Last updated on February 14th, 2025 at 07:39 am
So you wrote a book. Congratulations!
It’s an accomplishment that you should be proud of.
But it’s also just the first step if you want to make a living as an author. Now you need to figure out how to sell your book.
Today we are going to share seven effective book marketing strategies that you can use to increase book sales.
Take Control of Your Business With a Book Funnel!
We have nothing against Amazon.
Our co-founder Russell wrote three best-selling books and they are all available on it.
But if you are serious about making a living as an author, you cannot be completely reliant on a single platform.
That’s why it’s so important to have a book funnel that allows you to sell books without Jeff Bezos. But how can you build a system like that?
Step #1: Create a Lead Magnet Landing Page
A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer to the potential customer in exchange for their email address.
As an author, you are fortunate in this regard because you don’t have to create one from scratch, you can simply use the first chapter of your book as your lead magnet. All you need now is a landing page.
Squeeze pages, which are the most basic type of landing pages characterized by being just one screen long, tend to work best for this.
This is the page that you will be driving traffic to with the marketing strategies that we are going to discuss later in this article.
We recommend using one of the proven, high-converting squeeze page templates from the ClickFunnels template library.
Step #2: Set Up an Automated Welcome Sequence
We don’t recommend hitting the potential customer with a sales pitch the moment they give you their email address. They didn’t have the time to check out your free chapter yet!
If you are a non-fiction author, send them this welcome sequence instead:
- Email #1: Who Are You? Introduce yourself to the new subscriber.
- Email #2: Where Did You Come From? Share your origin story. How did you become interested in the subject of your book?
- Email #3: What Do You Do? Explain in more detail what it is that you do and how it relates to the subject of your book.
- Email #4: How Did You Gain This Expertise? Explain what makes you qualified to write about this subject. Share relevant experience, credentials, and accomplishments.
- Email #5: Who Do You Do This For? Explain who are your dream customers + share a case study on how your book helped such a person achieve the results that they wanted.
- Email #6: How Can You Do It For Me? Pitch your book and provide a link to its sales page.
Meanwhile, if you are a fiction author, you can set up an email sequence of similar length where you introduce yourself, share your origin story as a writer, and discuss the experience of writing this book.
You also want to get the new subscriber excited about your book by giving them glimpses into it that pique their curiosity.
We recommend using the Hook, Story, Offer copywriting framework to structure your emails:
- Hook – Grab the subscriber’s attention with a compelling subject line.
- Story – Tell them a captivating story that resonates with them on an emotional level. Fiction writers have an advantage here!
- Offer – Transition from the story to the sales pitch to the call to action. You can end emails #1-5 by asking a question and encouraging the new subscriber to reply. Make sure to respond to every email you get. Then pitch your book and link to your sales page in the email #6.
Here’s how our co-founder Russell, who’s a best-selling author himself, explains this framework:
Send one email per day so that the entire welcome sequence would take six days to complete.
This will allow you to build some trust and give the new subscriber time to read the free chapter before you pitch them your book.
Step #3: Drive Traffic From Your Email List to Your Sales Page
Your sales page is the page where you pitch your book to the potential customer and give them the opportunity to buy it.
Here are a few quick tips that can help you ensure that it converts well:
Headline
Use an emotion-based headline.
It should grab the potential customer’s attention and pique their curiosity.
Copy Structure
Structure the body copy of your sales page like this:
- Appeal to emotional buyers above the fold with emotion-driven copy.
- Appeal to logical buyers below the fold with benefit-driven copy – Provide social proof such as reader testimonials. Sales pages for non-fiction books should also feature a bullet-point list of benefits. What will the potential customer learn by reading your book?
- Appeal to fearful buyers at the bottom of the page by introducing scarcity to give them that final nudge – Make your offer time-sensitive in terms of price or bonuses.
There’s much more to sales page copywriting than that but unfortunately we can’t adequately cover this subject in this article due to space limitations.
But if you want to learn to write copy that converts, we highly recommend our friend Jim Edwards’ book “Copywriting Secrets”. You can get it for FREE. All Jim asks is that you cover the shipping!
Get “Copywriting Secrets” for FREE!
Order Form
We recommend using a 2-step order form on your sales page.
It’s a type of order form that looks like this:
- Shipping information
- Payment details
So the potential customer fills out their shipping information first, then proceeds to checkout where they provide their credit card details and finalize the purchase.
A 2-step order form works better than the standard 1-step order form because the first step creates a micro-commitment that makes the potential customer more likely to complete the order.
You should also add a bump offer to your order form.
You know how at the grocery stores there are all these small items like KitKats and TicTacs at the checkout area?
These are impulse buys that people throw in their carts on a whim. A bump offer is the digital version of this.
The key here is to make sure that your bump offer needs no explanation. It should be a simple yes or no decision.
Say, everyone knows what an audiobook is, you don’t need to explain it to the potential customer. You can simply ask them if they want the audio version of your book. Yes or no?
Then, once the customer clicks the call-to-action button to complete their order, you should take them to the upsell page.
Step #4: Offer an Upsell or a Cross Sell
An upsell is an upgrade on the offer that the customer has already accepted. It’s about adding value to it.
In this case, they have already agreed to buy your book, so your upsell should be an upgrade on it.
Meanwhile, a cross sell is an offer that is complementary to the offer the customer has already accepted.
In this case, it should be something that is complementary to your book.
Non-Fiction Example
Let’s say your book is a guide to becoming a professional photographer.
You can upsell a one-on-one consultation where you help the reader figure out how to implement what they learned and answer their questions.
Or you can cross sell a photography equipment kit that includes everything a beginner photographer would need to get started.
Fiction Example
Let’s say your book is a thriller that is the first book in a five-book series.
You can upsell a box set that includes the entire series. Some people enjoy living on the edge and will buy it without having read the first book!
Alternatively, if it’s a standalone book, you can upsell an exclusive short story collection set in that universe that isn’t available anywhere else.
As for cross sells, they can work well for children’s books where you can cross sell toys, stationery, and other merch related to the book.
Say, if your book is about animals that live in the forest, you can upsell a knitted toy collection that includes all its characters.
Cross sells can also work well for genre fiction, especially YA, fantasy, and thriller novels. You can cross sell posters, stationery, etc.
If the customer accepts your upsell or cross sell offer, you should take them straight to the thank you page.
But if they reject it you should take them to the downsell page instead.
Step #5: Offer a Downsell
A downsell is a downgrade from the offer that the customer has already rejected.
In this case, it’s a downgrade from the upsell or the cross sell, something that is similar but smaller in scope and therefore more affordable.
Non-Fiction Example
If the potential customer has rejected the personal consultation upsell that costs $97, you can downsell a 30-day plan for jumpstarting their photography career for just $7.
Or, if they have rejected your beginner gear kit cross sell for $997, you can downsell a beginner camera for $297.
Fiction Example
If the potential customer has rejected your box set upsell, you can downsell the next book in the series.
Or, if they have rejected your children’s book merch cross sell, you can downsell a similar but more affordable item.
Say, if the potential customer has rejected your knitted toy collection upsell, you can downsell the main character toy.
Then, regardless of whether they accept or reject your downsell, you should take them to the thank you page.
Step #6: Thank the Customer
As the name of the thank you page suggests, this is the page where you show the customer what they ordered and thank them.
It’s also free real estate that you can use to encourage the customer to take a specific action. What do you want them to do next?
Say, if you are focused on growing your social media following on a particular platform, you can encourage the customer to follow you there.
Or you can present an offer wall where you display all your offers so that the customer could learn more about them.
Step #7: Continue Providing Value via Email!
You should continue providing value via email regardless of whether the new subscriber bought your book or not.
If you are a non-fiction author, you can create a weekly link roundup newsletter where you share links to interesting content related to the subject of your book.
If you are a fiction author, you can hype up your next book by sharing what you are working on, the experience of writing it, sneak peeks, etc.
You can also occasionally send out a free short story, especially around the holidays where you can make it holiday-themed (e.g. a Christmas-themed short story on Christmas).
Keeping in touch with your email subscribers will help you convert those who haven’t bought your book yet and make it much easier for you to launch your next book.
Top 7 Book Marketing Strategies
Okay, now that you have your book funnel in place, it’s time to start driving traffic to your lead magnet landing page. But what’s the best way to do that?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to marketing because every situation is different. You need to figure out what works best for you.
Here are seven book marketing strategies that you might want to experiment with…
Strategy #1: Paid Advertising
We recommend starting with paid advertising. Why?
Because paid traffic is immediate, targeted, and scalable.
All major social media platforms allow you to run ads on them:
- YouTube
- TikTok
Pick the platform that makes the most sense for your book, create an ad campaign designed to promote your free chapter lead magnet, and start running it with a small daily budget.
Once you figure out how to run ads profitably, you can begin scaling your campaign by gradually increasing its daily budget.
Mastering paid advertising is another way to take control of your business because it allows you to reliably generate traffic yourself instead of hoping that something or someone will do it for you (e.g. Amazon’s algorithm, book reviewers, etc.).
Moreover, you can use paid traffic to optimize your book funnel, which will then enable you to make the most of the traffic generated with other marketing strategies.
Strategy #2: Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a booming industry that is set to grow to $21.1 billion this year.
While the term “influencer marketing” is often associated with lifestyle influencers on Instagram, it’s not exclusive to it.
In fact, Instagram is not even the #1 influencer marketing platform anymore, TikTok is in the first place right now!
And that is the platform we recommend starting with because it has a thriving community of reading enthusiasts.
Here’s what you should do:
- Identify several promising TikTokers in your niche.
- Reach out to them and agree to pay them for three shoutouts over the course of three months.
- Create a referral link for each influencer and ask them to promote your free chapter lead magnet.
Then analyze the data to see which campaign generated the most leads and continue working with that TikToker. Rinse and repeat to find more creators that you can partner with.
This approach isn’t platform-specific so you can use it to find influencers on other social media sites as well.
Also, begin by targeting nano-influencers, then move on to micro-influencers, and finally to macro-influencers as your book sales increase.
Strategy #3: Podcast Advertising
Podcasts are an extremely popular form of entertainment with 38% of Americans above the age of 12 being monthly podcast listeners.
This means that promoting your book on relevant podcasts can be a great way to reach your target audience.
And the easiest way to do that is through podcast advertising: you can simply pay the hosts to promote your free chapter lead magnet.
You should use an approach similar to the one we recommended for influencer marketing:
- Identify promising podcasts in your niche.
- Reach out to the hosts and agree on three podcast ads over the course of three months.
- Create a referral link for each podcast and ask them to promote your lead magnet.
Then analyze the results to see which campaign generated the most leads and continue running ads on that podcast. Rinse and repeat to find more podcasts to partner with.
Strategy #4: Podcast Appearances
You can also appear as a guest on relevant podcasts to promote your book. This can work really well for non-fiction.
That’s what Dorie Clark did to promote her books “Stand Out” and “Entrepreneurial You”.
“I made podcasts a driving force in the launch of my book Stand Out in 2015, securing 160 podcast appearances over the course of the year — and I replicated that for the launch of my most recent book, Entrepreneurial You, hitting the same number in a four-month period.”
How did she manage to secure so many podcast appearances in such a short period of time?
Here are the five key strategies that she used to pull it off:
Identify Which Podcasts You Should Target
Dorie advises finding your media “doppelganger”: an author who wrote a book in the same niche and used podcasts to promote it. That will give you a blueprint that you can follow.
“For instance, if you’ve written a book about negotiation, find other well-known authors or thinkers on that topic and go to the media page of their website and see which podcasts they’ve already appeared on. They’ve essentially done the sourcing for you.”
If your doppelganger doesn’t provide a list of their media appearances on their website, you can simply google it with the keyword “[doppelganger’s full name] + podcast”.
Search for Warm Leads
It will be easier to secure an appearance on any given podcast if you can get someone to introduce you to the hosts.
“From your searches above, create a spreadsheet of possible podcasts, and then visit their websites to see who their previous guests have been.
If you see people you know, reach out to them and ask if they’d be willing to make an introduction, and most will gladly do so.”
And if you can’t get an introduction, then at least mention that you saw that your media doppelganger (e.g. an expert on negotiation) was a previous guest. This will immediately give the hosts an idea of what you bring to the table.
Create a Short Cold Outreach Email
Podcast hosts typically provide an email address that you can use to contact them on their official website.
Your email should be short, include social proof, and explain why you believe that you would be a good fit for the podcast.
Dorie provides this sample template that you can customize and use for cold outreach:
“Hi John.
My name is X.
I really enjoyed your recent discussion with Y about [his company name], and I wanted to reach out because I also run a startup in the fintech space. [Insert 1–2 sentences of social proof, such as $ raised, who your clients or investors are, where you incubated, media plaudits, etc.]
We just [insert timely hook or angle] and I wondered if you might be interested in discussing it? I thought this might be especially relevant to your listeners because of [insert reason].
If you think it might be a fit for your podcast, I’d be honored to continue the conversation. Please let me know and thanks for considering.”Be Prepared to Leverage the Opportunity
You want to make the most out of each podcast appearance that you secure.
Here are some tips from Dorie:
- Make sure that you have high-quality headphones – You can’t use your computer speakers or cheap headphones for this because that will negatively impact the audio quality.
- Ask the hosts if they intend to record videos as well – You want the video to look professional so make sure to sort out your background, lighting, etc.
- Prepare a list of questions that the hosts might ask and practice answering them so that you’d be able to give concise but informative responses – Some hosts might even ask you for that list so that they could better prepare for the interview.
- End each podcast appearance with a call-to-action where you tell the listeners what you’d like them to do next – “Hosts often tee up this opportunity with a final question such as, “How can listeners learn more about you?” During the launch of Stand Out, through religiously mentioning that listeners could download a free Stand Out self-assessment workbook, I was able to more than double my email list — from 9,500 to 25,000 — in nine months.”
As you can see, while Dorie used her podcast appearances to promote her book, she didn’t drive traffic directly to the book sales page, she drove it to her lead magnet landing page instead. That’s what you should do as well!
Strategy #5: Social Media Marketing
You also want to build a social media following.
While each platform has its own peculiarities, the key principles that you should follow remain the same:
- Create a content schedule that you can keep up with indefinitely.
- Commit to that content schedule and adhere to it religiously. You can produce content in batches and then use social media scheduling tools like Buffer or Edgar to schedule it and publish it.
- Ensure that each and every piece of content that you publish provides value to your followers.
- Use your social media to promote your lead magnet but don’t be obnoxious about it. Providing value to your followers should be the main focus.
- Interact with your followers. Ideally, you want to respond to each tweet, comment, or reply that you get.
Content quality is extremely important but the real secret to building a social media following is consistency. So just keep at it!
Also, as an author, your best bet is probably Twitter, as it is a text-driven platform that by its nature attracts people who enjoy reading.
That being said, there’s no need to limit yourself to it, you can also post on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, you name it. If you enjoy being on camera you might even start a YouTube channel!
Strategy #6: Personal Newsletter
While personal newsletters have been around for a long time, this medium has exploded in popularity in the last half a decade, primarily due to Substack offering an easy way for writers to set up their newsletters.
Of course, setting it up is just the start, you then need to figure out how to grow your audience.
But it’s not rocket science. Just like with social media, consistency is the key to success:
“The best predictor of success is writing and promoting your work regularly and consistently. It’s hard to predict which pieces will take off or when someone big will find and share your Substack. Even if growth feels slow at first, over time, the growth will compound into a self-propelling momentum.”
And here are some practical tips that Substack offers to writers who want to grow their audiences:
- Talk about your newsletter everywhere – Add a link to your newsletter to your website, social media bios, and email signature. Add calls to action to your posts encouraging the reader to subscribe. Whenever you publish a new post, share it on social media. Turn on the recommendations feature and take advantage of the Notes feature. Comment on other writers’ posts.
- Engage with your readers – Reply to friendly emails, conduct reader surveys to learn more about your audience, and feature testimonials on your About page.
- Spend time writing a few big hits – Long-form, high-quality pieces that stand a chance of getting picked up by various websites, other writers, and press outlets have the power to create growth moments. “There’s no magic formula, but one big hit can bring you thousands of new readers.”
- Forge targeted partnerships – Partnering with other writers, influencers, and media outlets can help you expand your reach. You want to invest in building mutually beneficial relationships that you can then leverage to grow your newsletter. You might also want to consider using cold outreach to ask people who have large audiences to share your content. “If you don’t know anyone, try cold emailing or messaging someone you admire whose audience overlaps with yours. Introduce yourself with your Substack, share something relevant to their followers or about a topic they care about, and be gracious with your ask.”
Here’s a case study of how one writer grew his audience to 20,000+ Substack subscribers:
Strategy #7: Amazon Marketing
Amazon is the biggest bookstore in the world so it makes sense to sell your book on it. But how can you get the attention of potential readers when there’s so much competition?
Here are some tips:
Make Sure that Your Book Cover Conforms to Genre Expectations
When people are browsing Amazon, they notice the covers first, then click on the books that caught their eye to read the descriptions.
That’s why you want to make sure that your cover design conforms to the genre expectations in a way that allows the reader to immediately guess what your book is about.
Say, if your book is a Scandinavian noir thriller, you want the cover to look like the covers of popular Scandinavian noir thrillers.
If instead of doing that you defy genre expectations with a cover that looks like the covers of popular cozy romance novels, the Scandinavian noir aficionados will ignore your book altogether.
Meanwhile, the romance readers who clicked on it will be baffled because they were looking for a feel-good love story, not a tale about a disgraced alcoholic detective who is hunting a serial killer in Stockholm!
Of course, this is an extreme example designed to illustrate the point, no sane person would use a cozy romance cover style for a Scandinavian noir novel cover.
However, both non-fiction and fiction authors make the mistake of defying genre expectations with their covers all the time.
But the reality is that getting creative with your book cover will almost certainly damage your sales!
So look at the covers of the top 100 best-selling books in your genre, identify the most popular cover style, and then hire a designer to create a cover that conforms to that style.
Choose the Right Categories for Your Book
Amazon allows you to assign categories to your book.
Presumably, this helps the algorithm recommend your book to readers who enjoy similar books.
Make sure to choose not just the right category (e.g. thrillers) but also the right subcategories within it (e.g. Scandinavian noir).
Also, if you put your book in the wrong category (e.g. you use the category “Horror” for your Scandinavian noir novel), the readers are going to be unhappy about it and that will be reflected in their reviews (“Where are the ghosts??”). Avoid that at all costs!
Write a Compelling Book Description
Your book description is your sales pitch.
It should give the reader a good idea as to what they can expect but also pique their curiosity so that they would feel compelled to buy the book.
Look at the descriptions of the best-selling books in your genre if you need inspiration.
Get People to Review Your Book
Reviews are extremely important on Amazon.
However, as an author with a recently published book, you will run into a catch-22 where you can’t get organic reviews because people see that your book has no reviews and avoid it because of it.
That’s why it’s advisable to proactively solicit reviews from people who enjoy reading books similar to yours.
You can do this by offering free review copies to Goodreads power users, YouTube and TikTok book influencers, professional book reviewers, etc.
Of course, you want them to be honest in their reviews, so don’t expect everyone to give your book five stars.
In fact, if your book has a 5.0 rating on Amazon, readers will see that as suspicious and be skeptical about the legitimacy of these reviews.
You want a rating of at least 4.0 stars but it has to be believable with a good mix of 3,4, and 5-star reviews.
Use Amazon Ads to Promote Your Book
Finally, Amazon is not just an online store, it’s also an advertising platform.
This means that you can promote your book with various types of ads, from sponsored recommendations to banner ads to ads on Kindle screens.
Just like with any other platform, you need to make sure that the math works, but if you can figure out how to profitably run ads on Amazon, it can help you drastically increase your book sales!
Case Study: How Mark Brown Sells 6,000+ Books Every Month From His Garage
Mark Brown’s journey to where he is today was complicated.
Growing up, he was a shy outcast, but then in his late teens, he decided to pursue the “fickle things”, as he puts it: career, money, and status.
He might have continued on that path but his stepbrother passing away in a motorcycle accident at age 21 served as a wake-up call. It made Mark realize that life was temporary and question what he was doing with it.
And then the second wake-up call came when Mark’s son was born – he realized that he had made many mistakes in his life, mistakes that he didn’t want his son to repeat.
Wanting to pass his hard-earned wisdom to the next generation, he created a children’s book and showed it to other parents. Everyone loved it.
Mark believed in his message, he knew that there was demand, but he had mixed feelings about selling his book.
“I was subconsciously rebelling against marketing,” he admits.
Today, Mark’s Zen Pig series consists of six books, he is a full-time author, and he sells 6,000+ books every month.
Here’s how he got there…
Make Sure to Leverage the Success of Your Book!
Your book can help you get access to opportunities that weren’t available to you before.
Nathan Barry, who is now best known as the founder of ConvertKit, first made his name in the entrepreneurial community by launching several wildly successful books about web and mobile app design.
He then wrote “Authority” in which he shared his process so that other authors could replicate his success.
One of the things that he discusses on its sale page is how publishing a book can help you get raises, jobs, public speaking engagements, etc.
Brett Kelly wrote “Evernote Essentials” which led to Evernote offering him a job – his dream job – before the book was even published.
Rob Walling, who already had a popular blog and a podcast, got public speaking opportunities because of his book.
Nathan himself, who started out as a web designer before becoming an entrepreneur, observed that being an author helped him to get consulting gigs.
He remembers how in one case, just after he had published “The App Design Handbook”, he was on a call with two people from the company that was considering hiring him.
“The junior person on the call had read my book and loved it.
The manager wasn’t so sure about hiring me. If my design was so good, why wasn’t I working in the Bay Area?
I listened to the two of them go back and forth for a minute before the manager relented and said, “Actually, of course he’s good enough, he wrote the book on the topic.”
And it’s not just non-fiction authors that can leverage the success of their books. Fiction authors can do it too!
In fact, it’s common for well-known fiction writers to teach seminars, workshops, and even university classes.
Also, in the digital age, you aren’t limited to teaching in person, you can also create an information product for that purpose.
Say, Nick Stephenson leveraged his success as a fiction author to create an online business where he teaches other writers how to market their books through his online course “Your First 10k Readers”.
Of course, if all you want to do is write books, there’s nothing wrong with solely focusing on your career as an author.
But if you want to get your dream job, become a professional public speaker, or teach up-and-coming writers, you can leverage the success of your book to achieve that!
Build Your Book Funnel With ClickFunnels!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to build a book funnel:
- A proven book funnel template.
- A visual editor that allows you to customize the pages in your book funnel.
- An email marketing functionality that enables you to start, grow, and monetize your email list.
We also offer a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk. So why not start building your book funnel today?