Marketing

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Many authors will say that marketing our books is more difficult than writing them. They have a point! Below are some pointers that may help you…

  • Amazon, Facebook advertising: this will cost you time and money. Amazon charges you per click whereas Facebook charges for every time they show your advert so Facebook will likely get through your daily budget. The recommended is whatever you can afford.
  • Advantages: Amazon: will only charge if someone’s interested in your advert. Facebook: like any posts you can interact with anyone who leaves a comment.
  • Disadvantages: Amazon: You don’t know who has clicked on your advert. Facebook: you don’t know whether anyone interacting goes on to buy your book, and it may cost you more money but that depends upon your budget.

Blog tours (also see dedicated sub-page)

  • Blog tours are online book tours where book bloggers read your books and leave reviews on their website (to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of subscribers) and hopefully on Amazon and the likes. There are blog tour operators who will arrange this for you.
  • Note: it’s against Amazon’s terms of service to pay for reviews so ignore anyone who says they’ll review your book for a charge.

Social media

  • Social media: with so many platforms, how do you choose which ones to go on? Some of that depends on the genre you’re writing. For example if you write children’s books, it’s more likely that you’ll be targeting the parents. Facebook tends to have an older than TikTok but of course there’s a huge range of readers on both.
  • Instagram and Pinterest are ideal for book covers.
  • LinkedIn is seen as a business website but has a very healthy book-related community.
  • Which platform are you on? Take a look at the Participate page to become involved in Self-Pub Fest.

Below are panels where we’ve talked about marketing:

On Monday 1st June 2026, the panel below, with Morgen hosting, talked about various aspects of marketing for authors. The recording is below.

These are free events but we’re raising money for local book-related charities and we’d be really grateful if you would donate whatever you afford via the Charities & Donate page. Thank you so much.