So you’ve finished writing your novel, memoir, or short story collection. Congratulations! Now what? How do you get your work noticed?

You’re about to embark on one of the most exciting journeys of your life.

From start to finish, publishing a book takes many steps, including finding the perfect publisher, negotiating contracts, and marketing your book.

So how do you go about marketing a book internationally?

If you have all the correct rights to your book, there are some strategies you can employ to market your book within each regional market where it’s sold.

You may already have managed to reach worldwide audiences automatically. However, there are ways to specifically market your book to get worldwide exposure. Let’s take a look at a few of them. 

Make Your Book Available 

Before looking at ways of selling your book internationally, let’s discuss availability. You should ensure that your book is available on every major ebook platform.

When you are targeting an international market, you must consider what ebook store is most popular in each country where you wish to sell your book.

Fortunately, there are a plethora of ebook stores that can help you achieve this.

For example, Kobo is among the biggest ebook stores in Canada, so if your book is being sold in Canada, you should definitely use Kobo in your promotional campaign.

Promotions 

The average reader spends $7.50 per month on ebooks. If you want to sell more books, you must offer them at a lower price. And it doesn’t even have to be a big discount; just a few cents off can make a difference.

A recent survey by Bookbub found that 95% of bargain readers had bought a book from an author they didn’t know about because of a promotional deal.

Another way to promote your work is to include links to related works in the backmatter of your discounted book. 

Finally, don’t forget to offer a discount on your next book. Readers love it when authors give them a reason to pick up another book in a series.

One study showed that adding a link to the next book in a series increased sales by over 50%.

Book Reviews 

Reviews are extremely important for marketing in the modern world, especially for books.

Potential customers look at reviews to help inform a purchase decision, and it’s important to make sure there are enough positive ones out there.

Many retailers have product pages that are different for each region, and those pages don’t always share reviews. 

Amazon, for instance, has separate reviews for each region depending on where the book was purchased.

So you might see a lot of reviews for a book in one region, but very few in another.

To address this issue you could try running a Featured Deals campaign. It’s likely you’ll see increased measures of visibility after the promotion.

Ad Campaigns

BookBub Ads lets you run targeted campaigns based on geography. You can choose a single region or multiple regions to focus on.

For example, if you’re promoting a book about travel, you might want to advertise it to people living in Asia.

Or, if you’re promoting a novel about romance, you might want to target people in North America.

The content doesn’t necessarily need to be relevant to the specific place to be effective, it is just useful to have a specific focus. 

The BookBub Ads interface gives you access to all of the same features as regular BookBub campaigns, including the ability to set up custom audiences, track conversions, and use conversion pixels.

However, there are some key differences.

For one thing, you’ll see different types of ads depending on where you place your bid.

If you’re bidding on a US-only campaign, you’ll see US-targeted ads. But if you’re bidding on a global campaign, you’ll see international-targeted ads.

You can also specify whether you’d like to show the same ad across all regions or display different versions of the ad based on location.

Finally, you’ll notice that the “Choose a Book” dropdown menu includes a list of books associated with the ad. This feature allows you to select a book without having to manually enter the ISBN number every time.

Social Media 

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow advertisers to target their campaigns geographically.

This allows you to reach audiences based on where they live, what city they are located in, or even what state they reside in.

If you want to reach readers in New York City, for example, you can do so by targeting people living there.

Targeting people within those regions who express interest in similar books or genres is one way to increase your chances of success. 

You can also try and reach your audience through posting videos on social media platforms like Instagram.

Instagram videos aren’t just great for sharing personal moments; they’re also a powerful tool for promoting your business.

They allow you to show off your products, in this case your newly written book,  in ways that photos simply cannot match. 

People also tend to trust recommendations from people who have a strong presence on social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Country Specific Design 

Not all readers respond to design in the same manner, and cultural differences can affect how they view a book.

Publishers may offer you the opportunity to customize the look and feel of the book to match the audience in each region.

You might choose to change the color scheme or font style to make the book easier to read.

In Europe, books are typically printed in black and white, whereas in America, books are often printed in full color.

On book covers, typography, imagery and certain layouts will better appeal in one region over another.

You could browse through successful books similar to yours and in the same genre across regions to see if there are differences in design.

If you notice a difference, try to understand why. Is it because the publisher wants to appeal to a specific audience? Or does it just make sense to do things differently in one place versus another? This will help you decide what to include in your design. 

Partnerships 

Coordinating with relevant blog readers helps launch new releases or reinvigorate backlist titles.

Bloggers based in other countries provide writers access to their subscribers who may also live in these countries.

So compile a list of bloggers based in the regions you’re targeting who regularly review books or interview authors in the same genres, then contact them directly via email.

This will require some research, because every genre and subgenre has its own unique set of relevant sites. But it’s worth the effort as it will reach more potential readers. 

Conclusion 

Marketing your book worldwide isn’t as difficult as it seems. It takes time and effort, but once you get started, you’ll find there are plenty of ways to get your book to more extensive audiences. 

The more your book is marketed the better chance of people purchasing it, writing a review and recommending it to others.