5 Tips to Market Your Book

We all want to sell our book(s), and in the literary world, there are so many different methods we can use. Some work better than others, but writers should be willing to try something different to record any increase or decrease in sales. Let's go over some way to market your book!

1. Can the spam! (Ok, I'm sorry, but I've been meme'd about this some years ago. How can I not share?) But seriously, this is important! We all know what it's like to have someone try and force us to do something we don't want to do. Same goes for buying books. Those generic tweets that you schedule to go out several times throughout the day, over and over again? Dude, you may seriously be losing not only friends, but potential readers by acting like a machine. Go out and interact! BE HUMAN.
2. Put some effort into your cover! And maybe even some money, if you're financially capable. If your cover looks like Photoshop hacked up and vomited on a book, you're in for some disappointment. Readers will likely pass by your hard work with as much excitement as any stranger passing a nauseous kitten hacking up a fur-ball.
3. Join a writing community! To be honest, it's kind of a pain to find an actual useful writing community online. So many of them just turn into another place for writers to spam their books. If you come across a good one, stick with it! I am part of The Phoenix Quill on Facebook. It's a place for writers to share their work, get advice, get critiqued, and on most days, just have a creative place to geek out with other writers! The creative juices aren't always flowing, and it's nice to have a safe place to go and talk writing when you can't write...writing. OWS Word Mafia is another fantastic writing community offering support you can see, along with critique, feedback, beta readers, daily prompts, and the same wonderfully supportive founders you have here on Our Write Side.
4. Start promoting before finishing the book! This isn't something you hear a whole lot of, but it works! If you're out talking your book up, readers will hear, ask, and seek out your book when its release finally arrives! You want people curious and excited about your work! Build up your author platform across social media, and get out there and mingle. This puts your name in people's minds and develops a sense of trust that will help when it comes time for book sales!
5. Keep writing! This is the clearest and most obvious thing....keep writing! You want to have more to offer your readers so they keep coming back. If they only get one book out of you, before you know it, they'll move on and find someone who keeps creating.

It's tempting sometimes to not just throw out your pride and joy to the masses, but it's been made so clear that it just doesn't work that way. You need to be something different and you need to be loud about it...without spamming. Because ew...who likes spam?