Promote Your Author Reading with These 25 Tips

If you’re the only author involved, it’s fine. If you have a conversation partner, it’s better. If you’re able to get 2-3 other authors involved, your event will be more attractive to potential attendees. Every author will draw their own crowd, and collectively, you will all have a broader audience.

You should have various graphics promoting the event. They should answer the basics: who, what, when, where, why. And they should look professional enough to make potential attendees feel that the event will be worth their time.

If you have an author website, (which you should definitely have, as explained here, here, and here) create a page for your event on the site and refer people to it from social media and your email list.

Facebook is a great place to promote your book event, be it a virtual event or a live one. In addition to your website’s event page, you should create a Facebook event page and invite people on your friends’ list.

Creating a teaser video, similar to a book trailer, is a lesser-used approach to marketing your reading or other book event. Make sure the video is fun, to increase its views and chances of being shared.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ads are perfect for increasing traffic and engagement. You’ll gain visibility for your event, as well as for your book, by targeting the literary crowd.

Google ads ensure that your event pops up whenever people search for specific keywords. They also lead to sales from people who cannot attend the event but find out about your book this way.

Local libraries are one of the best places to find book lovers, and they are often willing to partner with local authors. Get to know your librarian and ask about opportunities.

Book clubs are another great avenue to meet book lovers. If you are a member of one, there’s no shame in recommending your book. If you know someone who leads or is active in one, ask to be considered as a speaker or to have your book be a possible club pick. Providing supplemental material, such as book club questions, or a discount to the group may also help.

Invite family and friends to your book reading and ask them to invite their friends. They’ll be happy to support you.

In addition to your ongoing PR outreach, also ask to have your event listed in local calendars. If it’s within your budget, run an ad in your local daily or on radio inviting book lovers to your book reading event.

Create a contest where winners get to attend the book reading and collect a gift after the event. Gifts don’t have to be expensive: book-related merchandise, a gift card, a small literary novelty would work. Advertise this everywhere you talk about the event.

If you already guest post on literary blogs, link to your event page. If you do not have a history of posting, it could seem spammy to start by promoting your event, so in that case, focus your comment on others’ posts and only mention your upcoming reading in your profile.

Create an email sequence and send it to your newsletter subscribers, inviting them to your reading or event.

Engage your Instagram followers by posting photos and videos of the event planning process as you build-up to the day of the reading. People love to get a look behind the scenes.

Create more buzz around your book and your upcoming reading by posting excerpts on Facebook and Twitter. This is good practice regardless of having an event to promote. Just don’t go overboard by making your feed so self-promotional that people start to tune you out. Creating a hashtag and using it when tweeting or posting about your event will help keep all information in one place. You should ask your reading partners and also attendees use the same hashtag.

Example:

An excerpt from our client Tom Lutz’s novel Born Slippy, posted on social media:

Besides hiring and networking, LinkedIn is also a great place to promote your book reading. Join literary groups and start engaging with members. Once you’re known in the group and have contributed to some discussions, you can mention your upcoming reading without seeming too self-promotional.

Create a series of videos building up to your reading event. Ensure that the videos are entertaining and value-packed, not just about your event or book, to keep people interested. Sharing writing tips or details of your journey to publication, for instance, will keep people entertained.

You can always incentivize attendance by offering a discount or a prize or even a freebie to attendees.

Approach community groups and invite the members to your reading. Most local groups are willing to send out invitations to their members. With virtual events, you can cast quite a wide net.

This may seem old school, but it still works. Flyers are an inexpensive way to get the word out and make a great souvenir, too. Hang them in coffee shops, libraries, public notice boards, wherever people may see them.

You can ask influencers to promote your book event and get their following to attend. It helps to have a relationship with them, though. When you do not, they may ask you for a fee to reach their audience. In some cases, this is well worth the price.

Podcasts are a great way to reach a targeted audience. You can start a podcast or appear on another person’s podcast as a guest to promote your book reading. Know more about this here.

You can do a series of short Youtube or Facebook or Instagram, or Twitter lives to promote your event. Live videos are great marketing tools to drive engagements. You just need to finish each of them by inviting people to attend your upcoming event and/or buy your book.

Quora gets a lot of traffic and can be a great place to promote your event. Create a discussion around a literary topic and mention your reading. Just don’t go for the pitch right away. That’s too self-promotional, and Quora users don’t like seeing it.

We hope the above tips helped you figure out how to promote your author event.