Ways to Plan Your Book Marketing

Your book launch and overall marketing efforts need some planning to be effective. Scattershot marketing often doesn’t work, and you end up spending more money than you want. Here are some tips that can help you get started or get organized.

• Determine your budget before you start. Spend your money where it will be most effective. Make sure you include your time in your cost calculations. Guard your writing time.

• Get a calendar or make a spreadsheet to track your efforts. It’s often hard to tell what makes a difference to your sales sometimes, but if you record dates and events, you can see if they tie into spikes in sales.

• Make sure that you are always collecting names for your newsletter/email list. Put a sign-up form on your website. Collect names at every event you attend. Your website and newsletter are things that you truly own. If a social media site folds or bans you, you lose access to your followers there.

• Spend some time each week building your key social media followings. While the number of followers doesn’t always translate to book sales, it is a way to become known and to share with others, and if you’re querying agents or publishers, they often look at your social media following and posts to see how active you are.

• As you plan your launch, reach out to friends and other authors to do guest interviews or posts. They only cost you your time, and it’s a way to reach new readers. Make sure you return the favor and help other authors.

• Build your author group or street team ahead of your big launch. This is usually a small group (usually a private Facebook group) that helps you with early beta reads or ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) reviews. I reveal news and book covers to my All-star team ahead of public announcements. They also help me spread the news when I have a new book. Many leave reviews and request my book at their library.

• Build your team of author friends who will share and celebrate your news. By sharing their news, you form a strong, supportive group.

• Look for events that promote your book. Reach out to book sellers, libraries, and other stores that will be willing to host a signing. Sometimes you have to be creative, and you have to make some cold calls. Look for events that you can include other authors. It’s more fun, and you expand your audience with multiple authors.

• Start early. I track the three months before launch and the three months after to give me a baseline of the activities. I also spot-check my analytics weekly to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Early on in my writing life, I signed up for everything that came along. I’ve learned to be a bit more selective these days as I focus my time and money or events or activities that tie into my marketing plan. In the early years, we did multiple author events (several often on the same day). While they were fun, it got to be too much, and I found that I was doing more events than writing.

Keep track of your activities, and then do a quick lessons learned to determine what worked for you, Keep what worked and jettison the ones that didn’t.