Here at BookBub, we love helping authors and publishers learn to sell more books. One way we do this is by publishing actionable marketing tips and publishing insights on the BookBub Partners Blog each week. We aim to provide real-life case studies, ideas, and data from authors and publishers to inspire our readers and help them achieve their own marketing goals.
This year we published dozens of articles — including many by wonderful guest contributors — on a variety of book marketing topics, and wanted to make sure you didn’t miss any of the most valuable content from this year! Here’s a list of our top 10 book marketing articles from 2018.
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1. Book Launch Checklist: A Marketing Timeline for Authors
Readers nowadays want to personally connect with authors they like, especially online. So whether you’re an independent author or traditionally published, it’s important to engage with your fans. After years of testing various marketing strategies, bestselling author Debbie Macomber developed a book launch checklist with tried-and-true tactics that best build buzz and sales. In this post, she shared her marketing plan for each book launch, with a handy printable checklist!
2. How to Write 12 Books in 6 Months to Grow Sales & Populate a Backlist
Thanks to the rise of binge-reading and binge-watching behavior, today’s readers often plow through an entire book series quickly. In this post, author J. Kenner walked through how she published 12 books in six months — from creating the concept of the series to marketing each release. This strategy helped her increase sales and populate a backlist-driven product.
3. 20 Top BookBub Ad Designs Readers Want to Click
Setting up a BookBub Ads campaign only takes a few clicks, but we often get questions about what creative designs work best. So to answer these questions and provide inspiration as you plan your next campaign, we rounded up 20 of the top-performing BookBub Ads designs from the 150K+ ads partners ran over the previous year.
4. How Readers Discover New Books to Buy [Infographic]
How are readers discovering new books these days? Where are they finding new titles most often? When are they most likely to buy? And what factors into their purchasing decisions? In order to better understand our readers’ purchasing behavior, we surveyed thousands of BookBub members. We compiled our findings in an infographic in the hopes of helping you decide where to spend your marketing efforts for your next book launch!
5. 10 Tips for Authors on Using Social Media from a Literary Agent
Using social media is great for getting the word out about your book. But if all you’re doing is posting your Amazon link again and again… nothing is going to happen. That’s not how you get sales, and that’s not how you should be using social media to engage with the book world. In this post, literary agent Eric Smith shared 10 tips for authors on using social media to create a community, build a brand, and effectively engage with readers.
6. How to Write Attention-Grabbing Promo Copy for Books
The publishing marketplace is flooded with thousands of new titles every single day, and readers are inundated with offers, messages, pictures, and pleas to buy. Despite the saturated marketplace, M. J. Rose at AuthorBuzz has successfully helped launch authors’ careers, ratcheted their sales up to the next level, or maintained their sales momentum while everyone else in their genre was slipping. In this post, M. J. explained how to hook readers with compelling promotional copy that makes a book feel unique!
7. 20 Podcasts for Authors on Writing, Publishing, and Book Marketing
Wish you could get a free education in writing and publishing? Publishing-related podcasts can provide just that, and the number available has exploded within the past couple of years. Many aim to provide writers with craft tips, career inspiration, productivity hacks, book marketing advice, the latest publishing news, or inside scoops from industry pros. Since there are so many to choose from, we compiled a list of some of the most popular, well-reviewed, and consistently produced podcasts on writing, publishing, and book marketing!
8. 10 Successful Advertisers’ Tips for Targeting Readers with BookBub Ads
If you’re trying to drive book sales — whether you just launched a new release, you’re promoting a discounted title, or you’re looking to hook new fans — running ad campaigns is a great way to reach both existing fans and new readers. We interviewed 10 advertisers who consistently run BookBub Ads campaigns with high click-through rates, and they shared their strategies for choosing which authors to target, measuring a campaign’s effectiveness, and other fantastic tips for reaching new readers using BookBub Ads.
9. How to Grow an Audience as a Newer Author
As a newer author, it’s easy to become either wildly overwhelmed by the amount of book marketing advice on the internet or to try to do everything that people suggest. Author Katherine Locke quickly realized she couldn’t do everything. Instead, she set goals and priorities, tried different tactics, and focused on the ones that best helped readers find her through one book and stay with her through many. See which five tactics she used to grow an audience as a newer author — and how she maintained the connections she made.
10. How (and Why!) to Reach the Right Readers
Are you overwhelmed by the amount of book marketing you seem to have to do? There are a ton of ways to promote a book — but you don’t need to do all of them in order to drive sales. Instead, focusing on tactics that reach the right readers with the right message at the right time will let you spend less money (and time!) and sell more copies. In this post, we broke down why you should target a narrow audience, how to define your target audience, and how to reach that audience.
What kinds of posts would you like to see on the BookBub Partners Blog in 2019? Let us know in the comments below!
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