One of the most important parts of selling a book is how you market it. This will ultimately be what drives most of your sales. This can be intimidating at first due to how difficult it can be to build up momentum and how many ways there are to market, but it is very important and in the long run will do wonders for your book.
If you want your book to be a success, you must market it. Constantly. People aren’t going to buy a book, even a well-written one, if it’s a book that they’ve never heard of. Word of mouth, good reviews, and/or a good campaign are often the only way people even hear about a new book. And with so much competition, you have to be consistent about marketing your book every day. It’s all in the marketing.
We even wrote a handbook on how to market your book: Just go to the front page on our main website, and ask the AI chat-bot “How do I market my book?”, and it will provide you with a 34 page PDF listing just about every possible method to marketing your book.
Speaking of AI, by now you’ve probably picked up that ChatGPT and AI are great tools to get inspiration for where you want to take your books next, and marketing is no different. From just generating ideas on how to market your book, to extrapolating extra information, AI is a powerful tool that can be used for being educated on the subject.
For example, when I asked ChatGPT how to market my book, it suggested local bookstores and book fairs that I could contact. From here, I could set up a booth at a book fair, or a book reading or an author signing to raise awareness of my book. You can get more eyes on your book by leveraging the eyes that another company already has on them. Doing it with their permission & support is the best way to do so.
You can also use AI to create a list of people to email about your book, or to draft emails. Email campaigns are more effective than one would think, especially if you email people you know about your new book. If you email 1,000 people about your book, statistically at least half of them would at the bare minimum read the subject line in their inbox, and 1 or 2 of them might even click on them and open the link to purchase your book.
Some websites, such as Facebook and Amazon, give you the ability to pay for ads or list your book earlier on the list in online searches. Though we don’t quite recommend this feature for first-time authors, it may be a good idea to invest a little bit of money (Not much! Don’t spend what you aren’t willing to lose!) to get just a few more eyes on your book, and hope word of mouth spreads from there. Many of these ad programs, like with listings, will often have AI features that fill in information about the ad and its placement for you, even allowing you to have the AI pick a target audience or market for you.
The world of marketing is too vast for a single blog post and we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface. Again, we highly recommend that you check out the marketing handbook from earlier if you want more information, and use ChatGPT on a particular topic for even more information. Just know that there are so many ways to get the word out about your book, make sure you are consistently trying, and to never hesitate to use AI. In our next blog post, we will cover the online, social media side of marketing, a cheaper, faster way to let people know about your book.
Written by Connor Mayhorn
ChatGPT was used for additional research for this article.