Books are hard things to finish., even for the best writers out there, sometimes. With all that work and effort that goes into writing them, you’ll want to make sure that all that success translates into a good-selling book!

Now, if you’ve signed up for a large publishing company, this isn’t an issue that you’re likely to need to deal with.

With digital and physical marketers, promoting a book through companies like Random House and Harper Collins is very rarely an issue for a writer here.

However, if you are someone who wants to be a little more involved in promoting your work, whether by choice as part of a bigger publisher, or by necessity if you are going down the self-publishing route, there are plenty of steps that you can take to start.

And luckily for you, we have some of the best ways to help promote your work before it hits shelves and book listings online!

This list that we have collected contains plenty of ideas that you can use to help get your book promoted as soon as possible. Before it is published, even!

These tactics cover everything from large team-based paid options to simple tricks and ideas that you can do on your own, and for free.

The Right Cover

Starting with an option that might be either the simplest step on the list or the trickiest one, depending on how you approach book marketing, you can’t go wrong with a good cover for your book.

Having a book cover that entices potential readers and customers into picking the book up and checking the first page for themselves is a major part of the marketing machine that is publication.

It’s what is going to attract people to a book in the first place, and has been done for as long as retail bookstores have been a thing.

However, a catchy or striking book cover is also vital for the role of another aspect of promotion that we will quickly become familiar with through the course of this list: Creating engagement, and starting up the hype train!

Revealing a great book cover is the perfect way to get followers on social media interested in a potential book, as they can immediately associate the cover with an upcoming work of interest.

Now, how you go about finding or making a good cover will depend on how you go about publishing your work.

Major publishing companies will likely be the ones to get in contact with an artist, and the amount of say an author has over the final cover will vary

Of course, self-publishing also comes with its perks and cons. The author will have a much more creative say over what their final cover might look like, while they may struggle to find the right artist for the job.

Making An Author Website

This is a key feature that anyone with an ounce of marketing experience will be able to tell you is a key step to not just promoting your work before it is published, but also how establishing your online presence as an author for yourself.

Not only does this allow potential readers to look you up and learn more about you, but an author’s website will give you an easy place to advertise and promote upcoming books that you have planned, as well as a site to backlink to from 

Creating a website from scratch is difficult, especially if you have no background in web development. Fortunately, there are plenty of services that you can use to help create a great website with next to no previous knowledge required.

Companies like Squarespace and Wix provide plenty of options when it comes to customizable features, giving you a website that looks and feels professional to click on and navigate.

Opening A Pinterest Account

This might feel a little random when compared to some of the other tips that we have covered, but trust us when we say that opening a Pinterest account might be one of the easiest ways to both promote your book, a swell as drive people to your website to learn more about it before it is published.

Pinterest is a site where hundreds of thousands of images are uploaded to a liked every day, with virtually any field of interest being covered here. That also happens to include books and other literature posts.

Creating posts or sending images of your book to Pinterest, all of which will be linked back to your main author’s website, are a great way to increase the amount of internet traffic to your website, which will in turn help boost the website and book in online searches overall.

A Great Description

This is another simple, yet very effective strategy that you can use to encourage people to click on your site is to have a great description that you have made of your book.

There are two aspects to this strategy. The first and more obvious one is that it serves as a kind of blurb of your book, allowing readers to know what to expect when coming into the book.

However, there is another aspect that creating this description can do for your audience. It is an effective tool for explaining what a book has to offer to your audience if they read it. It’s kind of like a sales pitch, in that sense.

There are tons of elements that you can add to a good description, from a compelling hook that can get the reader invested, to describing the emotional turmoil or goals of your main characters, or even saying explaining what issues a reader might have can be solved by reading your book.

All of these ideas and more should be considered when planning out a description of your work. Remember, anything that might pique the reader’s interest is on the table with this option!

Social Media Presence

This is a particularly important aspect to consider when promoting a book in our modern, digital-oriented age.

You’ll likely have noticed that most mainstream or popular authors today are on social media in some form. This allows readers to follow and even directly get in contact with their favorite writers.

And, as a way of driving up engagement with an upcoming book, this engagement is crucial for getting people hyped about your next release!

However, while simply creating an account for every social media platform might seem like a great idea, that may just end up wasting your time and energy.

After all, there are so many social media sites out there these days that staying up-to-date and posting on all of them is unfeasible for most authors.

Plus, there’s a good chance that the target audience of your upcoming book (i.e. the audience that will pay for it) may not be on many of these platforms.

So, if you do decide to go with this strategy, make sure that do a little research before deciding on where you will create official social media accounts.

Try and aim to have a presence on sites where your intended audience is likely to be, to better maximize your overall success.

Great Author Photo

People like to put the name of an author to a face, so this idea should be a no-brainer for any author with an online presence to have!

Not only does having a photo of you, the author, on your webpage immediately allow potential readers to make that connection, but you’ll also find that you appear higher on search results for your name or book, thanks to the addition of a good photo!

Book Announcement

This is a strategy that will work in tandem with a lot of the other ideas that we have covered. Ideally, you will already have a decent presence on one or more social media platforms.

With a large enough following on at least a few of these sites, any announcement of a new novel is more than likely to drum up interest among your follower base, which in turn might spark new interest in people outside your immediate influence.

Run Ads

It is a tradition as old as time it seems, and one that many people can often be quick to overlook. However, you should never underestimate the power of what a good advertising campaign can do for your social media presence!

Gather Blurbs/Synopses For Your Book

Just about the only thing better than a good description of your book by the author themselves, is a good description of a book by other people who liked it!

Final Notes

So, there you have it!

There are so many ways to drum up interest or support in your upcoming published work, that it can feel a little overwhelming to pick just a few ideas.

Trying to do all of these ideas would even be exhausting for some authors.

However, if you focus on just a few of the ideas here, you’ll almost certainly have a better shot of your booking having a commercially successful

And if you do find yourself sinking your time into quite a few of these ideas and others, we hope that your efforts are rewarded!