Once your book has launched, you may be unsure of how to continue marketing over time.
One of my favorite approaches is to incorporate new, creative initiatives at least quarterly, planning with pen and paper.
Start with a blank piece of paper and fold it into quarters. Unfold the paper and label each quarter with the upcoming quarters on the calendar (Q1/year, Q2/year, etc.) so that both sides of the paper are labeled for two years of book marketing initiatives.
Then, look at your calendar for any existing events or holidays that would inspire creative approaches to marketing your book, identifying one idea per quarter. The goal is to keep your book top of mind for potential readers by initiating a quarterly promotion to attract new attention.
For example, in the fourth quarter of the year, you may want to do a holiday or gift promotion. During the month in which your book initially launched, you may want to do a book birthday or anniversary promotion.
Here are some additional ideas to plug into each quarter:
- Apply for book awards, then celebrate them as you receive them, adding the award logos to your website and sharing about them on your social media channels. To add value to others, consider highlighting other recipients of the awards whose content may be of interest to your audience.
- Run a discount promo on your ebook, temporarily lowering the price, and apply to have your discounted ebook featured through ebook sales sites like BookBub.
- Showcase your audiobook by sharing audiobook snippets of key messages from your book.
- Use a pre-existing awareness month to talk about your book’s topics through articles or social posts. For example, Mental Health Awareness Month (if your book’s messaging aligns with it).
- Host a live virtual event to discuss your book’s topics and build community around your ideas. Bringing people together is a great way to help them remember the value of your book and to add additional value by interacting with them about any questions they might have about your content.
- Create a new resource to support people’s learning. This could be a discussion guide, book club guide, or workbook. Give this away to grow your email list and find out who is reading your book.
- Create and release a new resource with updated thinking regarding a topic in your book, and use promotion of the content in the resource to renew interest in your book.
- Do a book giveaway on Goodreads or through your own channels to get your book into more people’s hands. Follow up with the winners to request additional Amazon reviews.
- Create a series of short videos to reinforce your book’s key messages and share those intermittently with your audiences.
- Invest in social media advertising, such as LinkedIn or Instagram ads, to reach new audiences for your book.
By choosing to implement one new idea each quarter, you will keep your book top of mind for your followers while taking an approach that may be more sustainable for your available time, energy, and money over time. If you find that you have more resources for marketing your book, you could choose one initiative per month instead of one per quarter.
As you consider these ideas, you may have resistance or feel like people are tired of hearing about your book. It’s natural for you to feel this way, so if you encounter this difficulty, try to focus on the value your book brings to others. By continuing to share your book, you are increasing the likelihood that the people who need it will find it.
As you expand your audience over time, there are likely to be people who encounter you who have not heard of your book yet. If you are not talking about it, they may not discover it. By consistently sharing the key messages of your book over time, you will ensure that you continue to reach the people who are most interested in it.
To learn more about adapting your book marketing efforts post-launch, listen to this episode of The Book Marketing Action Podcast featuring Hesha Abrams.
I am the founder/CEO of the Weaving Influence team, the author of Reach: Creating the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause, and the host of the Book Marketing Action Podcast. I’m a wife and mom of three kids, and I enjoy running, reading, writing, coffee, and dark chocolate.