This page is a blog dedicated to book marketing posts and articles.
Book marketing ideas that sell: blurbs
The purpose of the book blurb is to grab the attention of a potential reader. Once you have her attention by means of a great pitch line as the opening sentence, you need to follow that up with a few more sentences that tell her what’s different about your book and what’s in it for her.
Many new authors consider a book blurb to be a short synopsis. This is a mistake. Book blurbs and a short synopsis are two different animals, and they have very different purposes.
Here are descriptions for each of the three elements involved in a book blurb. Keep the blurb to fewer than a hundred words if possible and no longer than a hundred-fifty words.
Pitch Line: This is the first statement and it is the hook to grab the reader’s attention. Its purpose is to persuade the reader to keep reading the other two statements. It should be simple, one or two sentences at most, and it must make a clear statement about your book.
What’s in it for the buyer? This is a statement that explains what the reader (i.e. a book buyer) will get in exchange for money. This must be explicit. Tell the reader what benefit he’ll get from buying the book. Think of this statement in this way: if your book is surrounded by hundreds of similar-sized books on a shelf in a bookstore or on a web page, what would persuade the buyer to choose your book instead of one of the others?
What’s different about this book? With all the books published every month, what makes your book stand out from the others?
The secret to creating an effective blurb is to keep rewriting and condensing it until it expresses the ideas with a minimum of words.
For example, this is the book blurb for my novel Falstaff’s Big Gamble.
This blurb is less than 60 words
For my non-fiction book, How to Self-publish and Market a Book, I developed this blurb.
The blurb has a total of 57 words.
While not explicitly stated, the blurb must include a promise to the reader. In the example just shown, I promise the reader that I will show them how to publish and market a book.
An attention-grabbing blurb is an important part of your marketing kit. Adding keywords to the blurb makes it even more powerful.
As an example, here is the blurb for my novel The King Who Disappeared before I generated the keywords: A long time ago, Bohan was a king. But that was before the sleep spell. Now that he’s awake again, it’s time for revenge.
The keywords I used are: fantasy adventure, fantasy quest, fantasy humor, fantasy comedy.
Using these keywords, I modified the book blurb to: A long time ago, at the beginning of this fantasy adventure, Bohan was a king. But that was before the sleep spell. Now that he’s awake again, it’s time for a quest to get revenge. Fantasy humor doesn’t get better than this.
This increased the word count from 24 words to 42, still fewer than a hundred.
Embedding keywords into your marketing content makes search engines giddy with happiness and they react positively to the experience.
If your blurb is short, you can use it as a tweet. Or a blog post if it’s too long for Twitter.
This article is based on material from my book Self-publish a book in 10 steps.
AI marketing queries
You may not know it, but an AI app can be a huge help in marketing your book. It can brainstorm ideas on marketing, It can write social media posts and much more. I used Perplexity.AI to illustrate the usefulness of AI. I fed it the following query and got this response (which is in italics). The list of AI queries can be used with any general purpose AI app. Some queries will require that you add content such as a storyline or a short synopsis to give the AI more guidance.
Give me a list 10 AI queries an author can use to enhance his marketing efforts
Here are 10 AI queries an author can use to enhance their marketing efforts, each designed to leverage AI’s unique strengths for book promotion, audience engagement, and campaign optimization:
1.“Who is my ideal target audience for [book title/genre], and what are their reading preferences?”
Use AI to analyze market data and reader behavior, helping you define and understand your target audience for more effective marketing.
2. “Generate 10 engaging social media post ideas to promote my new book.”
AI can brainstorm creative content for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, saving time and increasing engagement.
3. “What are the trending keywords and hashtags in my book’s genre for SEO and social media?”
AI-driven keyword research tools can help you optimize your content and ads for better visibility and discoverability.
4. “Write a compelling book blurb and advertising copy for [book title].”
AI can draft and refine blurbs, ad copy, and taglines, providing a strong starting point for promotional materials.
5. “Outline a complete book marketing strategy for my upcoming launch.”
AI can generate step-by-step marketing plans, including timing for announcements, content ideas, and suggested channels.
6. “Analyze my competitors’ book marketing strategies and suggest ways to differentiate my campaign.”
AI tools can review competitors’ online activities and recommend unique angles or tactics to stand out.
7. “Create a quiz or interactive content to engage readers and promote my book.”
AI can help design quizzes or interactive experiences that drive engagement and sharing among your audience.
8. “Suggest email newsletter topics and subject lines to boost open rates and reader engagement.”
AI can generate personalized email content and optimize subject lines for higher engagement and conversions.
9. “What are the best times and platforms to post about my book for maximum reach?”
AI can analyze audience activity and recommend optimal posting schedules and channels for your marketing content.
10. “Summarize and analyze reviews of similar books to identify what readers love (and dislike) in this genre.”
AI can sift through reviews and feedback to uncover key themes, helping you tailor your messaging and address reader expectations.
These queries help authors harness AI for market research, content creation, campaign planning, audience targeting, and ongoing optimization—ultimately saving time and boosting marketing effectiveness in a competitive publishing landscape.
All of these queries may not resonate with your marketing needs but they do illustrate the usefulness of AI apps.
What your thoughts on AI and its capabilities?
Book marketing mantra and equation
Book Marketing Mantras
Copy these mantras to sticky notes and paste them near your computer screen.
No one buys a book they never heard of.
Marketing first: Royalties second
No Marketing = No royalties
Book Marketing Equation
You may be surprised to learn that successful book marketing can be mathematically represented by an equation. It doesn’t make the marketing easier, but it does simplify the concept. The equation looks like this:
SBM = ((QBP+ ∑R + Esub(lp) + ∑(A + P)+ EsubM + ∑SM))L
where
QBP means Quality Book Package∑
∑r is the summation of all book reviews
Esub(lp) stands for the effectiveness of book’s Landing Page
P is for Promotions
A is for Ads
(A + P) means the summation of all results for ads and promotions
EsubM is for email
∑SM means the accumulation of all your social media effectiveness
L stands for the Luck Factor (note: Luck can be a negative number)
This equation is one of the more useless pieces of information you’ll ever come across but it rather nicely illustrates the complexity of the situation. Simply put, book marketing is a complex project involving a lot of disparate moving parts. Once you accumulate all these components in the equation and mix in a bit of luck, you’re on your way to a successful marketing campaign.
Prioritize your book marketing tactics
The book marketing possibilities are endless.
What if you can’t work on all the marketing tasks you’ve read about? After all, life has a way of butting into one’s writing and publishing work. Obviously, not all marketing tasks are created equal, so the question comes down to this: What marketing tasks should you concentrate on? This article provides such list and it’s based on my years of experience
If you have limited time and or money to spend on marketing, make sure you do the following:
- Identify the customers for the book and where they can be found online
- Start a webpage
- Develop a set of keywords
- Write a book blurb
- Join Goodreads and Bookbub
- Request book reviews in a few of the groups on the Goodreads site
- Join LinkedIn
- Request book reviews in a few of the groups on the LinkedIn site
- Write a short synopsis
(Note: a book blurb and a short synopsis are not the same thing: they are two very different animals. See this article to learn more: https://hanque99.medium.com/book-blurbs-a-marketing-opportunity-46d6586ee44b)
A neat thing about this list is that, with the exception of the webpage, all these tasks are free. All they require is the investment of your time.
Here is another question. If you have a limited marketing budget which marketing tasks should be on the bottom of the list?
- Commission a trailer
- Do a blog tour
- Hire a promotion company
These three tactics are expensive and, with a limited budget, other, cheaper tactics will be more cost-effective.
This material is extracted from my book How to Self-publish and Market a Book.
