If you’re like me, you’re always scouring for ways to help readers find and fall in love with your books. Do free ways to market books still exist? You bet.
Here are NINE Free Ways to Market Books:
BookBub: Claim your author page at BookBub. Whenever one of your books releases, BookBub will likely send a notice out to your followers. (Be sure to funnel as many followers to BookBub ahead of time via your social media sites and newsletters. Simply post the link to your BookBub author page and ask them to follow you. That way, they’ll receive the notifications.)
Call to Action in the Back of the Book – When you read a book you like, don’t you wonder what else the author has written? I do! Always make sure that links to all of your books are active and easily accessible in the back of your other titles (you can add links to front matter as well).
Free Book Listing Sites – EBook sites pop up all the time, some with more staying power than others. It used to be fairly easy to find one that would let you list your free or deeply discounted eBooks at no charge, but no so much anymore. That said, I’ve revised this recently and here are a few that are still offering no-cost features for your free (or deeply discounted) books: ebookshabit.com, bookpraiser.com,(Read their guidelines for rules. If you know of others, please leave a comment ~ thanks!)
Goodreads – Anyone can be a member of Goodreads, but authors can sign up for Librarian status. This means that you can list your books and manage your pages. Unfortunately, the free giveaways feature in Goodreads has been discontinued (boo), but you can still participate in groups and send announcements to friends.
Kindle Unlimited – Enroll your book in KU for 90 days and have your choice of a 5-day free promo or countdown promo. EVERY time I do a freebie promo, I see a bump in sales over the next few days, even on books not associated with the freebie. It’s like this cool magic that comes out of nowhere. There is much debate in the indie author community over the choice of “going wide” or “going exclusive” with Kindle Unlimited. With KU, members of Amazon can download your book for free, and you are paid per page read. Since I have two handfuls of books available, I always have some in KU; I rotate books in and out of the various distributors, then back in to KU. Even for new authors I’d suggest trying KU to find readers. It’s only three months, people.
How are you doing so far? Making lists? I hope so!
Let’s keep going … here are more free ways to market books:
Mailerlite – If you are not collecting emails (legally, of course), you’re missing out on a GREAT way to communicate with your readers. I’ve tried several email services, but I currently use Mailerlite because it’s simple to navigate, versatile, and customer service rocks. Mailerlite allows you to maintain an email list up to a specified number of subscribers for free. (Others I’ve used in the past are Vertical Response and Constant Contact, but neither has a free version.)
Newsletter Swap – I did a swap with a writer friend and gained a whopping 600 more readers! Here’s what we did: I included information about my friend’s books in one of my newsletters and she did the same for me in one of hers. My info in her newsletter also offered a FREE download of the first book in a series. NO WHERE ELSE could her subscribers get that deal other than signing up for my mailing list – a win-win-win situation! Subscribers received something for free, my friend’s popularity grew, and I gained more readers, many who went on to purchase my other books. (Note: Always be clear that your new subscribers are signing up to receive news from you and the free book. A professional practice even before GDPR.)
Social Media – Pick a few social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumbler, etc., then update your friends and followers with news about your book. PRO TIP: I’m part of several groups who often “share” each others’ posts, providing a wider net of influence (kind of like a manual Thunderclap campaign – see below). If you ask friends to share your “tweet,” make it easy for them by writing the post yourself so all they have to do is cut and paste. And make sure to return the favor!
Thunderclap Campaign – When three authors and I put our books in a collection, we set up a Thunderclap Campaign to announce it to the world. This is a cool way to ask your online friends to help you spread the word about your book through all their social media channels at the same time. Think of it like one collective rocket launch through the web – yahoo! I’ve used Thunderclap on multiple occasions–once with a social reach of well over a half million potential readers. Thunderclap offers a free version with restrictions, or you can pay a small fee to have those restrictions removed. Sorry, friends! This service is no longer available 🙁
I hope you find these tips on free ways to market books helpful! If you have some others not mentioned here, please share the marketing love. <3