Yes, you need an author marketing plan, no matter what corners of the internet are trying to make you feel better by saying you don’t. If you don’t market your book, it won’t sell. Relying solely on the Amazon algorithm and other auto-marketing mechanisms won’t work.
Even if you want to get traditionally published, spoiler alert, you will still have to market your own book.
Insert the gasps of shock here.
The publishing house will only do so much, especially if you’re an unproven author and didn’t have an all-out bidding war for your book in which the houses have to earn back a substantial book advance.
All of that is to say, you need a plan. More than that, you need a book marketing plan that works. Thankfully, I have a decade of experience in the marketing world, the last 6 spent in books and publishing. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, I’ll teach you the strategy behind marketing, which will allow you to create the marketing plan that’ll work for you. I’m going to walk you through how to prep and create a monthly author marketing plan you can rinse and repeat to sell more books.
Here’s what I’ll cover:
Step 1: Choosing the Channels of an Author Marketing Plan
I’d get right to the point and just give you a book marketing plan, but unfortunately this is yet another case of the “depends”. And I don’t mean adult diapers.
What I do mean is that because each book is different, has a unique genre, and even a specific audience inside the genre (hello tropes and reader expectations), you’ll have different marketing plans.
Someone who writes sweet romance will not use the same channels to market as someone who’s publishing a nonfiction book about parenting a child with autism. Therefore, we first have to do some prep work so you can build an author marketing plan. That prep work involves determining where you’ll actually market your book.
Which will then inform the type of content to create for those platforms.
I will emphasize that this is a complete list of channels (platforms) and components of each (types of content) necessary for putting together your author marketing plan. However, you will absolutely not do all of them, nor should you. That’s a great way to burn out completely and hate marketing.
The key is to discover which marketing channel is the best to focus on for your type of book.
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is when people find your site through methods that you don’t pay for. Oftentimes, this comes from search, like Google, other search engines, or from places like Pinterest. When it comes to an author marketing plan, organic traffic based on keywords relevant to your book can become the “passive” part of your income, especially if you’re building a business from your book.
Website blogs
I’ll start by saying this is the long game. If you want to generate a lot of organic traffic over time, it’s a great method to use. Basically, you’ll start with an author website. Then you’ll upload blog posts that are optimized for search engines (called SEO) so your work will appear on Google and other search engines. What you write depends on the genre and type of book.
The Strategy – Nonfiction:
Nonfiction blog posts will consistent primarily of articles related to your book. Think about your book’s chapters. Now break those chapters into various topics, specifying the problems or challenges people have related to it. You can even go to Google to find topics by typing a core topic and using the “people also ask” section to give you more ideas.
Let’s take the topic of helping parents navigate raising a child with autism for an example:
Here, you can continue to “branch” until you have many ideas. For example, you can write a blog post about the primary search term, but also about parenting styles as a whole, and then individual blog posts going deeper into each parenting style. Through this, you can always promote your book within the blog posts.
Publishing 1 book a week is a great plan. More on how you can use this in your author marketing plan in the monthly schedule below.
The Strategy – Fiction:
Fiction book marketing is more about your personal process. Either that, or you can take a couple different routes, including writing blog posts about the writing process that includes advice, or you can write topics about reading, like book reviews or other deep-dive content into the life of a reader. Both will attract readers, because even writers are readers.
Pinterest is a search engine, not a social media platform, though it’s often confused for the latter. But it’s often a great promotional channel for blogs, and that’s why it’s worth including in your author marketing plan. Instead of publishing blog posts here, you publish images that can link to blog posts—and your book!
Because of most authors’ ignorance into Pinterest, it can be seen as an unconventional marketing tactic, but is really powerful in the long-run, especially if you want to build an email list by creating freebies (reader magnets) and connecting them to an email software like Flodesk.
Here’s an example of what this looks like, and how you can generate more traffic to your website without solely relying on Google (because ranking on Google can take a while):
The Strategy – Nonfiction:
Nonfiction is a bit easier, because it’s just a promotional pin for your blog posts. Take the title or an interesting takeaway from your article and place it over an associated image. Upload the pin, include the link, and make sure to write a description that will include keywords related to the blog’s content.
The Strategy – Fiction:
Using Pinterest for fiction looks a lot more like writing blog posts that are book lists, and including your book’s cover in the list and in the image. You can also take quotes from your book and make images (more on this below) that go with the mood of your story. These will create intrigue, where you can then link to your book’s page on your website. This is not as effective as with nonfiction, but still a great method for an author marketing plan.
2. Youtube
Many authors are growing an increasingly large network on places like Youtube, utilizing the platform as a primary means of their author marketing plan. If you’re good on camera—or want to be—and have a topic you love discussing, Youtube is a great option for you.
The Strategy – Nonfiction:
Most nonfiction authors create a channel around their area of expertise. So in the same example we’ve used, the writer of the book helping parents of children with autism would create videos around that topics—typically ones that go along with the blog posts. Their author marketing plan would include telling people about their book, briefly, in each video.
The Strategy – Fiction:
Fiction authors take one of two approaches, similar to blog posts. They either join “booktube” in creating a channel that discusses books, reviews them, and talks about the reader lifestyle. Others will talk about the writing process, including giving advice and their own tips.
3. Social Media
The great news is social media can be created based off of organic search or Youtube content. Take Youtube clips and cut them down to fit on social, and take blog post sections and create graphics. But that’s not the only method to use social media in your author marketing plan.
Keep in mind that the channel you use should be based on where your audience is, not only what you like. Remember to focus on the target audience (more on that in the plan building section below).
Here’s a brief list of social networks, their demographics, and which type of content performs best on them.
TikTok
Demographics:
- Age: Predominantly Gen Z (ages 10-29 make up around 60% of the user base), great for young adult fiction authors.
- Gender: Slightly more female users than male, which lends itself well to a romance author marketing plan.
- Geography: Strong presence in the US, India (prior to the ban), and other parts of Asia and Europe.
Top Performing Content Types:
- Short-Form Videos: Typically 15-60 seconds long.
- Challenges and Trends: Participating in popular challenges and trends.
- Music and Dance: Lip-syncing, dance routines, and music-related content.
- Humor and Memes: Funny skits, parodies, and relatable content.
- Educational Content: Quick how-to videos, tips, and tricks.
- User-Generated Content: Encouraging users to create their own content related to a brand or trend.
Here’s a great resource I wrote for using TikTok for authors:
Demographics:
- Age: Broad user base, strong presence among 18-34-year-olds, great for many author marketing plans.
- Gender: Slightly more female users than male.
- Geography: High usage in the US, Brazil, India, and Indonesia.
Top Performing Content Types:
- Photos: High-quality, visually appealing photos in carousel format (more than 1 photo that slides to the next)
- Stories: Short, temporary content that lasts 24 hours, specifically utilizing engagement features and great for bringing more of YOU to your author marketing plan.
- Reels: Short-form video content similar to TikTok.
- IGTV: Longer-form videos, up to an hour.
- Live Videos: Real-time content and interactions.
- User-Generated Content: Reposts and collaborations with followers and influencers, sharing posts you like from others to your stories.
Those who talk about the job market or business will find a lot of success in an author marketing plan on LinkedIn.
Demographics:
- Age: Majority of users are 25-34 years old, professionals and business-oriented individuals.
- Gender: More balanced gender distribution.
- Geography: Strong presence in the US, India, China, Brazil, and the UK.
Top Performing Content Types:
- Professional Insights: Industry news, trends, and expert opinions.
- Career Development: Tips on job searching, resume building, and career growth.
- Company Updates: Announcements, product launches, and corporate news.
- Thought Leadership: Articles and posts from industry leaders.
- LinkedIn Articles: Long-form content for in-depth insights.
- Videos: Professional advice, interviews, and behind-the-scenes content.
Facebook is a tried-and-true method for an author marketing plan. It’s a great place to share links and long-form content.
Demographics:
- Age: Diverse age range, with significant users aged 25-54, a more active audience above 40.
- Gender: Slightly more female users than male.
- Geography: Global presence, particularly strong in the US, India, Indonesia, and Brazil.
Top Performing Content Types:
- Photos and Videos: Engaging and high-quality visual content.
- Live Videos: Real-time engagement and interaction.
- Groups: Community-based discussions and niche interests, great for specialty and genre-based groups.
- Stories: Temporary content that lasts 24 hours.
- Events: Promoting and engaging with virtual or in-person events.
- User-Generated Content: Sharing and promoting content from followers.
X (Formerly Twitter)
X can be a great place to focus on for your author marketing plan. It builds authority quickly, and allows followers a peek inside your mind.
Demographics:
- Age: Predominantly 18-49 years old, with a significant portion of users in the 25-34 age range.
- Gender: Slightly more male users than female.
- Geography: High usage in the US, Japan, India, and Brazil.
Top Performing Content Types:
- Tweets: Short, concise updates, opinions, and announcements. “Hot takes” also commonly go viral.
- Threads: Series of connected tweets for more detailed discussions, stories, or explanations.
- Visual Content: Images, GIFs, and short videos.
- Live-Tweeting: Real-time commentary on events or trending topics, utilizing hashtags to show up in the right places.
- Polls: Engaging followers with questions and feedback.
- Memes and Humor: Relatable and shareable content.
4. Paid Promotions
You can pay for promotion, and it’s a great supplement to an organic author marketing plan.
When most people think of paid promotions, they think of ads. But there are a few different types you can use to craft book marketing that meets your specific needs, as ads don’t always work for all genres.
Ads
Paid advertising for books involves purchasing ad space on various digital platforms to promote a book to a targeted audience. You may have seen ads on Facebook that include a book quote, the title, and an image that represents it—even a book mockup.
But it can also include:
- Social Media Ads: Running ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to reach specific demographics.
- Search Engine Ads: Using Google Ads to target keywords related to the book’s genre or topic, especially if you have an author website.
- Display Ads: Banner ads on relevant websites and blogs to attract readers (sometimes these are set up as Google ads).
- Book Retailer Ads: Ads on sites like Amazon or Goodreads, targeting users browsing similar books.
Review Websites
Review websites are platforms where book enthusiasts and critics review books, often influencing potential readers’ purchasing decisions. It’s a strong way to build your author marketing plan.
Oftentimes, you can pay for someone to write about your book. That often looks like:
- Sponsored Reviews: Paying for a review by a professional reviewer or a prominent book review site.
- Featured Listings: Paying to have a book featured on the homepage or in a prominent section of the site.
- Giveaways and Contests: Partnering with the site to run a giveaway or contest to generate buzz.
Here’s a list you can check out of free and paid book review sites.
Influencers
Influencer marketing involves partnering with individuals who have a large and engaged following on social media or other platforms to promote a book. Never underestimate how an influencer can impact your author marketing plan. Try to include 1 of these per month.
This can include:
- Book Bloggers and Bookstagrammers: Influencers who specialize in reading and reviewing books.
- YouTube and TikTok Influencers: Creators who can feature the book in their videos, such as through book hauls or reviews. You can check Youtube video descriptions for PO Boxes to send books to.
- Celebrity or Authoritative Endorsements: Leveraging a celebrity’s following to promote the book, or you can work on getting book endorsements from successful people in your field.
5. Podcasts
Recording podcast episodes for your own podcast works well. But you can also just be a guest on someone else’s podcast. This tends to work best for nonfiction authors, as many podcasts are educational content. You can discuss your expertise with hosts in your industry and share your book as a way people can learn more.
This will be best for those who like to talk, but a very strong author marketing plan overall.
6. Partnerships
There are two primary methods you can use to supplement your author marketing plan, and it includes working with other people!
- Co-authoring: Writing a book or series with an author who has a similar target audience as you. This works really well because when you publish on Amazon, both names will appear as links by the book, prompting fans of the book to seek more reading material by both authors. It also allows for fans of one author to discover another.
- Email newsletter swaps: Similarly, you can partner with other authors to share each other’s work in your email newsletters. This helps expand your author platform to fans who may not have heard of you, but still enjoy the genre you write it.
Here’s an example of what co-authoring looks like on Amazon:
This method works really well for fiction authors. Keep in mind that readers don’t only read a single author. They often read many! Creating an author marketing plan that allows you to network and support other authors goes a long way to succeeding on your own.
Step 2: Creating Author Marketing Plan Components
After you’ve determined what type of author marketing plan you want to put in place, it’s time to create the components. Now, I won’t lie, this might take some time. Yes, you can hire a VA or someone on fiverr to help you out, but it’s also great to learn the skill yourself.
You never know. You might end up liking the creation process too!
Here are some quick tips for creating the assets you’ll use in your author marketing plan:
- Videos: Most smart phones have good enough video quality that you don’t need anything fancy. You can also edit videos with tools like Final Cut Pro, iMovie, and on mobile with CapCut. Upload videos directly to the platform for best results!
- Images & Graphics: Canva is one of the best places to make images no matter your needs. They have a free account type with pre-formatted images for Pinterest, social media, and even blog posts.
- Mockups: Creating a book mockup can be confusing. But if you want those pretty images to share sparingly (more on this in mistakes to avoid when marketing a book), then this article on book mockups can point you in the right direction.
- Captions & Descriptions: No author marketing plan is complete without quality captions for people to read, ones that can increase engagement on image and videos. You can just write these yourself, by focusing on posing questions and creating conversations that increase comments, or you can use a caption generator like this one.
- Blog posts: Good, old-fashioned writing is your best bet for these. You want your blog posts to sound like your own voice, so people get a good idea of what your book will sound like. So while AI and ChatGPT may help provide a structure, make sure to do your own writing for maximum effect in a quality author marketing plan.
Step 3: Building a Monthly Book Marketing Structure
The key to a good author marketing plan is a replicable structure. If you don’t have to think too much about it, you’re more likely to just do it. The strategy here is to set up your marketing to be varied to maintain interest, but consistent enough that you have an easy time implementing it.
Remember, prior to crafting this plan, you will have to do the following:
- Define your audience: How old are they? What genre do they read? Pinpoint the specific subgenres and tropes within your genre too.
- Choose your channels: Based on your audience, where are they spending time online? Which channels do you want to use in order to make your author marketing plan?
- Research like authors: It’s best to see what other authors are creating that’s already working for you. If you know TikTok is the place to be, find a successful author on TikTok and see what their author marketing plan looks like.
Once you’ve identified these details, it’s time for the strategy of what to post and when to post it. Keep in mind that this monthly plan is mildly vague on purpose. Depending on your channels, you’ll have different creative assets. But each is with the purpose of getting your viewers and followers to take action and learn more from you—through buying your book.
Remember that you can always tweak these, and many authors like to take a “theme” approach to each month of content for the sake of their own organization.
Take this single week of a book marketing plan, rinse and repeat! Truly, that’s it. Because this weekly schedule is diverse,
Weekly Plan:
Decide on an overall topic for the week’s author marketing plan. For nonfiction authors, this might look like deciding which chapter to dive into—or even which section. For fiction, focus on choosing a fiction element to highlight, like a relationship, the genre as a whole, a plot type, or even a trope.
Day 1:
Pose a question related to a long-form piece of content you want to share
Day 2:
Share a fun fact or often misunderstood aspect of your book’s topic. Myth-busters are fun! You can start this by creating a story that has a poll, or just posting a poll on a platform that has them (X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Newsletters like Convertkit). Then share the truth in your post.
For fiction, this might look like sharing what trope you subvert, a factoid about the genre itself, or something interesting about the creation of your book.
Day 3:
Share content from someone else! Part of a great author marketing plan is including all types of helpful content. This can be sharing a post you like to your Instagram stories, or linking a post on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Day 4:
Engage! Choose this day to be most active in the comments, your DMs (direct messages), and on your story. Carving out time to engage in your author marketing plan is really important for engaging your audience.
You can also share a “sneak peek” of your long-form piece of content that will be shared the next day—including a reel or TikTok from it.
Day 5:
Share a long-form piece of content, like a blog post, newsletter, or Youtube video. Today is the day to take your main topic for the week and share the full, in-depth piece about it. For nonfiction, you’ll likely share a blog post or Youtube video.
For fiction, this might look like a blog post or Youtube video, or this could be a snippet of your book.
Day 6:
Share a quote (or multiple) from your long form piece of content. This can be a graphic or even a video clip. The goal here is to get your audience engaged by either commenting that they’ve seen it, or prompting them to read or watch.
Day 7:
The last day of the week can be for you to share your book! You’ve done all the work for your author marketing plan upfront to get your audience’s attention as it relates to the book’s subject matter. Now it’s time to share a book review, a mockup of the book, and any details about where someone can get it. Notice that only 1 day of the week is dedicated to actually sharing your book. Too much book promotion is a bad thing.
For your author marketing plan to work, the entire purpose is to give more than you take. Simply posting pictures of your book is not enough. Readers want to know what’s inside the book. The more you can share tidbits and create your authority int he subject matter (even for fiction), the more people will want to learn more.
BONUS: Engage With People!
The old “setting and forgetting” doesn’t work well with marketing plans. For ads? Sure. But for any other medium, you have to feed the algorithms. In the case of social media, this means engagement. But beyond the metrics that will influence the algorithm—like comments and DMs—the actual act of engaging is important for the individual on the other end, too.
Creating an author marketing plan doesn’t have to be a headache. Just take the above plan, define the components for creating content, and stay consistent.
Author Marketing Plan FAQ
What is a marketing plan according to authors?
A marketing plan for authors is a strategy that outlines how they will promote their book and connect with readers. It involves choosing the right channels, creating engaging content, and maintaining a consistent schedule to boost book sales and visibility.
How do you write a marketing plan for a book?
To write a marketing plan for a book, understand your audience and choose the right platforms. Create engaging content like blog posts and social media updates. Plan a monthly schedule and adjust based on what works.
How do you market an author?
Marketing an author involves building a personal brand and promoting their books. Use social media, blogs, email newsletters, and podcast appearances to connect with readers and build a following.
What are the 4 P’s of a marketing plan?
The 4 P’s are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. For authors, this means focusing on the book itself, setting a good price, choosing the right places to sell it, and promoting it effectively.
How do you market a book on social media?
Market a book on social media by choosing the right platforms, posting engaging content regularly, using visuals, running ads, and interacting with followers through comments and messages.
