6 Author Marketing Tools You Should Try Out Now

Marketing your book is the hardest step that comes after writing. If you want to reach your readers and create a buzz around your book, you need to have a solid and consistent marketing strategy—which requires some professional knowledge and skills, especially if you’re planning to do it all by yourself.

This article lists 6 useful marketing tools that will help you in different aspects of your book marketing campaign.

01. Canva (for Graphics)

Designing appealing visuals and ads for your book can seem like a daunting task for an author who has no experience in graphic designing. But that’s where Canva comes in handy—Canva has taken the world by storm in the past few years as a graphic designing tool for amateurs to produce professional-looking designs.

With its thousands of pre-made templates customized for different social media platforms, and unique elements that can be dragged and dropped within the design with ease, Canva can easily help you create stunning ads and posts to market your book.

02. Yoast SEO (for Search Engine Optimization)

With Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you can convince search engines like Google to direct people towards your website or blog—and, as an author, this is an art that can determine the success of your book sales.

To make sure your website uses the highest technical SEO standards, install an SEO plug-in such as Yoast, which comes with a range of in-built features that would optimize your article. While the plug-in helps with your search engine rankings, it will still depend upon your content, so make sure to produce good quality content with relevant keywords. The plug-in will then analyze your content and give you scores based on different factors, like sentence length, frequency of keyword usage, and many more, giving you  a comprehensive overview of the quality of your content.

03. MailChimp (for Email Marketing)

Creating a mailing list is one of the easiest ways of keeping in touch with your readers regularly. Email marketing helps an author send personalized emails to thousands of people at once, and allows you to connect with your fans to promote your book and increase sales. There are many email marketing services available now, and MailChimp, with its affordable pricing plans and easy-to-use interface, is one of the best places to start your email marketing campaign from.

In fact, MailChimp is free for up to 2000 contacts and 12,000 email sends per month. With MailChimp’s signup forms, you can customize fields to collect everything from age and gender to interests and subscription preferences, letting you define your target audience in order to send personalized emails.

According to MailChimp’s Email Marketing Field Guide, “Mailchimp makes it easy to design beautiful, personalized email campaigns and automations so you can build and strengthen your relationships with potential and existing customers. And with your online store connected, you’ll collect helpful e-commerce data for your customers—like order history, how much they spent, and whether they’re first-time or repeating customers—so you can send targeted campaigns that direct traffic back to your store and generate more sales.”

04. Kindle Direct Publishing (for Ebook Publishing)

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is one of the two self-publishing service companies owned by Amazon.

KDP Select—enriched with Amazon’s marketing strategies—will enable you to publish your book for free and also give you the option to expand your book’s availability on a global scale, making it more accessible for readers around the world. You must give Amazon exclusive distribution rights to your ebook for a 90-day period, but you will be able to claim Amazon’s highest royalty rate of 70%. By doing so, Amazon will also allow your book to be part of the lending library for Amazon Prime members.

05. Amazon Author Central

Whether or not you’re using Amazon’s services, remember to set up an Author Central page, which will allow you to build your Author Stores, adding photos, videos, biography, editorial reviews, details of your upcoming book events, and even link to your own website. When you have an Author page on Amazon, readers will even be able to sign up to get email notifications from Amazon whenever you release a new book.

Amazon Author Central is very important if you want to market your book to readers across the globe, for it allows you to cross-link other books you have published, and build a long-term community of fans.

06. Instagram Ads (for Advertising)

Instagram is a powerful and cost-effective social media marketing tool for authors, with its massive and diverse community of users. While there are numerous ways you can utilize Instagram to promote your book, you can also create paid advertisements on the platform which has proven to be a highly effective way to reach out to your target audience. The Analytics tool lets you track the progress of your ads, activity, and figure out what influences your sales. There are four types of Instagram Ads that you can choose from: Photo Ads, Video Ads, Carousel Ads, and Stories Ads.

Stories Ads have currently proven to be the best out of the four, with a 23% higher conversion rate than feed ads and 78% more clicks, according to a study conducted by Agora Pulse.