Some More Book Promotion Tips for Authors

Not using a detailed description on the book’s sales pages. Whether on your website, on Amazon, on other online sales sites, your sales copy should be detailed and compelling. We see a lot of book pages that contain a one paragraph description and that’s it. Your sales copy should never be so sparse.

This is not a common problem, but we see a few book pages that sound something like this: “The King’s Daughter is a YA romance for young adult readers who enjoy romance novels. This romance novel will capture the attention of all young adults (YA readers) who…” You get the idea. No matter what keywords you’d like to rank your book for, no keyword should be repeated so often that it’s more than 2% of the page content. That means that in a 100-word description section, no keyword should be used more than twice. If it reads unnatural, you need to remove some keywords. It’s best to use the metadata section for this purpose.

This is a huge one, especially on Twitter, and we talk about it often there, yet… What is considered spamming? Any posting on social media that’s about your book but that doesn’t fit the context. Sending a DM (direct message) to someone with “buy my book” is spamming. Responding to a post about someone’s day with a link to your book is spamming. These are obvious to most authors.

What’s less so is when posting repetitive book promotion content. It’s easy to fall into the trap of creating one or two good promo posts and then repeating them over and over again. Setting these tweets up in Tweetdeck or Hootsuite and letting your content repeat endlessly. But it’s not smart. People notice it and you quickly become the “must avoid” self-promoter. Many will mute you, some will even block you. So keep your tweets and other social media posts varied. Include images and videos. Interact with other users.

Don’t expect to get results without hard work. Social media is time-consuming and doesn’t always pay off even when done right. But if you do it wrong, you will definitely fail at it.

We are very proud to say that we’re working with Ashanti Anderson, an award-winning Black Queer poet, playwright, and screenwriter. We will publicize and market her chapbook collection titled Black Under, coming from Black Lawrence Press, Fall 2021.

We are also publicizing a new edition of Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Seven, now a major motion picture directed by Aaron Sorkin, starring Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Redmayne, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. This book is by our client Jon Wiener, whose Set The Night On Fire: L.A. in the Sixties we’ve been promoting. The book came out in April and made it to the LA Times Bestseller List.

Speaking of bestsellers, our other client Jody Armour’s book titled N*gga Theory: Race, Language, Unequal Justice, and the Law debuted as an Amazon Bestseller in the Crime and Law, Discrimination Constitutional Law, and Rap Music! The book sold so well that after only 3 weeks it’s going into its second printing!

We couldn’t be any happier for the above clients or any more grateful to be a part of their successes.