate with readers who enjoy similar books or genres as yours. It will give you a place to interact with potential readers and other authors and promote your books and upcoming events.
Most of your interactions through this author persona should be centred or, at least, led back to your fiction books, your characters, your writing process, etc. Having such profiles across various social media platforms where your readers hang is one of the essentials to successfully marketing your fiction book.
3. Leverage Your Email Subscribers for the Initial Sales
Your email subscribers are your best friends. They’re your most loyal fans and customers, so you want to do everything possible to make sure they know about your new book as soon as it’s released. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach people, particularly if you’ve been using email marketing for some time and have built up a list of subscribers who are interested in what you have to say.
So reach out to our devoted readers — your email subscribers — talking about your new fiction book release and pull them in with an enticing offer. You can offer discounts and additional supplementary content for those loyal readers to get those initial book sales rolling.
Most authors start with their mailing lists, but you can also reach out to other authors with a similar audience and see if they’d be willing to co-promote your book. And this is where the power of co-marketing with other authors comes in.
4. Co-Ordinate and Co-Market with Other Authors
The best way to get more exposure is by working with other authors who have similar interests as yours or, even better, those who write about similar genres as yours. Contact them and ask if they would be willing to work together with you on something like this. If they agree, start planning how you will make this happen! You could do joint author interviews, guest posts on each other’s blogs and talk about each other’s books on social media outlets like Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups! You can also exchange each other’s books, read, offer suggestions and talk about them online to the followers. Anything that will get people talking about both of your books should help increase your book sales.
But keep in mind to work with authors with a similar reader base as yours to maximize your chances of getting discovered and increase your book sales.
5. Keep Your Fiction Book Marketing Interesting
One mistake that many authors make is using the same old marketing techniques over and over again without thinking them through properly. This results in boring content that does not attract new readers or increase sales figures significantly enough to make an impact on your book sales ranking.
Remember that novelty sells. No matter what product or service you’re offering, your customers will be more likely to buy when they’re intrigued by it. Novelty also keeps things fresh, which is another plus in marketing your fiction book.
Use images, videos, fresh written content, GIFs, contests, discounts and offers to keep your fiction book marketing engaging. Don’t keep using the same style of marketing throughout. Instead, mix up different promotional banners, GIFs and videos as you share throughout social media. This way, you can grab the eyeballs of a lot more interested audience.
Not sure where you can find the tools or the time to create such a huge variety of marketing materials?
Check out AllAuthor’s various tools like Magic Tool, Seasonal Mockup Banner, Promotional GIF Banner, and much more.
Each tool requires only a minute or two to create marketing material customized with your book cover. This way, you can churn out multiple marketing materials that you can use throughout your promotions.
Not yet a member of AllAuthor? Create a free account to test out these tools.
