I know you must have read so many articles on book marketing tips, tactics and strategies. You must have some of your own ideas you’re implementing right now.
But there’s one simple book marketing tactic that works for every author, irrespective of your genre and book type.
And that is:
Show Up and Engage with Your Readers
This is one of the most underrated strategies utilized by authors. This may be because authors generally prefer to sit behind the laptop, typing away their next book.
If this is you, make sure to spend a fraction of that time showing up online where your target readers can interact with them.
How Can You Start Engaging with the Readers?
Let’s say that you have a not-so-active social media page and your readers have given up trying to find you online.
Suffice to say that you’re starting on plain ground to build your reader base online. If you’re at such a place, here’s what you can do.
- Find out the pages and accounts where you find a good majority of your target audience.
- Engage with your competitors’ posts and lead a few followers to your profile.
- Write short, catchy posts that your readers will love.
- Send an email to your mailing list about becoming active on social media + a direct link to follow you.
Once you are getting decent traction, you will start building meaningful relationships with your readers. Don’t expect things to happen overnight. It takes time to build a loyal following. It’s not always about the follower count. You want followers who are ready to invest in your books.
So, it doesn’t matter if you have 5k followers if only 1% of them are remotely interested in buying your book. It’s better to have 2k followers and have 50% of them interested in what you write!
What Can You Share on Social Media?
If you think you can get away with sharing only your book covers day in and day out, you’re so wrong!
Most of your followers are there for your content first and only a handful follow you because of your book. So, share images and videos about your books regularly, but that shouldn’t be the only thing on your page.
You can post about many things on social media connected to your image as an author or indirectly for your book promotion. If you’re writing a new book, talk about what it is, how far along are you and your hiccups.
People love the humane aspects of work. So, show them that you’re just like them and inspire them with your way of smashing the hindrances and writing a wonderful book.
If you’re short of ideas to post, here are some to get you started:
- Your book writing process
- Your daily schedule
- Any tips you adopt for writing
- Some books/quotes you like
- Share other authors’ works
- Ask questions to the followers about their book-reading preferences
- Use interactive images and GIFs to talk to the followers about your books. (To do that, you can use AllAuthor’s Book GIF Banners to ask engaging questions about your books to the readers. )
- Create different images with your books (You can try out AllAuthor’s Magic Tool to create 3D images of your book mockups and use them with the Image Editor to create various images for book promotions within a few minutes.)
Apart from these, you can post about book launches, book reviews, any milestones achieved with your books, conduct live book reading sessions online and do a lot more.
The only thing you should remember is to make yourself seem interesting to the new followers that they become your loyal readers.
You can use AllAuthor’s Tweet Scheduler Tool to schedule your tweets in advance. This way, you don’t have to come online every single day and still be active.
Wrapping Up
As you keep showing up regularly online, posting stuff that your followers like and interacting with them, you create a relationship with everyone, which converts them to readers when you have a new book ready to be released.
There’s no secret to marketing on social media. The best way is to be regular and interactive with your followers and adding value to their feed with your posts.
The beauty of social media is the openness and access to anyone and everyone you want. So when you leverage that, you will create a reader base not just for your current books but for any books that you’ll be writing in the future.
