Don’t wait until your book is published to start marketing. Building anticipation should start as soon as you commit to writing a book. There are many different ways to build buzz and create a community of followers anxiously awaiting your book launch.
Treat your book launch the same way movie studios do with an upcoming release. Long before the summer blockbuster season, you start seeing trailers of coming attractions. The movie studios create websites and social media pages for the movie. They release rough cuts of scenes, and artwork to fan groups prior to releasing them to the general public. Actors will talk about the movie on their social media pages and share behind the scenes pictures.
These activities build excitement and anticipation for the film and if all goes as planned, translates to a huge opening weekend at the box office.
You want to do the same thing with your book. You want people to be expecting the launch and purchase the book as soon as it’s published.
A key component of your launch strategy should be your author website. A website is your home base where you capture email addresses of fans and followers. I recommend having a blog on the website and posting to it on a regular basis. After you post to your website, you can then link and syndicate to your social media pages. What do you write about in your posts? All the major milestones in your book project:
- The planned publish date
- The book cover creation. You can even have fun with this by sharing more than one version of the cover and asking fans to vote on their favorite
- When advanced reader copies (ARC) for Beta Readers are available
- When your book is available for advanced copy purchases
- Excerpts or sample chapters from the book
- The book launch party date and details about the event.
Share your writing process, things you’ve discovered in your research, or how the family is coping with your new project. Add personality to your posts to get your readers invested in your success.
Finally, always have a call to action at the end of each post. Give the reader an action you want them to take such as:
- Sign up for your mailing list
- Join your Facebook® group
- Follow you on Twitter®
- Connect with you on LinkedIn®
Regardless of what you share with readers, ensure your post is free of errors. Take the time to run a spell check and grammar check. After all, your blog posts are a sample of your writing style. You want readers to feel comfortable they will get high-quality writing when they purchase the final product.
I use Grammarly to check the spelling and grammar of my blog posts. I love the convenience of the tool so much that I became an affiliate. I’ve added it as a plugin for both my web browser and Microsoft Word. It’s always available when I compose my blog posts, whether I write directly in WordPress or compose in Word first. I like that it finds mistakes and suggests corrections all without leaving my compose screen. I especially like the way it points out overused, unclear, and repetitive words. One of my favorite words is ‘great,’ and I need reminders not use it too much.
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