Why Marketing Your Self-Published Book Is So Important: A Guide for New Authors
If you’re a new author, you might be feeling overwhelmed by all the information, tips, tricks, and hacks for marketing your first book. We get it—the internet is flooded with posts expounding on all the things self-published authors should do to promote and sell their books. You might be thinking about releasing your new work without all the fanfare, but we’re here to tell you that you should definitely put some time and effort into devising and executing a marketing strategy. Not only will it boost the chances of your book to achieve commercial success, but it will also lay a solid foundation for the rest of your writing career.
Even if your book is absolutely brilliant, it won’t get discovered by itself. If you don’t want all the hard work you poured into your manuscript to be voided, you’ll need to invest in a carefully drafted marketing strategy that gets your book in front of those who will be most interested in it. If you’re new to marketing, it can be scary to embark on this new journey, but luckily, there are tons of professional resources to help you.
Whether you hire a professional service to craft a marketing strategy or do it yourself, marketing your self-published book is a must if you want to stand out and turn a profit. Would you like to work with a team of experts? Then check out our book marketing packages for authors.
Let’s start with the basics. Why is book marketing so important?
Book marketing increases your sales
This is probably the number one reason authors do any marketing at all for their books. Without a solid marketing strategy, selling your book is going to be a huge challenge—releasing your first self-published book without a marketing campaign is almost guaranteed to result in commercial failure. You’ve already put too much work and money into your book to skimp now—making the investment in marketing is worth it and dramatically increases your sales.
Marketing is about promoting your book to the people who would read it—your target audience—and a strong marketing strategy will convert that promotional campaign into sales. The more people who know about your book, the higher the chances that someone will buy it, meaning it won’t just increase your sales (and therefore your profits) but also your readership. Once you have a fan base built up, it’ll be increasingly easier to promote your published works, but you first have to cultivate that initial fan base.
Book marketing enhances your personal brand
By publishing a book, you officially become a public person. It sounds weird, we know, but being in the public eye is part of the job description even though most authors choose to keep a low profile. However you decide to manage this aspect of your career will depend entirely on your personality, lifestyle, and what you want from your new job description. Still, the truth remains that if you want your book to sell, you have to consider yourself a brand. Even if you’re staying out of the spotlight and letting your books take center stage, as you publish more titles, your brand will become more important, and the audience will come to expect certain things from you.
Readers want to know about the authors of the books they’re reading. They want to learn personal things about you, to humanize you and connect with you. Making yourself personable to your audience can have a bigger impact than you probably think. You also want to become googleable, which means people need to remember your name (or pen name) and associate it with your book. This is just another reason why marketing is so important to the commercial success of a new book—it will develop your brand as an author, which will, in turn, translate into a wider, more engaged audience and more sales.
Book marketing builds trust and familiarity in your audience
However, it’s not all about sales and profits. It’s also about building a community based on trust, openness, and familiarity so that your readers become true fans and support your career as it continues to grow and evolve. They’ll also be the ones to give you reviews and drive traffic to your online profiles and website; plus, you can count on them to buy each new book you publish. In many cases, readers pay more attention to who’s publishing a book than to the book itself, so if you can get on their whitelist, you’re doing well. In short, you want to grow this base of loyal fans as much as you can and keep them happy and engaged.
That’s why it’s essential to do some research before launching your marketing campaign. It will give you a clear understanding of who your target audience is, what their interests are, and what the best ways to communicate with them would be. Do they spend more time posting on social media platforms or listening to podcasts? Do they scroll online marketplaces like Amazon to find their next read, or do they rely on recommendations from their favorite influencers? What kind of ads and posts do they respond best to, and when and where should you post them?
Being able to answer these questions will make it much easier for you as an author to connect with your audience on a more personal, human level and build an authentic marketing strategy that will entice them to buy something they already want rather than pushing your book on them.
Book marketing can improve your ranking on search pages
As we said above, an engaged audience is more likely to click on your ads, visit your website, and check out your online profiles, such as your Amazon Author Page. This traffic will improve your search engine rankings, meaning your book will reach even more people, thus generating more sales. In case you haven’t noticed the trend already, online marketing is all circular: The more people who know you, the more people who will get to know you. That won’t be good only for your first book but also for any subsequent books you release.
The problem is getting started—you’ll need an effective promotional campaign to get that initial traction in your career. Basically, a good marketing strategy serves as a popularity hack that you can build on to grow your brand and recognition in the industry; if all goes well, you may not have to do that much marketing for your fourth or fifth book.
There’s a lot you can do on your own these days, from buying paid ads and using data processing tools to define your target audience to utilizing social media platforms to create a content marketing strategy and attracting new readers through sales and discounts. If you want your new book to see the light of day and, better yet, make you some money, you definitely need a solid marketing strategy to connect with your target audience, build your brand, and consolidate your fan base. When you don’t have experience in marketing, it can be difficult to know how to approach this monumental task. If you’re still not sure where to begin, check out our book marketing packages for authors and let our experts craft a personalized strategy for your book.
