The Digital Author’s Cheat Sheet
Digital-first authors, not sure how to promote your book without a traditional approach? We’ve put together this handy cheat sheet just for you!
Traditionally published authors’ books are in bookstores, where they can walk in, meet people, and promote in person, but with digitally published novels, everything happens online. Because of this, to promote their book, a digital-first author has to be where the book’s buyers are—online. Below, we’ve explained each of the items in our cheat sheet. Have a look!
With no brick-and-mortar bookstore, how does an author meet her readers? This is where social media appearances come in handy. An author can access her fans and other readers by doing Live events online. Facebook and Instagram have Live options where an author can chat directly to readers. Not ready for the Live feature just yet? An author can also reach readers with posting on social media and responding to comments and questions. On the platform X (formerly Twitter), authors can attach a hashtag to their posts so readers can follow entire conversations about that post.
Author readings can actually happen online, using platforms like YouTube and TikTok, but if you’re not ready to video yourself, you can be strategic about posting the first chapter of your novel to pull readers in. You can also include some behind-the-scenes information about your inspiration or deleted scenes to make it enticing to read.
While you can still do TV and Media interviews, it’s important to remember to hang out where your readers are (online). Instead, you could do online Q&A’s, guest posts, and podcasts to drum up interest for your book and link the posts to the book’s retailers. You can get with other authors in your genre and interview each other, then share those interviews on your websites. You can also reach out to reviewers and podcasters who might be interested in reading and discussing your novel.
Bookstore visits are tough for digital-first authors because their books aren’t in the shop! But many times, they are on online retailers worldwide. So the best thing to do to get the book in front of readers is to post about it online. You can search out readers’ groups on social media, post on your own social media, and find forums and chat rooms where people are looking for books like yours. Having a well-maintained website is also a good place to keep the latest information about your book in one spot. While social media platforms come and go and change in popularity, your website belongs to you and will always be, so keeping it up to date and making it a place where readers want to go to find information can be helpful in promoting your book.
So with no bookstore book displays, where do you send people to find your book? The retailer page! You want the fewest number of clicks between the interested reader and your book. So, for example, if you include the general link to your website in a post, the reader clicks that, gets past your newsletter and cookies popups, scrolls around, looking for your book, clicks it, goes to the book’s page… Then someone interrupts them and you’ve lost the sale. Instead, if you post with the retailer link(s), the interested reader, clicks the link, sees the book and everything they need, and (hopefully) hits the buy-button. If you want to draw attention to all your books, by all means, send the readers to your website. Adding things like a list of your books in order, book club discussion questions, and an interactive blog can all bring people to your website.
No matter how you decide to promote your digital title, as long as you promote where your readers hang out, you’re on the right track!