Here at BookBub, we love helping authors and publishers sell more books. So each week, we publish actionable book marketing tips and publishing insights on the BookBub Partners Blog. We hope these real-life case studies and marketing ideas inspire our readers and help them achieve their own promotional goals!
This year we published dozens of articles — including many by wonderful guest contributors — on a variety of topics. Want to make sure you didn’t miss any of the most valuable content? Here’s a list of our top 10 book marketing articles from 2019!
P.S. You can get our latest book marketing tips delivered to your inbox in 2020 by subscribing to the blog here:
1. How to Run a Book Launch for Maximum Sales (& Hit List!)
When you’re preparing for a book launch, there’s a massive amount of book marketing tactics you can choose from — but which will make the biggest impact on sales? Which will give you the best shot at hitting a bestseller list? And if you’re a traditionally published author, what can you do in tandem with your publisher to become a bestseller?
In this post, we detailed how an author hit the USA Today bestseller list during launch week by running a coordinated marketing campaign, using tactics proven to deliver sales and revenue.
2. How to Promote Your Book for Free
Many popular book promotion options — from self-serve advertising platforms to email blasts — come with a price tag, which can be tricky if you’re on a budget. But whether you‘ve just launched a new book or want to boost a backlist book with stagnant sales, promoting your book will help readers find you in a crowded market.
Luckily, there are a number of ways to market your book for free on BookBub and elsewhere — and we compiled several popular strategies in this post! While these tactics are not necessarily the most effective options if you’re looking to drive large sales numbers, they are low risk, and we’ve seen authors use these strategies to successfully reach new readers!
3. 5 Book Marketing Strategies All Authors Need to Try
Keeping your books in front of readers is a challenging task, especially over a long writing career. As your backlist grows, it’s important to keep existing readers coming back for more while also growing your readership with each release, gaining new fans who then may be interested in the rest of your catalogue.
In this post, author Barbara Freethy shared some of the time-tested strategies she employs that continue to bring positive results in reaching both existing fans and new readers.
4. 50 Stellar Examples of Author Facebook Cover Photo Designs
According to a survey of 6,000 readers by Marie Force, 69% of readers use Facebook to find information about their favorite author, and 88% of readers follow their favorite author on Facebook. Whether you have a page, public profile, or group, you can brand your Facebook presence with a unique cover photo design.
In this post, we showcased ideas for what to include in your cover photo and examples to give you inspiration. We included designs from a mix of traditionally and independently published authors to inspire your own designs whether you’re a marketer at a publishing house or a self-published author.
5. How I Hit a Bestseller List with a Traditionally Published Book
It’s almost every author’s dream to become a bestseller and hit those elusive lists. But there’s more to becoming a bestselling author than just writing a book!
The February publication of Christina McDonald’s debut novel, The Night Olivia Fell (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books), was good — strong foreign rights and domestic sales, reprint demands, positive reader and reviewer reactions — but she didn’t hit any lists. As the months went on and sales plateaued, she sat down and came up with a plan to hit the USA Today bestseller list and increase her readership. In this post, she revealed exactly how she did it!
6. A Guide to Getting More Reader Reviews
Obtaining reader reviews on retailer sites is critical for driving book sales. Reviews can lend books legitimacy and help readers decide whether they’re worth their money and time. In fact, 36% of BookBub members say book reviews from other readers can convince them whether or not to buy a book, and we found that including high review counts in our Featured Deal blurbs can increase clicks by an average of 14%. Yet getting reader reviews can be challenging and stressful.
In this guide, we shared some tried and tested strategies to generate more reader reviews on retailer sites. This guide also includes what practices to avoid so retailer sites don’t remove them. If you’ve struggled to get reviews or simply need more, read this article!
7. 20 BookBub Ads You HAVE to See for Design Inspiration
The BookBub Ads platform lets authors and book marketers easily create customized campaigns to promote their books to BookBub’s millions of readers. While many advertisers enjoy the flexibility to design their own ad image, we often get questions about what kinds of designs our readers are most likely to click on.
While there is no set recipe for designing the perfect ad, there are common elements we see in successful campaigns. To highlight some of them, we gathered 20 high-performing ads from the 100k+ campaigns partners ran in the previous few months.
8. 14 Fantastic Marketing Tips for Debut Authors
Marketing a book as a debut author is vastly different from marketing as a seasoned author with a large backlist. For one, you likely don’t have an existing fan base — and you also lack the experience to know what tactics work best to reach the right audience.
So if you’re a debut author, what promotional strategies should you try when preparing for your first book launch? In this post, we compiled some valuable advice from experienced authors to debuts on how to market their books.
9. How To Create Eye-Catching BookBub Ads Images
Advertisers have just a few moments to grab someone’s attention in this fast-paced world. Only 9% of digital ads are viewed for more than 1 second, so you don’t have much time to catch someone’s eye. What will make a reader stop and look at your BookBub Ads?
The team at Book Brush talked to many successful authors who use their image creation tool and discovered five simple things that will help you create effective BookBub Ads. In this post, they shared their tips!
10. How to Promote Your Book Before It’s Published
Promoting a book before it’s published can help generate buzz and build awareness, which might convince readers to buy early. And driving preorder sales can help a book hit certain bestseller lists, since many retailers count preorders as launch day sales.
But how can you get readers to want to buy a book before it’s published, when they can’t read the book right away? In this post, we compiled a list of strategies we’ve seen authors use to promote their book ahead of launch day.
What topics would you like to see us cover on the BookBub Partners Blog in 2020? Let us know in the comments below!
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