How Not to Hate Marketing Your Book

If you’re an author who hates marketing and self-promotion, at least one of the following is probably true:

• You don’t want to be annoying and thrust yourself into the faces of everyone you know.
• You associate marketing with tricking people into buying something they don’t need.
• You feel like an imposter who doesn’t have the skills for effective self-promotion.

Get ready to challenge those ideas! In this post, you’ll learn how marketing, done right, creates a happy union between you and the people who truly want to read your book. If you’re ready for dozens of specific marketing ideas, I have a post for that as well. In this one, we’re going to re-train your brain so that you can enjoy the act of connecting your book with its readership.

It all comes down to knowing your audience.

If you’re worried that people will find you annoying, remember this: when you’re promoting your work, your goal is not to get the attention of everyone in the world, because your book won’t be the right fit for most of them. In fact, if you do convince people outside your book’s intended audience to pick it up, they will end up feeling tricked. That’s where a lot of bad reviews come from: when the expectations a reader was given for a book have not been met.

This matters because, at its very heart, marketing is a set of tools that help us reach the right people. The ones whose lives will be improved by what we have to offer. The ones who will say things like:

“This is my favourite genre! These tropes make me happy every time.”

“I really needed this information. Now I feel equipped to make some important decisions.”

“This book gets me! I feel like the author is talking directly to me.”

You earn responses like those ones by knowing exactly who your book’s audience is and targeting them consistently. How do you do that? Start by getting as specific as you can about your audience. Here are some examples:

• Monster-loving toddlers who need to move from high to low energy before bedtime
• First-time dads who want to co-parent successfully while working full time
• Bridgerton fans who want to see similar historic-inspired romance play out among 1800s Spanish nobility
• Readers of Braiding Sweetgrass who crave a similar intertwining of Indigenous ways of knowing and scientific knowledge for the plants of western Canada
• Romantasy readers who love the found-family and enemies-to-lovers tropes

Are you excited to tell those people that you wrote a book just for them? I hope so! Will they be excited to hear about it? Yes! And since you had the interest and authority to write the book in the first place, it’s likely that you already have connections to your readership of like-minded people.  

This is the crux of everything in marketing. You wrote this book for someone, and you wrote it out of some interest or experience that you share with them. Now it’s time to find your people and share about something you both love. Isn’t that a nicer way to think of it than aggressively thrusting your book into the faces of the disinterested masses?

You’ve Got This, Introverts

Communicating with your audience

Now that you know who your audience is, it’s time to go address them. There are two questions you need to consider at this point:

1. Where does my audience spend its time and attention?
2. How do I like to communicate?

There’s no point advertising to romantasy readers in a sports magazine. And you’ll quickly burn out if you force yourself to give live presentations when public speaking makes you sick. You’re looking for the sweet spot where the ways your audience likes to receive communication and the ways you like to give it overlap.

You might find your readers through:

Fans of particular tropes or genres

• Genre-specific book clubs
• Facebook groups
• Reddit forums
• BookTok
• Libraries
• Genre-specific publications
• Book bloggers/reviewers who focus on your genre
• Independent bookstores with a strong collection of books in this genre

People looking for specific information

• Pinterest
• Informational blog posts
• Informational videos
• Subject-specific publications and websites
• Workshops
• Specialty businesses or organizations
• Newsletters

Residents of a specific region

• Regional social-media groups
• Physical bulletin boards
• Local book clubs
• Local businesses
• Community organizations
• Libraries
• Festivals and markets
• Newspapers
• Local radio

You might like to communicate by:

• Writing (newsletters, articles, blog posts, emails, press releases)
• Speaking (presentations, videos, festivals, podcasts)
• Interacting online (social media, forums, Facebook pages, Discord servers)
• Interacting in person (book launches, signings, and special events; markets; workshops; chatting with librarians, booksellers, and book clubs; getting involved with organizations that serve your audience)
• Designing (posters, flyers, book trailers, social-media graphics, a Pinterest business account)

Remember: you don’t have to do all these things, or even most of them. Identify your own strengths and play to them.

Read “30 Ways to Market Your Book Once it’s Published” for more elaboration on marketing activities like these.

Bare-minimum passive ways to promote your book

Maybe writing, speaking, and interacting all sound terrible to you. If you want to get away with the bare minimum of marketing effort, here’s what I recommend:

1. Set up a simple website so that anyone who looks you up has a place to land. If you just want a single page with the most basic information, Carrd is a useful free service.
2. Create an email signature that includes a cover image of your book, a link to find it online, and a simple call to action. Use it for all your email correspondence.
3. If you ever do video calls, place your book somewhere visible behind you.
4. If you can handle making one single video, do so. Introduce yourself so viewers will know how to pronounce your name, then talk about your book and why you wrote it. This video will be a useful resource for years to come anytime someone searches for you or your book online. If you can’t face filming yourself, record a PowerPoint slideshow instead. Embed or link to your video on your website.

What not to do when marketing your book

If you want the process of marketing your book to be enjoyable, here are some actions to avoid:

• Don’t spam your personal social-media accounts with “buy my book” posts. (Your loved ones are not usually your target audience!) Instead, post occasionally about exciting milestones in your career that your loved ones will enjoy celebrating with you.
• Don’t stretch yourself too thinly over many social-media platforms, especially if you don’t already enjoy using them. However, being tagged in other people’s posts can be useful, so you might like to create a profile on major platforms and write in your bio that you can be found on [insert platform(s) of choice here].
• Don’t create a social media profile for a specific book unless you’re 100% sure you’ll never write another. Instead, create it for your public persona as an author.
• Don’t try to get everyone’s attention. Instead, focus tightly on your target audience.
• If you’re entering the world of online content, don’t promise a particular posting schedule right out of the gate (unless you’ve created a large batch of content ahead of time). Instead, take your time feeling out an approach that can adapt to your changing needs.  

Most of all, don’t apologize for taking up space. You are an author, and there are people out there whose days will be brightened by finding your book. You owe it to them to speak clearly and shine brightly!