You don’t need to launch a new book to create exciting marketing opportunities — your backlist can also attract new readers and engage current fans.
BookBub has been proving the power of backlist marketing for over a decade by helping older books find thousands of new readers. In this post, we’re sharing nine ways you can create new value from your backlist to grow sales and excite your audience while you’re in between releases. We hope one of these ideas sparks inspiration!
1. Update your branding
One of the best ways to breathe new life into your backlist books is to update your branding and book covers. A brand refresh keeps your books relevant with current trends, which can increase promotional opportunities and capture the attention of new readers. It can also remind your existing fans of books in your backlist they may have missed!
The first step is to reassess your book covers. To decide whether you’re due for a cover redesign, ask yourself the following questions:
- Does your cover fit in with the current bestselling books in your genre or subgenre, or does it look out of place?
- Does it pop in a thumbnail size and stand out on retailer carousels?
- Are you getting good conversions from your marketing, or do you see a high drop-off in purchase rates from initial clicks?
- Do you see unusually high drop-off from one book to the next in your series?
Be honest with yourself, and ask for candid feedback from readers or other authors if you want more input.
If you have multiple cover designs to choose between, consider A/B testing them with your target audience. Author Tricia O’Malley used BookBub Ads to test new potential cover designs to confirm that her new cover would attract the right readers.
In addition to refreshing your covers, you should also regularly review your book descriptions:
- Highlight trending tropes that appear in your book
- Include new blurbs or accolades
- Review your metadata and keywords every few months to stay current with best practices for each retailer — algorithms increasingly favor copy that reads naturally over keyword stuffing, so optimize for how readers actually search
- Ask yourself the same conversion questions as for your covers — is there a misalignment between your advertising copy and your book description? Is there a sales drop-off for a particular book in your series?
A cover refresh can also unlock promotional opportunities that weren’t available to you before. Author Jean Gill secured a BookBub Featured Deal for the first time in four years after updating her covers and reinvigorated sales across her series.
How do you promote a brand refresh?
A cover redesign provides a fantastic marketing opportunity to bring a fresh audience to your books. This is a good time to invest in advertising or other promotions to reach new readers:
- Submit for a BookBub Featured Deal to get massive exposure to readers in your genre
- Run BookBub Ads to promote the refreshed edition — or to test cover designs if you have multiple designs to choose between
- If you’re republishing an older title as a new edition, set up a Preorder Alert to notify your BookBub followers the moment the book is available to preorder
- Share your new covers in your newsletter and on social media — this gives current fans a chance to purchase the updated edition or snag a copy of the original in print before it’s unavailable
- Update your author website to showcase your refreshed brand and book covers. You can create a website in 15 minutes or less with BookBub’s Author Websites!
2. Run price promotions
Limited-time discounts are an incredibly effective marketing strategy to grow sales for backlist books. Discounts give readers a low-risk way to take a chance on someone new, so you can capture new readers who were unlikely to make a full-price purchase.
Many authors will downprice the first book in a series to pull readers in at the beginning of the story. You may even consider making your first-in-series permafree to make it consistently easier for new readers to get hooked.
If your series doesn’t need to be read sequentially, experiment with discounts on later books. Each story may attract different readers. This can also be a good strategy if you haven’t had luck getting your first-in-series book selected for a Featured Deal — it’s possible that one of the later books in your series could actually be a better fit for the BookBub audience!
You can also consider tiered discounts across a series, increasing the deal price slightly from one book to the next — this is an excellent way to generate follow-on sales and increase conversion rates across a series. Toni Anderson discounted every audiobook in her Cold Justice series during a $1.99 Chirp deal on book one.
How do you promote a price promotion?
Dropping the price of a book can increase sales, visibility, and revenue, but it’s not enough to just discount a book and hope that enough readers notice it — to make the most of this strategy, you need to promote the discount and get as many readers’ eyes on the deal as possible.
To promote a discounted book:
- Submit for a BookBub Featured Deal or Free Reads promotion to get massive exposure to readers in your genre
- Run a BookBub Ads campaign to target relevant audiences for the duration of the deal
- Stack promotions across multiple platforms to reach as many readers as possible
- Notify your current fans on social media and through your newsletter
- Submit for a Chirp Audiobook Deal and discount related audiobooks to increase revenue across a series
- Keep the promo price for several extra days to keep the momentum going
3. Run giveaways
Giveaways related to your backlist books can expand your audience, incentivize readers to leave reviews, create visibility on social media, and even reward engaged fans to build goodwill with your current audience.
Here are giveaway strategies to try with your backlist books:
- Give away free books. This could include digital or physical copies, which you can make even more special by signing. Most often this strategy is used to grow your mailing list, but it can also be a good way to cross-promote with other authors to get visibility from each others’ audiences.
- Give away content closely related to your backlist books to attract devoted fans to your mailing list. Consider bonus content like an exclusive prequel or epilogue.
- Give away prizes. Many authors note that they see better long-term engagement with giveaway prizes that are more closely tied to their books than generic prizes like gift cards, so get creative! Consider custom swag related to your characters or your world, a poster of your book cover, or even something interactive like the chance to have a phone call with you to reward current fans.
How do you promote giveaways?
The best way to promote a giveaway will depend on your goals, the audience you want to reach, and the action you want to encourage in exchange for the giveaway prize:
- Add a link to your ebook back matter offering bonus content for the book they just finished (more on optimizing your back matter below)
- Share giveaways on social media to grow your following or encourage engagement
- Promote giveaways in your newsletter in exchange for reviews from your biggest fans
- Run giveaways at live events like reader conferences to grow your mailing list
- Work with a book giveaway service to increase your exposure to more readers or grow your book reviews
4. Create box sets
Box sets are a fantastic way to generate new engagement for your older books. They can increase sales and revenue, capture new readers, and reengage current fans. There is something very compelling about getting a lot of content at once — especially for readers who love to devour an entire series!
There are a lot of different options to bundle backlist books together:
- Create a box set of a complete series
- Bundle the first few books in a series as an exciting entry point
- Create a first-in-series “sampler” to introduce new readers to your work
- Add exclusive content to incentivize purchasing a collection
- Collaborate with other authors to create a collection of books with similar themes or tropes
How do you promote box sets?
Advertise your box sets widely to capture new readers:
- Submit a limited-time box set discount for a Featured Deal. We’ve seen that box sets have 29% higher average purchase rates than single-title deals
- Run BookBub Ads campaigns for box sets at any price — see how one author boosted revenue for a complete series set
A box set is also a great way to reengage current readers, so share new collections or offers with your newsletter and social media followers. Don’t assume that every reader who follows you has read every one of your books! Maybe they haven’t tried this series yet, or they started it but never finished, and a box set will entice them. Read about one author’s strategy for connecting readers to every single book in her backlist.
5. Publish in new formats
By expanding the formats of your books, you can reach new audiences of readers who prefer other formats, create new revenue streams and marketing opportunities, and offer new value to your current readers.
Be strategic about which formats make the most sense for your audience, your genre, and your budget:
- Ebooks
- Audiobooks
- Special print editions with new covers, artwork, or custom design elements
- Special digital editions with bonus content
- Large-print editions
- Translations
How do you promote new formats?
New formats can be appealing to new types of readers, but they can also be exciting for your existing audience:
- Update your author website to include links to all formats of your books
- Spread the word in your newsletter and on social media
- Run BookBub Ads campaigns for books in any format (ebook, audio, or print)
- Consider crowdfunding platforms, which can help fund the investment in a new format or increase your visibility beyond your existing fans
6. Experiment with distribution
In addition to expanding to different formats, you can also create new value from backlist titles by experimenting with different distribution methods. The more places your book is available to purchase, the more readers you can reach.
Consider expanding to new regions or languages to reach new markets. Another option is to move individual books or entire series in and out of retailer subscription programs like Kindle Unlimited (KU) or Kobo Plus to access new audiences of readers. This can have the added benefit of creating urgency for your current readers to grab your books before they lose access through their preferred retailer or subscription program.
How do you promote new distribution?
Before committing to a new retailer, region, or platform for your books, research whether it’s a good fit for your genre and what marketing opportunities are available to make sure you’ll have chances to grow your audience. You should consider:
- Submitting newly enrolled KU titles for a New in Kindle Unlimited promotion from BookBub, reaching hundreds of thousands of KU readers in BookBub’s audience
- Running BookBub Ads to reach readers on particular ebook retailers
- Using marketing language like “last chance” to create urgency among your current audience
7. Identify seasonal marketing opportunities
Capitalize on seasonal themes, holidays, and current events to draw attention to your backlist books that include relevant content.
Of course there are actual seasons that lend themselves to certain marketing opportunities, like promoting beach reads in the summer or holiday-themed books in December, but there are plenty of other cultural or calendar events you can take advantage of, including:
- Sporting events or the start of a new sports season
- Pop culture, such as movies or a new season of a TV show in the same genre as your book
- News and current events
- Memes or social media trends, which often provide visuals or sounds you can incorporate into your marketing
- Major holidays — think Halloween for horror books, Valentine’s Day for romance, or Thanksgiving for family dramas
- Silly daily holidays like National Cat Day or National Donut Day
- Weekly themes like Motivation Monday or Throwback Thursday
- Personally significant dates or milestones, like your birthday or the anniversary of a book’s publication date
How do you promote books around seasonal opportunities?
Get creative! Ask yourself:
- Do any of my backlist books have topics or themes that are relevant to current or upcoming events?
- Is my own background or expertise relevant to a current event?
- How would my characters react to current events or celebrate certain holidays?
Check out effective seasonal ads for inspiration, and don’t forget about generic seasonal promotional opportunities, too. Events like Black Friday or other holiday sales can be used to promote discounts on any books in your catalog, so you don’t have to have thematically relevant books to take advantage of seasonal marketing moments!
8. Engage your fans
Start conversations around your backlist books to stay engaged and top-of-mind with your biggest fans. Interaction with your readers in between releases can remind them what they love about your books and your writing, and ensure that they’ll be thrilled when your next book arrives.
First, decide on a platform you feel comfortable using and commit to a consistent plan for sharing content. This could be an email newsletter, a blog on your website, a Facebook group, Instagram, TikTok, or other community-building platforms like Discord, Circle, or Slack.
Here are some ideas to use with your backlist books to keep fans engaged:
- Share bonus content or other behind-the-scenes details that extend the story or share more about your characters
- Talk about your writing inspiration or the research that went into a book
- Recommend other books that are similar to yours — posting recommendations on BookBub.com can also help you get more visibility on our platform
- Ask your fans questions about your books or characters
- Host an “ask me anything”
- Host a read-along of one of your books or lead a book club
9. Optimize your back matter
The end of your book is one of your most valuable marketing channels — by the time a reader turns the final page, they’re invested in your work, and a few well-placed links and calls to action can turn that enthusiasm into another sale, a new subscriber, or a review. Best of all, updating your back matter is a set-it-and-forget-it effort that keeps readers discovering more of your work!
To make it easy for readers to take the next step:
- Link to your next book or the next title in the series so readers who don’t want to miss a beat can keep reading
- Invite readers to sign up for your newsletter to hear about future releases and promotions — Author Websites comes with built-in tools to collect subscribers and send emails
- Offer bonus content tied to the book they just finished, like a deleted scene, prequel, or character extras, to reward engaged readers and grow your mailing list
- Encourage readers to follow you on BookBub so they receive a New Release Alert the moment your next book is available
- Ask readers to leave a review to build visibility and social proof for your backlist — if you’re not sure how to ask, check out our guide to getting more reader reviews
You don’t need to do everything on this list. Start small by choosing one book to boost or refresh, reviewing its branding and book description, and submitting it for a promotion. What’s another strategy that stood out to you that you can try today?
