Book marketing
Getting the book to the readers it was written for.
Marketing does not make a book good and it cannot rescue one that is not ready. What it can do is make sure the readers who would love your book find out that it exists.
The honest version
Most book marketing fails for the same three reasons.
It starts too late, it aims at everyone, and it stops on publication day.
Starting late means the metadata, categories and description — the things that determine whether a search finds the book at all — get filled in hurriedly at the point of upload. Aiming at everyone means the messaging is general enough to interest nobody in particular. Stopping at launch means the effort peaks precisely when the book has the fewest reviews and the least momentum.
The fix is not complicated, but it is unglamorous: decide who the reader actually is, get the listing right before publication, and keep going for a quarter.
What we will not do
- Buy reviews, or arrange reciprocal review schemes
- Engineer a temporary category ranking and call it a bestseller
- Promise sales figures, review counts or retail placement
- Spend your budget on advertising a book with no defined readership
- Recommend a launch campaign for a manuscript that is not ready
What a campaign covers
The pieces, in the order they matter
Positioning
Who the book is for, described specifically enough that you could point at them. Everything downstream depends on this.
Metadata & listing
Categories, keywords, description copy and comparable titles — the things that make a book findable at all.
Early readers
Getting the book into the hands of people likely to talk about it, before publication rather than after.
Launch activity
Coordinated effort across the channels that suit your category, concentrated where your readers actually are.
Sustained quarter
Continued activity after launch week, adjusted on the evidence of what is working.
Reporting
What happened, in plain terms, including the parts that did not work.
Questions
About marketing
Before publication, not after. Metadata, description, categories and early reader outreach all need to be in place ahead of the launch, and several of them are difficult to change once a listing is live.
No. Some companies engineer a brief ranking in a narrow category and present it as a result. It is a mechanic, not a readership, and it does not survive contact with the following week.
Yes. We usually start by reviewing the existing listing and metadata, because those are the cheapest things to fix and the most commonly neglected.
We plan around a launch quarter rather than a launch week. Anything shorter tends to produce a spike and then silence.