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Good marketing starts well in advance of you telling anyone about your book. Before you start creating your marketing plan, there are a few key elements I think need to be in place, which then set you up for success later on down the road.
Getting these right gives you a strong foundation and makes everything about marketing easier. Easier sounds better right?
1/ An understanding of your book
I know this sounds obvious, but many authors miss this step. Unless you sit down and have a proper think about it, it can be hard to nail down the essence of a book that you are incredibly close to.
Before you start any marketing, try to answer the following questions:
- Who is the ideal reader for my book? (Not necessarily ‘women over 45 – think more along the lines of ‘someone who loves X, Y and Z’.)
- What are the other books your reader would enjoy? Where does your book sit amongst those?
- What will the reader learn/feel/enjoy about the book? What is the emotional journey they’ll be going on?
- What are the themes of your book that you can pull out for publicity, your newsletter or guest posts for other people or your social media? Eg: what is the setting? What is the time period? Are there plot points that connect to things happening in the wider world?
- What is the ‘hook’ of the book? How will it change the way I think about the world? Is there a twist or something else that makes your book different from other books in its genre? What is the thing that will make me think ‘Oooh, that sounds like it’s right up my street’?
- How would you pitch your book to someone in under a minute? Sometimes you’ll hear people call this your ‘elevator pitch’!
You don’t need to answer every single question perfectly, but having a brainstorm about these things will
a) give you more clarity on who you are trying to speak to,
b) make it easier for you to show those readers why they’ll love your book, and
c) give you plenty of things to talk about related to the book.
These will also help inform the following points I’ve shared below and your marketing campaign.
2/ A strong cover
I’ve written before about why a strong cover is so important, but in short;
- It gives people an idea of what genre you write in and what kind of book this is going to be.
- A picture tells a thousand words (ie: someone is going to judge if they think they’ll like it based on what it looks like).
- People like picking up a pretty cover (sad, but true).
Book design is a very specific skill. If I were writing a book and was a professional graphic designer, I would still hire a specialist book designer to work on my cover. There are a lot of cues that book designers use to suggest themes/genre/writing style that are useful for readers deciding if the book is for them.
If you attempt to design your cover yourself, without any design background, it will almost definitely look like you have designed it yourself without any design background.
If you’re determined to do it yourself, do a lot of research into your genre and comp authors, and seek out as much free professional help as you can. There are lots of designers on YouTube and TikTok sharing their design process – take their tips, look for inspiration, think carefully about your font choices and position on the cover, and get feedback from someone that isn’t a family member.
Make sure you look at it alongside a selection of other, popular, books in your genre, and look at it on your mobile phone at thumbnail size. Does it still look good? Can you tell what type of book it is or what genre it sits in?
There are books that do ‘fine’ with bad covers. There are even entire imprints known for their terrible cover looks. BUT having a great cover is one of the biggest things you can do to make your marketing life easier, so if you can only invest in one marketing asset, this is the one!
3/ Clear and compelling back cover / Amazon copy
After the cover, the book description is the next thing they will look at. Your book blurb is not just some copy you have to fill in on Amazon – think of it as a pitch to potential readers – this is your moment to tell someone why they should read your book.
It needs to clearly signal what the book is about, and it needs to be intriguing.
Common mistakes I see on back cover/blurb copy:
- Descriptions that have no hook, tagline, or positioning statements; nothing to make me look at the first few lines and think ‘ooooh that sounds interesting/entertaining / like it will change my life for the better’.
- Very short book descriptions that don’t give me any information about the book.
- Very long book descriptions, which are more of a synopsis than an enticing book description. You want to give a sense of the plot and the challenges that the protagonist faces or how it will help someone, in the case of non-fiction. But you don’t need to give every single detail about what happens in the book. One key line (one/two line elevator pitch) followed by a couple of paragraphs, and then maybe a positioning statement or a quote is optimum.
- Bunching everything up into one dense paragraph, or including long paragraphs of text. Try to break it up so that it’s easy to read on a screen.
As with all of these, I really encourage you to do your research. Look at your competition authors and review their book blurbs. Read up on what makes a good book description. There is so much great support online for free – find it and make the most of it before you get started.
This post from Jessi Rita Hoffman on Jane Friedman’s blog is still a great guide if you want somewhere to start.
The thing I want to stress through this post is: there are hundreds of different marketing things you can do to help promote your book.
But without these basics in place, you might see yourself spending lots of money or loads of energy to send people to your Amazon page, but still getting no sales. Getting these essentials right (and changing them if you find they’re not working later on), is a big part of the marketing puzzle that I sometimes think gets overlooked.
Get the basics right to give your book its very best start in life!