How to Market Your eBook

14 Realistic Ways to Market Your New eBook and Boost Sales

One of the biggest reasons why self-published authors don’t sell more books is because of poor marketing. No one will buy your book if they don’t know it exists. So, how can you market your eBook without hiring agents or spending a ton of money?

After all, not all self-published authors have a massive savings account to toss into marketing campaigns. However, some methods will require some monetary investment of some kind.

As the saying goes, “You gotta spend money to make money.”

Nonetheless, there are quite a few cheap and free methods you can do right now that can help spread the word about your book. It’ll mostly come down to the amount of effort you put into marketing.

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14 Methods to Market Your New eBook

These are some of the most common methods that authors use to market their books. In fact, I’ve used several of these methods and plan on doing a lot more in the future.

Especially once my next book is ready to publish, which should be in the very near future. Also, keep in mind that I am mostly focusing on digital assets in this post.

I’ll go over techniques to market printed books in another blog post, although, some of the methods may be similar.

Today, let’s take a look at a few realistic strategies to market your eBook.

1. Generate Some Hype Before Publishing

Perhaps one of the most effective methods to market your eBook for free is to build up some hype. However, this is best when you have an active following of readers and subscribers.

By being active on social sites, including the likes of YouTube or even TikTok, a lot of your followers will buy the book the moment it drops.

That is as long as you spend some time building it up.

Get excited about the book, talk about it without revealing too much, and drum up some support from those around you.

2. Promote the eBook from Your Blog

If you have a blog, even a free one from the likes of WordPress.com, promote the eBook from your site. You can do this in a number of ways depending on the response from your visitors.

For instance, if you look on the right sidebar of this website, you’ll see my most recently published novel. This is a widget that directly takes visitors to my book on Amazon.

You could also use popups as long as you don’t annoy your visitors with them.

Something else you could do is blog about the process of writing your book before actually publishing. This kind of goes along the lines of drumming up some hype, especially if your blog gains followers easily.

3. Start Your Own Author Podcast

Podcast About the eBook

Podcasts are a dime a dozen nowadays, and it seems like everyone and their cat has a show available somewhere. The reason why they are so popular is because they work well to engage an audience.

After all, roughly 62% of the United States listened to a podcast in 2022. That’s a lot of listeners.

Start your own author podcast and build up an audience. When you’re next eBook drops, the regular listeners are the ones who are most likely to buy it.

There are a lot of different platforms out there for sharing the podcast for free. You could use Spotify or Goodpods to get your name out there.

The hardest part is that you have to market the podcast as much as your book. Otherwise, you won’t have an audience in the first place.

As an added bonus, monetizing a podcast isn’t overly difficult. So, you could generate a bit of income in addition to promoting your eBook.

4. Sell the eBook from Your Website

If you have a website or blog, you’re probably already bringing in visitors. There’s nothing wrong with adding a storefront to your website to sell the eBook directly.

The best thing about setting up an online store for your eBooks is that you won’t have to hold inventory. The eBooks are digital files, which means you don’t have to spend time and money shipping anything.

It’s nearly a method that you can set and forget. Well, outside of dealing with customer emails or the occasional complaint.

Not to mention the fact that you can cut out the middleman and make more money per sale. For instance, Amazon takes a huge chunk of the royalties. Selling your own eBooks cuts Amazon out of the equation.

And yes, you can sell your book on your website while selling it on Amazon at the same time. That is unless you’re enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, which is an exclusive deal from Amazon.

In fact, I plan on setting up my own direct bookstore with my official website soon. I just haven’t had the time to set it up yet.

5. Website Popup Giveaways and Discounts

Giveaways and discounts have the potential to get your book in front of more people quickly. Everyone loves a deal, especially if they’re already interested in the genre or industry in which you write.

Unfortunately, running special discount deals on Amazon’s KDP platform is a pain unless you sign up with Kindle Unlimited. Otherwise, you need to manually change the price of your eBooks back and forth.

Still, it’s not a bad way to generate interest as well as a few possible reviews from someone who received a free or discounted book.

I like to run popup giveaways when a new book comes out. Last time, I gave away several autographed copies to those who signed up for the raffle.

6. Use a Landing Page for the Book

Landing pages still work exceptionally well for marketing just about anything. And they can work great to market your eBook from the website.

Essentially, a landing page is where most of your links take visitors to read about your book. Here, you can answer why they would want to buy your book while providing the sales link or call-to-action button.

Plus, if you put it together properly, it can be one hell of a boost to your blog in terms of search engine optimization. Using relevant terms could show in Google and further promote your book.

In any case, never underestimate the value of a landing page that you dedicate to market your eBook. If you’re not sure how to make one, there are several free WordPress plugins specifically for building landing pages quickly.

7. Email Marketing Campaigns

Email Marketing

Email is still one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing. And it could help spread the word about your new eBook rather quickly.

There are several ways you can set up email marketing campaigns. For instance, a lot of people will use subscription popups on the website or create newsletter links in the sidebar.

Don’t buy email lists, though. In order for your new eBook to have the best chance of selling, people need to already have an interest.

Giving people the option to support your writing is far more ideal than trying to force your book onto someone.

Buying a list of email addresses is virtually the same as going door-to-door in a random neighborhood hoping someone will eventually buy your book.

8. Add to Email Signatures or Autoresponders

Speaking of email, there’s nothing wrong with adding the landing page to your email signature to market the eBook. You could also set up email autoresponders.

However, this works best if you already send out a lot of emails every day and to more than just your friends and family.

It takes less than a few seconds to add the link to your site from the email signature, and it may produce a sale here and there. It’s just one of those free methods of marketing that doesn’t take much effort to implement.

Autoresponders work well, especially if you have a contact form. Anytime someone sends a message to you using the contact form, your autoresponder could let them know your eBook is for sale.

9. Use Social Media

Despite most social media sites being dumpster fires, they are still effective at promoting your book. Especially if you can amass a decent following of people who already enjoy your work.

The hardest part about making social media work for you to market the eBook is that you need to find your target audience. Every author and writer will have varying experiences depending on the social site.

For example, I have five times the followers on Twitter than I do on Facebook. However, I sold far more copies of A Freelancer’s Tale through Facebook than Twitter when it launched.

Yet, I know several authors who use Twitter almost exclusively because of how effective it is. So, it really comes down to where your specific audience likes to consume your content.

10. PPC Advertising Campaigns

Although pay-per-click campaigns aren’t free methods of marketing, there are often one of the cheapest methods of advertising. This is because you can control how much you spend per day while sticking with a strict budget.

How a PPC campaign works is that you’re only charged when someone clicks the advertisement to see the landing page or the sales link of your book.

It doesn’t matter if the advertisement is shown 10 billion times. It won’t actually cost you anything until that click happens.

I’ve heard authors have great success advertising an eBook on Facebook’s PPC platform, but I haven’t tried it for myself yet. But I can see it working out well if you properly set your keyphrases to match what your target audience wants to read.

11. Collaborations within Your Community

Market the eBook with Collaborations

Collaborations work amazingly well when done properly. The idea is to market yourself as an author and your eBook to the other person’s audience.

And vice-versa.

This doesn’t mean that everyone in the other creator’s community will instantly follow you or buy your book. But it will get your name out there while building up a bit of recognition and reputation.

Also, there’s nothing wrong with networking with other authors who may become valuable assets and even close friends.

When it comes to selling any kind of book, your reputation is going to be one of the biggest factors. In fact, Stephen King even tried making a point once about the reputation of his name and selling books.

12. Use eBook Distribution Services

When you don’t have a lot of disposable income, it’s a bit difficult to market the eBook properly. But nowadays, you have access to marketing services for your eBook that only charge a percentage of what you sell.

A few eBook distribution services you can use include:

  • Draft2Digital: This is a much smaller platform, but it can get your book into some of the biggest book systems on the planet including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
  • IngramSpark: IngramSpark recently changed its pricing scheme to something similar to Draft2Digital. Instead of an upfront cost of $50, they only take a percentage. Yet, IngramSpark has a much wider distribution network.
  • PublishDrive: Although it’s not free, PublishDrive does have a lot of services that are affordable as long as your book is making a few sales each month.

As with everything else related to self-publishing, though, you’ll need to market the eBook distribution page as much as possible to get the most bang for the experience.

For instance, Draft2Digital will generate a landing page for your book. But it’s up to you to distribute that page as you would any other.

13. Video Marketing Methods

eBook Video Marketing

I mentioned YouTube and TikTok a bit earlier, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail about video marketing, in general.

Video is one of the most prolific forms of content today, and it’s worth using to promote your eBook. Especially if you’re capable of building one hell of an audience.

In truth, I’ve probably sold more books thanks to my YouTube channel than any other method. And it doesn’t cost me anything but time.

I’m actually looking forward to some live-action videos to promote my books in the future. For one thing, I think it would be incredibly fun to see my books come to life on-screen.

14. Connect with Book Influencers

There is an influencer for just about everything, nowadays. And while some of them aren’t worth the time to query, there are a few book influencers who might help spread the word about your eBook.

This isn’t the same thing as a collaboration. It’s essentially advertising through word-of-mouth while using the influencer’s audience to build up hype, sales, and reputation.

In a collaboration, you’re sharing each other’s audience.

The problem with some influencers, though, is that they can be a bit expensive. This is especially true for those with hundreds of thousands of followers and a bit of an ego.

Search Terms Will Only Go So Far

In the end, search terms on Amazon will only go so far. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still need to do a bit of optimization when describing your book with keywords on platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. But marketing needs to go much further.

This is especially true if you’re self-publishing your book. A lot of the marketing legwork is going to be on your shoulders, and no one is going to buy the book if they don’t know it exists.

Also, keep in mind that the more niche your book is overall, the more difficult it will be to sell.

For instance, my book is incredibly niche. Unless you want to know who I am or how I got started as a freelance writer, you’re not going to read the book.

This ultimately means fewer sales.

No matter the type of niche or genre, you’ll still need to do more than just optimize the Amazon page if you really want a full-time income from writing books.

And how you market the eBook pales in comparison to writing something people would want to read. That’s an issue of its own.

It Takes Time to Properly Market an eBook

Too many people are looking for the get-rich-quick opportunity. No matter how you market the book, it’s going to take time to really gain momentum.

Sure, there are a few things that can blast your book into the top 10 of Amazon. But it might be short-lived if you don’t keep your eBook in the public eye.

Not to mention that not everyone will have the same glowing experience as other authors. Some of us self-published authors have to battle, scrape, and fight for every square inch of digital real estate.

Plus, I’ve never had the bankroll to invest in a lot of marketing methods. So, everything I’ve had to do thus far has either been on the side of free or exceptionally cheap.

As I said earlier, though, my first book is exceptionally niche. It wasn’t meant to be a prolific piece of literature. In reality, I wrote it as a way to help me learn how to self-publish books.

In that regard, the book was a stunning success.

My point is that you shouldn’t expect a windfall from any marketing platform overnight. Being an established author is more about the long game, and it’ll take time before you bump into a fan at a Starbucks.

How Do You Market Your eBook?

Don’t assume that after you publish a book people will read it. You need to get the title in front of as many people as possible to give the book the best chance of success.

It will take a lot of trial-and-error experiences to find what works best for you. But you won’t know what those methods are without trying.

What sounds like the easiest method for you to market your eBook? What kind of experiences have you had with BookTube or BookTok on social platforms?

Michael Brockbank
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