Social eCommerce

Chapter 10. Book Promotion

These days, a book can be a physical or digital good—or both. While many of the same rules from both of these ecommerce categories apply to selling books, there is enough book- and author-specific information that the subject warrants its own chapter.

Traditional book promotion tactics still apply in the modern era, for the most part. We are social media experts, though, so we’ll go into detail only on the aspects that apply to that medium. We’ll cover how to get your book out there into the big, wide world without spamming everyone and ruining your chances of promoting anything to your friends, family, or followers ever again.

Fiction Versus Nonfiction

Most of the advice you can find on the Web about book promotion has to do with nonfiction books. Compared to fiction, nonfiction is enormously easier to promote, since it deals with a specific subject. All you need to do is get the attention of people who are interested in that subject. The demography and geography are not difficult to figure out, if you don’t know them beforehand.

Fiction is very difficult to promote because it typically appeals to a wide audience, and there are a lot of fiction authors competing for the attention of a few influential fiction reviewers. You may need to narrow down your audience to a single demographic that appears to be easy to target. This is difficult to do. Even traditional publishers fail to promote good fiction books most of the time.

People also seem more skeptical of ...