As an aspiring storyteller, the last thing you want is your book collecting dust at home after launch.
Although, it doesn’t have to be like that. With all the available tools and resources online, you can start building your audience even before you resort to paid marketing services.
Book marketing tools for authors may seem costly but there are reasonable ways where you don’t have to spend a dime in building your readership and boosting your book’s exposure.
Marketing your book doesn’t have to be tough, rather it can be fun with lots of learning along the way.
Let’s dive in!
Canva
Building a platform online needs creativity and strategy. You can have the best topic in your blog but not attract a visually-oriented audience.
This is why, employing infographics, images or any sorts of visual presentations gain higher attention and interaction than those contents with plain texts.
This is normally practiced in tweets, Facebook posts, Tumblr, Instagram stories, and email newsletters.
And since some authors are not graphic designers or literally don’t have the time to stick their nose on Adobe tools, Canva is going to be their best friend.
Canva is a handy and user-friendly graphic design platform you can download on your digital device.
It lets you create graphic designs in minutes without having to consume too much of your time coming up with initial designs since it comes with templates.
Its manageable functions and drag and drop tool is easy to use.
It also contains a library of images, backgrounds, templates, layouts, moving images, and font styles to choose from creating visual graphics of unique design that matches your audience’s dynamics.
And with just a bit of creativity, you can also design your book cover through this tool!
Blog Topic Generator
If you run out of topic to talk about, Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator is the perfect tool to come up with fresh and engaging topics for articles or content you will be posting next.
This crafty tool generates five topic ideas after describing it in three words, your expertise, and mainly the idea of what you want to talk about.
Feedly
It can get be tough in deciding what content to post next.
One important factor to keep in mind about social media sharing is that it shouldn’t be entirely promoting yourself all the time.
People don’t care about what you know or what your book is all about unless they know that you care about them or what they want to see on their feed.
If you haven’t built your numbers yet, then offering your audience value is a great way to start.
With Feedly, you can categorize the blogs or authors you follow so you can easily sort out similar topics together.
Feedly is an RSS aggregator tool that gathers your desired content in one place, making it easier for you to pick relevant contents your followers love to see.
Buffer
The best possible way to manage your social media is through the Buffer tool.
Buffer is a software application that works both on mobile and desktop to provide the means to schedule your posts to any social media platform (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.).
It also lets you analyze the results as to what content gained the most interactions or clicks.
By analyzing its data, you’ll learn what your audience likes to see, and what gets them engaged or hang around your page.
Pay with a tweet
Letting your audience pay with a tweet is the easiest way to gather contact details you can use in the future and boost exposure by giving them something of value in return.
It’s hitting two birds on one stone.
So how does it work? Say, you’re giving out a free chapter, tips, or videos that are useful to your audience.
Instead of asking for an email address from them, you can also ask them to hit that tweet button for them to get their free stuff.
It’s simply letting them pay you with a tweet or shared post, (and maybe a treat of their contact details) in exchange for your free content.
So what do you get from this? Your follower’s contact details, exposure, and potential book purchase.
Video Trailers
Video trailers are snippets in moving pictures. As mentioned, visual presentations or moving images get much higher attention than plain texts alone.
Compelling trailers are relatively easy to hook readers: first, because they want to know what the story is all about, second, they want to know what happens next or how your story ends.
Remember that trailers are meant to stir anticipation or drive curiosity about what the story is about.
So don’t spill everything but just the juicy bits that make them want for more.
Play with polls
Using polls is popular among social media platforms. One free polling tool you can use is PlayBuzz.
It lets you embed polls directly on your website or a blog post with no limit of responses.
It comes with a share button feature that allows the audience to spread your poll question.
Your poll questions don’t have to be entirely everything about your book.
Play with your poll questions and ask your online users anything under the sun that has something to do still with your story or plot.
You can also create poll questions about the inspiration for your next book or blog posts.
With polls, you get free feedback from cover designs or character names.
People love to get involved in something big, and polls are an effective way to make it happen.
Evernote
Evernote is another handy application and notes tool that lets you organize your notes and keep track of ideas whenever inspiration strikes.
It is equipped with a range of user-friendly functionality that lets you access your notes everywhere, whether you’re on your mobile device or desktop.
TweetDeck
Twitter can be time-consuming but it’s where news and discussions spread like wildfire.
This is why even though Twitter can get too noisy, we still want to get ahead of that noise.
And there’s an incredible way to manage your online presence on Twitter.
Tweetdeck is a social media dashboard application for management.
Through Tweetdeck, you can save searches for your name, books, or related keywords to keep track of the conversations where your name or book name is mentioned.
It also lets you manage lists of your fellow authors, readers, or anyone in the literary circle to take a peek at their activities instead of spending an hour scrolling through your Twitter feed.
If you have scheduled tweets within the week, you can schedule it in advance through Tweetdeck so you don’t have to log check back in every time.
Writing and marketing your book may seem like a huge project to get done with.
But with a plethora of book marketing tools for authors, you’ll surely achieve your definition of success one step at a time.