3 Must-See Digital Marketing Tips for New Authors

No matter how well you wrote, edited, and designed your first book, you probably cannot attract many readers unless you promote it. In fact, most online sales platforms tend to reward sales success with even more publicity of their own. At the same time, new and relatively unknown authors almost always need to attract their own first readers in order to share a portion of the platform’s audience. Take a moment to explore some online tactics and tools you can use to make sure you introduce yourself and your work to the right readers.

Three Online Tools to Introduce Your Book and Yourself to New Readers
Get started with these online marketing tools and tactics for new authors:

1. Build a List of Subscribers
A subscriber list with reader emails can make a tremendous difference for new authors. You can use it to promote new books, ask for reviews, and much more. Consider some tested tactics for building and using your subscriber list to grow your audience:

Create your subscriber list: You can start using email marketing tools like Mailchimp for free, and you only have to pay when you have already collected hundreds of subscribers.

Attract subscribers: Bookfunnel and Prolific Works are examples tools that you can use to offer “reader magnets” in exchange for email address. Examples of reader magnets could be free short stories or previews of your books. Some authors also offer other kinds of media, like videos or printable bookmarks.

2. Promote Free or Reduced-Price Downloads for a Limited Time
You might reduce the price of your book for a few days at a time to attract more readers. You can find plenty of sites that will promote free or .99 cent specials. Extra sales can help improve your ranks and may also result in more reviews.
You don’t always have to give away your book and might even write a shorter piece that you use exclusively to introduce your style to more readers. For instance, you might compose a short story with one of the same characters or themes as your longer novel or series. Of course, you should include links to your other work inside. You need to let readers know that they can enjoy more of the same after they purchase your full-priced books.

3. Use Social Media and an Author Site to Engage Readers
As a new author, you will probably want to create pages on a couple of social networking sites. Create posts that are likely to appeal to the kinds of readers that you hope to attract. Of course, you should make it easy for your social fans to find your books to buy. At the same time, you should not just advertise when you interact but try to engage people with interesting, informative, or even amusing content that they are likely to view and share.
To maximize your social pages, you should also create a website or blog that you can use to introduce yourself, promote your work, and of course, collect email addresses. If you don’t have the skills or budget to build a website, you can find plenty of free website builders that should help you get started.

Why New Authors Need to Promote Their Books
If you’re like most authors, you would prefer to move on to writing your next book. In today’s competitive book market, you will experience disappointing results if you neglect book promotions. Besides, you should enjoy connecting with your audience to learn what they loved about your ideas. As a new author, you should also try to learn from your audience to keep constantly improving. Thankfully, you can find many simple, affordable, and effective strategies that can help you transform from an unknown author into an author with an audience.