I have a stockpile of book memes on my phone. Not just because they’re hilarious, but because one day I’ll need to market a book and they’ll prove handy.
We see memes all over the internet, but there are subsections of the internet dedicated to memes about books, specifically. But not all of them are created equal, and not all of them will work to help you promote your book.
Which is why I’m here to help you break them down, and also provide you with a tutorial for taking a meme and making it applicable to your own books.
Table of Contents
What are book memes?
Book memes are what they sound like, memes about books, but more specifically they’re memes about readers and the realities of being an avid reader.
There are three types of book memes:
- Memes about books in general
- Memes about reading books
- Memes about specific books and stories
Readers will use ones about books in general and ones about reading, which is great for attracting that audience (but more on that in the promotion section below).
Typically, you’ll find book memes on social media as a way to grow platforms that way. Here’s an example of Ramy Vance (our fiction coach) and how he uses them specific to the audience he wants to attract:
Here, it’s clear he’s targeting an adventurous audience who knows comics or mythology, because those are the same types of people who would enjoy his books.
Examples of Popular Book Memes
Learning by example is one of the better ways to make concepts stick. Plus, you can even use some of these to create or recreate on your own.
Keep an eye out for these types of memes that you can make or use on your own platform.
1. Wanting to read one book…
2. Staying inside…
3. Finishing a book be like…
4. Big reader energy…
5. When you get a new book…
6. Reading for hours…
7. Book or movie?
8. Getting a book as a gift…
9. When you’ve already read the book…
10. Starting a good book like…
11. Movie or book, again…
12. Bookish problems…
13. Reader wins
14. A book’s ending…
15. When you interrupt a reader…
16. Finally reading that book…
17. Priorities
18. Reading with a bestie…
19. Staying up all night…
20. I’ll be your Belle…
21. Finishing that book…
22. Boys in books…
Using Book Memes to Promote Your Books
Now that you have a good idea of what book memes are like, and what people respond to because they’re all popular memes, let’s take a look at how you can use this to grow your platform.
Step 1 – Determine your audience
Not all of these memes will work for your audience. It’s important to use memes for your book marketing that will attract the right people. If you write romance set in the modern world, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to share mythology memes.
Those viewers and followers won’t translate to sales.
But let’s say you write modern romance in which all your main characters have an art-focused job or hobby. The readers most likely to buy those books will respond well to memes that incorporate art and the lifestyle of being involved in it. You can mix those memes with romance ones in order to pull in those readers.
Notice that the memes themselves don’t need to be just about books. If you’re using book memes to promote your work, make memes that your target audience would like unrelated to books too.
Here are some questions to help you determine your target audience:
- What job/s does your main character/s have?
- What interests do your characters have?
- What’s the setting of your story?
- Why are the tropes or archetypes you’re using in the story?
- What is the dynamic between protagonist and antagonist?
Once you answer these questions, you’ll have a good idea of the types of memes you can create. For example, if you have a main character who paints, you can incorporate funny painting memes like the one below.
Step 2 – Stockpile funny, interesting, expressive expressions or images online
Whenever you come across a meme you like, save it. You can use these as inspiration or edit them to put your own spin on them. You can save these on your computer or take a screenshot on your phone.
Just remember to create a folder to save them to or else all those memes will end up in your camera roll, to be lost forever.
Step 3 – Think of movies or shows like your book and take screenshots
Use a computer or your phone to watch shows or movies similar to your book. If there are characters or scenes that depict ones like you wrote, pause and take screenshots. Again, save these to a folder so you can make them yourself in Canva, photoshop, or simply on your phone (instructions for doing this below).
Step 4 – Use other memes as your base meme
It’s surprisingly simple to find the base image for memes without all the text on it. Which is super helpful when you love a picture for the meme but want to change the words to something more related to your book.
Here’s how to find meme images to alter the text:
- Find the meme you want to make for yourself
- Go to Google
- Type in “[description of meme] meme image”
- Download a version that is a larger size (so it won’t be blurry)
That’s it! Sometimes you’ll have to tweak the words for searching. If you don’t know how to describe a meme, look at the example below for ideas.
BONUS: if you can only find memes with words, click on one of the memes and scroll down to the “related images” and it could be there.
Step 5 – Make your own memes
Once you have stockpiled some meme ideas, get to creating! There are so many ways you can go about adding text to your memes. Some of them are as simple as using your phone and clicking “edit” on the picture, then adding text. On an iPhone, you’ll want to open the image, go to “edit” and then “markup”. From there, there is an option to add text, boxes, and other editing feature so you can make your own meme.
Here are other tools to create memes:
- Canva
- Photoshop
- Mematic – iphones
- Meme Generator – android
Step 6 – Post consistently to please the algorithm Gods
You want to keep a consistent publishing schedule on your social media. The more often you post, the more eyeballs on your content. The more people see your posts, the more the algorithm will continue to show new people your memes.
It’s best to bulk create your memes, and then use a scheduling software to make sure they go out every day.
Step 7 – Repost ones that did well after 90 days
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time. It’s actually important to look at your social media analytics and reevaluate. If there are some memes that did terribly, you can skip those and make note of the style or tone, to avoid future ones like that.
But most importantly, look at the ones that performed well. They were both seen by a lot of people as well as liked and shared. The shared number is super important for memes. The more people are sharing your memes with others, the more you’ll grow on social media.
For that reason, repost well-performing memes a minimum of 90 days after the original posting. This helps people see your memes as fresh and not repetitive. Plus, if you have enough new people to your profile, they might not have ever seen your best memes yet!
Step 8 – Don’t only post memes
Memes are a tool to have in your social media arsenal, but unless you want to grow a meme account specifically, you have to vary your content. Ideally, you’ll have various types of content to post and will alternate between them.
Here are some additional content ideas to post along with book memes:
- Updates on the writing process
- Book production progress (book cover, formatting, etc.)
- Book reviews you get and love
- Content around how you came up with certain ideas for the book
- Excerpts of the book
- Images that encompass the atmosphere of your story
Memes aren’t the end-all-be-all of book marketing, but they are really great ways to attract an audience and share content about your books!
