Some new authors believe if you write and publish a book, hungry readers will beat down your door to buy it. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Your book is competing with millions of others for the time and attention of your readers.
So, you have to become proactive about selling your book. No one will buy your book or know it exists without some hardcore marketing on your part. The good news is that there are plenty of different promotional tactics you can use to build your reader base.
Advertise Your Book on Social Media
One of the best ways to get some traffic to your book and find new readers is to use social media advertising. If you’re not familiar with the concept, you pay a social media network of your choice to display an advertisement to other users.
Some authors sign up for social media advertising before they truly understand how to get the best results. It’s not about how many people see your ad. It’s about how many people in your target market see your advertisement.
For example, it’s better to have an advertisement that’s seen by twenty thousand fantasy readers than an advertisement seen by two million readers who don’t enjoy that genre. That’s because the fantasy readers are more likely to sign up for your mailing list or buy your book than the other readers.
To learn more about your audience, look at your statistics about them. On Facebook and Instagram, these statistics are called Insights. Pinterest and Twitter call this data ‘analytics’. Regardless of the name, you need to regularly examine this data and mine it for information you can use to connect with your readers.
You might discover things about your target market that you hadn’t anticipated. You might expect that teens are most likely to buy your young adult book. But your statistics show that it’s not just teens buying your books. Older adults enjoy the genre, too. This means when it’s time to create social advertisements, you don’t want to limit it to a certain age group.
Using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram can be helpful to fiction writers. But if you’re a non-fiction author and your book is about business or leadership topics, you’ll probably see better results when you use LinkedIn to advertise your book. That’s because your target market is primarily business professionals.
Don’t think you have to take out a huge ad and spends thousands on your first social media advertisement. It’s smart to start by running a few small ads first. This prevents you from wasting money on an ineffective ad and it shows you what your audience responds best to.
Another advantage of starting with small ads is that you can measure your return on investment, so you can learn what to expect from your campaigns. For example, you may find that campaigns that run on Wednesday perform better than ads that run over the weekend. This is valuable data, so make sure you’re tracking your results.
Whether you’re launching a huge advertisement or a tiny one, make sure the ad displays nicely on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. A smaller device may make your text difficult to read or cut your picture size in half. If you forget to test the ad, it may flop and you’ll be left wondering what happened.
Don’t forget that you aren’t limited to text and images for your advertisement. You can create video ads that showcase your book and encourage users to buy it. But keep your video short and focused, as most social users won’t stick around to watch long videos. Good video ideas could include: a professionally designed book trailer, a quick tutorial related to your niche, a brief Q & A session, or a short behind the scenes segment explaining your inspiration for the book.
Social media advertising really does work. But it can take a few weeks to figure out how to get the best results, so don’t give up too soon. Instead, keep setting up ads and tweaking them as you learn more about your reader base.