Marketing Books in the Social Media Age

This is a guest post from James Norman, a writer for the content creation firm Article Writing Services.

Advantages To Contemporary Marketing

There are several challenges to today’s marketing scene that would seem to prohibit great success in publicizing books. A damaged economy translates into purses held more tightly and coffers that aren’t brimming at the edges. In short, it has become much harder to convince someone that their dollars are well spent on a particular item, including a book. In spite of this fact, this era of even more sophisticated technology provides for some assets to literary marketing. The biggest current web trend is social media; when used effectively, it can establish hype around a new title and get people excited about looking for it as soon as it’s available. Although new technology continues to be all the rage, there seems to be a return in favor of real human contact as well. Providing opportunities to associate a book with an actual flesh-and-blood person is a smart way to build interest in its release date. 

How to Market Books Today

The best ways to get the word out on books these days are social networking and mobile marketing. The former, based on interactions with people via Facebook, Twitter, and the like, allows you to build a page for your book, or events related to it. This can help you determine the level of interest in your brand and title, and provide you with a base of consumers whose interest in the book can spread to their own networks. The boom in smartphones means that mobile messaging has become another powerful way to reach potential buyers. Both marketing methods, however, require an attractive balance of text and videos in order to be most effective. While text can be read and digested quickly, video is dynamic, memorable, and cheap to produce.

Successful Examples

Tammy Lenski put on a masterclass in contemporary marketing with the release of her book, Making Mediation Your Day Job. She staged a virtual release party to coincide with her title’s coming out. Granted, it helped that some of her friends in high places supported her by lending their services up for the taking via special prize giveaways. But therein lies another important lesson about book marketing: Use the network, as both publisher and author of the book, to create an atmosphere of anticipation. 

The Harry Potter book series also provides some lessons on successful marketing these days. Despite all the emphasis on magic and strong narrative, the books earned a great reputation for how much they entertained readers. To prosperously market a book, there must be an association with fun and quality that surrounds the title as well. Providing interviews and Q and A’s with readers online, guest blogging for relevant sites to your book’s content, and judiciously offering excerpts of the title are all ways to hype it up and make it an attractive commodity. 

For more information on marketing books in the social era, see Entrepreneur, Branding Marketing, and Businessweek.