‘Cause sometimes readers like to see a good book deal.
What are promotions? Promotions are offers that entice a potential customer to buy a product or service. These can be bonus things like buy one get one free, or as simple as a discount.
Promotions can apply to book launches, too. As an author, you may not want to always be offering promotions, but they can be great ways to bring attention to your book, especially when it first launches. While this isn’t a comprehensive list, these are five examples of book promotions that I share in my online course:
1. Contests
People like games. Contests are very common on social media, so that’s the most obvious platform to run one on, but you can get really creative with this.
Maybe the first person who hits reply on your launch newsletter gets a book. Or you’re speaking at an event and ask a question to test how attentive your audience is, and one person wins the book.
Better yet, you offer a bunch of copies to a media outlet or content creator who hosts the contest for you and brings third-party attention to your book.
2. Merchandise (“merch”)
People like bonus gifts! Bookmarks are the obvious choice, but again, you can get creative with this. Just don’t go too wild or having too much bonus merch can be seen as wasteful. This blog recap of James Clear’s bestselling strategy for Atomic Habits has some great examples.
My client included stickers of their podcast logo with every signed pre-order copy they mailed out when they launched their book, A Little Bit Culty, a few months ago.
Maybe you give the merch away for the first 100 or so readers and then sell the rest that’s left over. You decide!
3. Giveaways
Unlike contests, these are free copies you give away straight up. The cost of you buying and giving the book away is the cost of promoting.
You can give books away at events (I did this when I attended Vegan Women Summit in 2024 and worked with the person I gave it to!), as prizes for contests, or include them in swag bags for event attendees. My book coach at The Vegan Publisher did this when she launched her book, and a portion of the audience who attended a large event in London, UK, got one in their event bag.
If event attendees are your target reader or client/customer, that’s smart marketing right there.
4. Book deal sites
I didn’t realize until around last year that there are many sites dedicated to marketing books to readers, and also marketing book deals to readers. By deals, I mean ebooks that are free, 99 cents, or under $5.
If you want to run a promotion for your book at a discount (either during launch or, say, years after you’ve launched your book), listing your book or paying for a listing with one of these sites might net you a groundswell of sales.
Here’s my list of marketing sites, which I updated from one of Reedsy’s lists. I’ve no experience with any of the deal sites, so let me know how it goes if you try them!
4. Goodreads
Even before Amazon purchased it, Goodreads was THE place for readers to check out and recommend books. As an author, you can also pay for a giveaway to promote your book to Goodreads readers. I didn’t have a budget to run a promo when I launched my book, but if you’ve got one, it’s something to consider.
At the very least, you should have an author profile on Goodreads. Here’s mine! You’ll find that if you have your books up on Amazon or even contributor credit on other authors’ books, Goodreads will pull them to your profile. If you intentionally aren’t selling your book on Amazon, Goodreads can be a good place to collect reader reviews. Unfortunately, Amazon and Goodreads don’t share reviews, but I think they should!
If you have to change anything—which I did when I relaunched my book in black and white on Amazon—customer service is pretty quick to help and get back to you.
Need a ghostwriter, editor, or marketer to help you publish and market your book so you can get it in the hands of readers? Read more about my author services here and contact me if you’re ready to begin!
Note: This post contains affiliate links.
