What is Book Marketing?
Book marketing is the process of increasing awareness, maximizing discoverability and creating relationships that help an author to sell more books.
These three elements are crucial to moving readers closer to the goal of buying your book.
Awareness
The first step in book marketing is often awareness. Awareness is simply making potential readers know that your book is (or will soon) be available for purchase.
Depending on your goals and budget, awareness can be simple (a Tweet) or complex (like a social media campaign with a landing page).
No matter what an author chooses, the goal of awareness is to make it easier for an author’s book to stand out in a potential reader’s mind.
Discoverability
When the book is launched, the book marketing process shifts to discoverability.
Discoverability is all about making it easier for readers to find your book among the millions that are released each year. During this phase, authors should focus on finding readers who are actively searching for new books to read.
Getting in front a new audience and making sure your loyal readers can always find out more about you is key to selling more books.
Relationships
Book marketing does not end with a sale. Authors have learned that the best way to continue selling books is to turn readers into fans. By creating fans, using techniques like social media marketing and blogging, authors can retain readers who are more likely to buy their next book.
While book marketing has separate phases (awareness, discoverability, relationships), these phases are designed to work together. By focusing on book marketing as a continuous activity, book marketers create a process that profits the author and the reader.