10 FREE BOOK MARKETING IDEAS! // Wondering how you can market your book for free? Indie authors have a lost list of ways to market their books, but if you’re like me, you enjoy keeping your marketing budget small. In this video, we’re talking about ten free book marketing ideas you can use to sell more books! These book marketing tips will help you promote your book without being pushy! With that said, let’s talk about how you can sell more books on Amazon using these book marketing ideas!

Download the first chapters of I am Mercy:

Resources Mentioned:

  • Social Media for Authors:
  • The Book Launch Planner:
  • Alessandra Torre:
  • Kindlepreneur:
  • Publisher Rocket: https://publisherrocket.com/
  • How to Create a Book Trailer Playlist:
  • How to Arrange a Book Signing:
  • How to create a book trailer playlist:
  • StoryOrigin: https://storyoriginapp.com/

PATRON OF THE WEEK: Rebecca K. Sampson: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFs30ZxpJzxDsw7iNWazdyw

Video Transcript:

Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to market your book completely for free or with a very low budget? If that’s the case, then be sure to stay tuned because we’re talking about 10 free book marketing ideas. Hello everyone. My name is Mandi Lynn. I’m an author, a book cover designer and the creator of The Book Launch Planner, and if you want to see weekly videos on writing, publishing and book marketing, then be sure to hit that subscribe button as well as that notification bell so you never miss an upload.

As an author of three novels and three co-written non-fiction’s, I’ve done a lot of book marketing in my day. In fact, those three non-fiction’s are actually books on marketing, but today we’re focusing exclusively on some of the free book marketing you can do, so let’s jump right into it.

Number one is social media marketing. Now I can talk a lot about this all day. Basically the idea is that you want to post about your book on social media, but that isn’t all you want to do. Basically the idea is that every five to seven posts you make, only one of them are about your book. You want to do more giving then taking in the community. If you want a full video on the topic, I do have a YouTube video that you can check out it. It’ll be linked down below as well as up in the info cards. So be sure to watch more on that if you want to learn more about book marketing using social media.

Number two is send your book to reviewers. Now not only will the reviewers go ahead and write a review of your book, but hopefully you’ve chosen someone who’s more-so a social media influencer. This way it’s someone who will not only read the book but post about them reading the book on their social media platforms. Now if you watched one of my recent videos, you’ll know I talked a lot about The Book Launch Planner, which is out for preorder right now, so the link to that will be down below. But in The Book Launch Planner, I have a template on how to reach out to reviewers and Instagrammers. So you can have them feature your book. And also in the planner is a contact list so you can say who you reached out to, what day you emailed them and whether or not they actually wanted to read the book. So this will just help make your life a little bit more organized. And again, if you’re interested in pre-ordering, there’s a lot of preorder benefits going on right now, so be sure to visit the link down below.

Number three is to update your Goodreads pages. So if you haven’t yet already, make sure you join Goodreads as an author. From there you’ll be able to control your book’s listing on Goodreads, you can control the description, all that jazz, but it doesn’t end there. I don’t know if you guys follow Alessandra Torre on YouTube or not, but if you don’t, you definitely should because she posts some awesome tutorials on how to use Goodreads to market your book. So one of the things I’ve done recently is that I’m slowly going through all my books and updating their listing on Goodreads. This means I’m not only updating the description, adding some quotes from reviewers, but I’m also adding some posts where I add fun graphics of the book and just make it that much more engaging and makes people want to read the book even more. If you haven’t yet already, be sure to check out her YouTube channel. Again, it will be linked in the description.

Number four is to update your Amazon pages. So like we talked about updating your Goodreads page. You also want to update your Amazon pages. Now you don’t have to do this if you did an amazingly wonderful job updating your page in the first place, but if you’re like me, you will learn as you go and you learn that you can do things better and that it’s sometimes best to go back and fix things later on. Another thing I’m doing besides just updating my Goodreads pages is I’m also going in and regularly updating every single description of my book on Amazon. Now this is making sure I include things like keywords that are relevant to the book’s genre, making the book description sound that much more enticing to readers and adding some quotes from reviewers as well.

Now one way I find keywords to include into my book’s description is that I use a tool called Publisher Rocket. You guys may have heard of Dave Chesson. He is also known as Kindlepreneur here on YouTube. His videos are awesome packed full of advice. If you haven’t checked out his channel again, you should be doing so and also give his software Publisher Rocket a try because it’s not only designed to help you find keywords when you’re trying to create Amazon ads, but it can just help you find keywords in general to include in your book’s description, update your book’s category, all of that. Basically what I’m trying to get to is that when you have your Amazon page, you’re trying to optimize your page, so if someone’s just looking up a book by genre, it may be possible that your book will pop up. Or if you decide to run an ad, your ad will become more optimized because your books page is optimized.

Number five is create a Pinterest board. Now, this is something brand new that I’ve just been starting to do. I’ve been trying to get a little bit more into Pinterest and making it something fun for my platform as an author and one thing I do is that each book has a dedicated Pinterest board. I pin those aesthetics there and I like to include quotes from the book in those aesthetics. That way if someone is just on Pinterest and they see it, they’re like, Oh, that sounds really good. I need to buy that book. Now, one of the key things you want to do when you do pin your own stuff with quotes on it is that you want to make sure that in that quote somewhere that you say, this is the title of the book. You can find it on Amazon and you also want to make sure that the image that you upload links over to Amazon so people can buy it directly there.

Another thing you can do is that on your Pinterest boards you can add descriptions of your book. So in the description of your Pinterest board, be sure to say really quickly the title of the book, the genre, maybe a quick one sentence describing the book and then of course a link to the book. Now the links in Pinterest aren’t clickable in the description, but people should be able to copy and paste it if they are interested. Before we continue, let me know in the comments down below if these are any tips you’ve thought of before, and if not, let me know which one is your favorite.

Number six is to add your book to your signature. So if you’re like me, you have an email address dedicated just to your author stuff, whatever that may be. So make sure you create a custom email signature. And if you are like me and you have more than say three books out, make your life easier by just saying you’re an author, maybe mention what genre you are, but at the least, make sure you link over to your author website. That way, if you’re ever in communications with someone in there, just mildly curious, it will be very easy for them to go ahead and explore your website.

Number seven is create a book trailer. Now, there are many ways you can create a book trailer. In fact, I have a whole playlist of book trailers I’ve made from my books as well as videos on how to create your book trailers. In the past I’ve done videos where I filmed the trailer myself or I use stock photography. So for example, for Essence, I filmed everything for, She’s Not Here. I used all stock video clips. Either way, it’s pretty simple to create a book trailer and if it’s done well, you can find a lot of book sales coming from it.

Number eight is to do book signings. Book signings can be anywhere, whether it be at local libraries, local bookstores, or you can do big giant conventions. Now I do have a video that talks about how you can arrange book signings with bookstores. So I will link that down below. I will let you know it’s a little bit older, so bear with me. I’m a little bit awkward on camera, but that’s okay. The point is still across. Right now I do at least one book signing a month and I’ve vlog all the adventures over for my Patreon page and I talk about the behind the scenes such as how many books I sold, how it actually went, all that jazz. So if you’re more interested in seeing all the behind the scenes of book signings, head over to my Patreon page on page and join the vlogger club tier.

Number nine is newsletter swaps. So newsletters, who else might actually be one of the most popular ways that most authors do a form of free marketing. Basically the idea is that either you and another author or you in a whole group of authors, agree to self promote each other on each other’s newsletters. So the key here is that you want to make sure that whoever you swap newsletters with, you want to make sure that you both have the same genre. So if people subscribe to my newsletter are into young adult, I want to make sure that someone I’m swapping with has a young adult book cause otherwise if I’m promoting say Sci-Fi in my newsletter, that might not be the best thing for my audience and I always want to make sure that even though I’m doing this free form marketing that benefits myself as well as someone else, I want to make sure the quality in my newsletter stays the same so I still have a good open rate on my emails and that people still see value in my emails.

There’s a few different ways to find newsletter swaps. The most basic way is just to talk to your author friends and seeing if they’re interested in doing some self-promotions or you can find some Facebook groups or my personal favorite is the Story Origin App, which I will link down below in the app. You can basically kind of post when you want to do newsletter swaps or you can find other people who are doing newsletter swaps and you can see what genre and all that. So it basically streamlines the whole thing. And the story origin app is free to use right now, so be sure to take advantage of it.

Last but not least is give free samples of your book. So basically what I mean here is create a PDF version of your book where it’s only the first three chapters of your book.

Take that PDF and make it an email opt-in. That way when people sign up to your newsletter, and not only are you getting newsletter subscribers, but they get a free excerpt of your book where they can read it and see if they like it and if they really, really want to read it. Now, if you’re lucky when they get to the end of the excerpt, they’ll be like, Oh my God, I need more. And they go out to buy the book. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to buy the book. And you do that by at the end of the excerpt you have a little embedded link and basically it’ll say want to read more, click here. And they’ll click there and they’ll be headed over to Amazon where they can choose whether to buy the ebook, the paperback, the hardcover, whatever.

But hopefully you will see a lot of sales for that. And if you don’t, at the least, you have a new newsletter subscriber, who you can hopefully convert into buying your book later on down the line. And speaking of which to kind of show you guys how it all works, I am giving out a free except of my second novel. I am Mercy. I am Mercy is a young adult historical fiction about a young woman who is being accused of being a witch during the black plague in France. So if that sounds interesting, you can read the first three chapters for free by just visiting the link down below. When you visit the link you’ll be signed up for my newsletter and in return as a thank you, you get a free excerpt of my book. So be sure to read it, hopefully you love it and maybe you’ll buy at the end.

Who knows. If you have any other marketing ideas that I haven’t mentioned yet, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Otherwise, that is it for this video I do however still want to give a shout out to our patron of the week today. Our Patron of the week is Rebecca K Sampson. She is actually another one of my cover design clients so it’s been an absolute blast working with her. Ember Dragon Daughter is a YA fantasy and is the first book in the Fated Tales Series where an orphan discovers her secret deformity is actually proof she is the missing dragon princess. She then has to decide for herself what and who she will fight for before her family’s secrets burry her alive. The companion novel Halsey Fated is available for preorder now and is coming out March 31st of this year. If you’d like to know more about Rebecca or her books, you can visit her over on her YouTube channel, which is right here, and will also be linked down below. If you would like to be a featured Patron of the Week, join me over on Patreon. There’s a lot of cool exclusive content you can unlock there. Or if you’d like to join me over on my newsletter, once you join me on my newsletter, you have access to all my free downloads as well as a few webinars. As always, thank you all for watching. If you’d like more content, I have a video marketing playlist right here where you can just keep on learning about marketing or you can check out the marketing for authors series.

 

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