How to Market a Book
Write more books: one title rarely sells itself, and every new book sells the last one. Then get three things right: a cover that signals the exact sub-genre, a price you chose on purpose, and a brand readers recognise across every book you publish.
Why does writing more books beat marketing one harder?
One book can sell well. Some have made their authors millionaires. Those are the exception, and building a plan around being the exception is not a plan.
Several titles change the arithmetic:
- You can sell a trilogy to one reader as a bundle, instead of three readers on three separate decisions.
- When a full-length book loses its opening momentum, a short story or novella restarts it, driving sales three ways at once, to the first book, to the novella, and to the pre-order of the next.
- Every sale of one book puts your other titles in front of that reader.
Label a short story as a short story and a novella as a novella. Readers who expected a full-length novel leave one-star reviews and write you off, and they are right to.
How do I pick the right genre and cover?
Not “a mystery”: a legal mystery, or a holiday mystery. The sub-genre is where readers actually search, and it decides the cover, the keywords and the tags together.
- Search the genre on Amazon and study the top 100 covers.
- Look at what they share: palette, typography, the kind of image.
- Design toward that, then differentiate inside it.
- A holiday romance and a winter thriller are not interchangeable, and a cover that hedges between them reaches neither.
What else is worth doing?
- Publish in print as well as ebook. They reach different readers, and print opens doors ebook cannot.
- Consider audio. A third format, a third set of readers, and a backlist that keeps earning.
- Redo old covers. A template cover on a good book is money left on the table.
- Price on purpose. Free and $0.99 do different jobs; pick which one this book is for.
- Use Amazon’s own advertising where the readers already are.
- Brand yourself, not just the book: consistent name, look and promise across titles.
- Support other authors in your genre, and collaborate with them.
- Treat social media as a place to be found, not a place to broadcast.
Marketing one book directs traffic to everything you have, on Amazon, in a bookshop, or on your own site. That only pays if the work is worth arriving at, which is why professional editing and a real cover come before any of this.
Originally published on eBookStage in November 2020 as “Top 11 Book Marketing Strategies for 2021”, by Rahiem Brooks. Edited for length and structure; the advice is his.
Common questions
- How many books do I need before marketing works?
- More than one. First-time authors with a single book can sell well, but they are the exception. With several titles you can bundle, cross-sell, and use each release to pull readers back to the earlier books.
- What should a book cover actually do?
- Signal the sub-genre before anyone reads the title. Search your genre on Amazon, look at the top 100, and see what those covers have in common: a holiday mystery and a legal mystery look nothing alike, and readers sort by that in a second.
- Is it worth publishing in print as well as ebook?
- Yes. Print and ebook reach different readers and different shelves, and a print edition makes the book real for bookshops, libraries and reviewers who will not consider a digital-only title.
- Should I re-cover an older book?
- If the cover was homemade or built from a template, yes. A backlist title with a professional cover starts selling again, and it lifts everything else you have published.
- How much should I spend on editing and covers?
- Neither has to cost a fortune, but both are an investment rather than an expense. A book competing with professionally produced titles needs to look like one.
- Does supporting other authors actually help?
- It is one of the few things that compounds. Readers of a book like yours are the readers you want, and the authors who write those books are the people best placed to introduce you.