5 book marketing tactics, ranked from “nice to have” to “please do this before you waste money on ads.”
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I thought writing the book was supposed to be the hard part.
Turns out, not really.
I’m working on two books right now, one nonfiction and one fiction, and before I got properly into this, I assumed most of my time would go into, well… writing the books.
Seems reasonable, right?
Instead, I’ll sometimes write for an hour or two and then somehow spend the rest of the evening reading about Amazon keywords, checking covers, looking at ads, researching newsletters, wondering whether Pinterest is secretly the greatest thing ever invented, and opening another twelve tabs I definitely do not need.
So yeah.
The actual writing has somehow become one part of this very weird job.
And because I didn’t really know what mattered most, I started doing what I always seem to do when I discover a new online-business rabbit hole.
A little bit of everything.
Social media.
Amazon ads.
Reviews.
Email lists.
Pinterest.
Podcasting.
Some random new tool somebody swears changed their entire business.
Basically, whatever shiny object happened to appear in front of me that week.
At first I thought I just hadn’t found the right tactic yet.
Then after spending enough time messing around with all of this, I realized something more annoying.
Most of the tactics were fine.
I was just doing them in the wrong order.
I was thinking about getting more people onto the book page before asking whether the page was actually good enough to make them buy.
I was thinking about ads before I had enough reviews.
I was spending time trying to grow on platforms I didn’t own while barely paying attention to the one thing I could actually keep: my email list.
Which, when I write it like that, sounds obvious!
Apparently it wasn’t obvious enough for me to figure it out before wasting a few months.
Anyway, if I had to rank the main book-marketing stuff I’ve been learning and trying, this is probably how I’d do it now.
This is NOT some holy book-marketing formula and you don’t need to follow it exactly.
Please don’t do that.
A romance author with 80,000 TikTok followers is obviously playing a different game from a first-time nonfiction author whose current audience consists of three friends and their mother.
Genres are different. Fiction and nonfiction are different. Your existing audience matters.
But if you’re somewhere near the beginning and wondering, Okay, what should I actually care about first?, this is the order that makes the most sense to me.
Starting with number five.
Quick thing before I get into the list. If you’re an author working in this space, book marketing and the business side of publishing, you can subscribe to my newsletter, The Sustainable Publishers.
5. Social Media: Useful, but Probably Not in the Way You Think
I’m not anti-social media.
I’m just increasingly suspicious of the idea that posting every day automatically equals selling books.
Someone sees your post.
Maybe they like the cover.
Maybe the first line catches them.
Maybe they even click on your profile.
Then, three seconds later, they’re watching somebody make pasta in a hotel room.
That’s the competition.
So I still think social media matters, but mostly because it helps people find you.
Getting them from “Oh, this person exists” to actually buying the book is a different job.
And where you post depends quite a lot on the kind of book you have.
If you write fiction, TikTok and Instagram can obviously be huge. I don’t think we need another article explaining that BookTok moves books. It does!
Pinterest is the one I keep coming back to because it works very differently.
A post on X/Threads can be dead by tomorrow.
A Pinterest pin can randomly decide to wake up six months later and start sending traffic again.
For fiction, that could be character aesthetics, quotes, locations, mood boards, scenes, tropes, whatever fits the book.
For nonfiction, it could be useful ideas, charts, checklists, frameworks, quotes from the book, things people are already searching for.
X and Threads feel more useful to me for talking about the process.
The stuff around the book.
What you learned writing it. Something that went wrong. Something weird you discovered during research. Why chapter six nearly made you throw your laptop out of the window.
That kind of thing.
I’d much rather read:
“I rewrote this chapter four times and somehow version two was still the best.”
than:
“MY NEW BOOK IS OUT NOW.”
followed by the exact same thing two days later.
There’s only so many times people can pretend they didn’t see it.
The other thing is: batch it.
Seriously.
Because I know how this goes.
“I’ll just make one quick post.”
Forty-five minutes later, you’re changing a Canva font nobody else will notice.
Ask me how I know.
So yes, use social media.
Just don’t expect one Instagram post to do the job of your cover, reviews, book page, email list and sales copy at the same time.
4. Podcast Guesting: Basically an Excuse to Talk for an Hour
I like podcast guesting because it doesn’t really feel like marketing.
You’re just talking.
And if the conversation is actually good, the audience gets to know you without you spending the whole time screaming, “Please buy my book.”
The other nice thing is you’re not starting from zero trust.
If I’ve listened to the same host every week for a year and they bring somebody onto their show, I’m probably going to give that person a chance.
Not because I suddenly trust them with my bank account.
Just because the host clearly thought they were worth talking to.
That small difference helps.
And you also get time, which is something most social platforms don’t give you anymore.
A Reel gives you a few seconds.
A podcast might give you 30 minutes, 45 minutes, sometimes an hour.
That’s enough time for somebody to think, “Okay, I actually like this person.”
Which is probably useful if you want them to later buy a book you wrote.
There are platforms like PodMatch and MatchMaker.fm that connect guests with podcast hosts, so you don’t necessarily have to send 200 cold pitches into the void.
Listen Notes is useful too, especially if you want smaller shows in a very specific niche.
And I think people get this bit wrong sometimes.
You don’t always need the huge podcast.
If 300 people listen to a small show and all 300 care deeply about your exact topic, that can be much better than showing up on a massive general show where everyone forgets your name before lunch.
Before you pitch anybody, though, at least look at their actual podcast.
Please.
Listen to an episode.
Read the titles.
Know what they talk about.
Because sending:
Hi [FIRST NAME],
I absolutely love your podcast.
when you clearly don’t even know what the podcast is about…
Yeah.
People can smell that from another continent.
Podcast guesting is slower than running ads. You can’t just click a button and suddenly appear on twenty shows tomorrow.
But I like the kind of attention it gives you.
Someone might hear you on a show, follow you, join your newsletter, forget about you for a month, see your email again and then buy the book.
It’s messy like that.
Real marketing usually is.
3. Reviews: Maybe Fix This Before Sending More People to Amazon
This one took me longer than it should have.
I kept thinking about:
How do I get more people to my book page?
Eventually I started thinking:
Wait… what happens after they get there?
Because getting more traffic sounds great until you realize you’re sending everybody to a book with barely any reviews.
Say you find two books.
One has zero reviews.
One has 250.
Similar cover. Similar topic. Similar price.
Which one feels safer?
Obviously, people still buy books with no reviews. I’m not saying a review counter magically decides every purchase.
But it definitely helps.
And if you’ve already spent time or money getting someone onto the page, you might as well make the page look like other humans have bought the thing before.
This is where ARC readers come in.
ARC just means advance reader copy.
You give people the book before launch, they read it, and ideally you don’t hit publication day sitting there with zero reviews while refreshing Amazon every seven minutes.
There are tools for this.
BookFunnel and StoryOrigin make it easier to send copies out without manually attaching EPUB files to emails like you’re running a publishing company from 2007.
BookSirens can help you reach people already looking for books to review.
Reedsy Discovery is another option.
NetGalley is more expensive, but if you want to reach librarians, reviewers or people closer to the publishing industry, that might make more sense.
And then there’s Goodreads.
I genuinely don’t understand how Goodreads still looks the way Goodreads looks.
But people use it.
So there we are.
Claim your author profile, make sure your book is on there properly, and give readers somewhere else to find and review it.
If I were doing the launch again, I’d start thinking about the review side at least a month beforehand.
Not after publishing.
Which is, naturally, when I started thinking seriously about some of this the first time around.
Great timing, Vinayak.
2. Paid Ads: Please Don’t Start Here
I’ve spent way too much time inside Amazon Ads.
Like, genuinely, an embarrassing amount.
There are probably hobbies I could have learned in those hours.
The thing I understand much better now is that running ads doesn’t automatically turn a book into something people want to buy.
It just sends more people to it.
That’s it.
If the cover is good, great.
Now more people see your good cover.
If the description works, great.
More people see the description.
If you have reviews and the page looks trustworthy, even better.
But if all of that is weak, you’re just paying Amazon to introduce more strangers to the problem.
That’s a fairly expensive way to learn.
I’ve already written about why a KDP book doesn’t sell and what I think is actually true about Amazon KDP publishing in 2026.
I’m also writing more about the numbers behind ads because that part gets interesting very quickly.
Well, “interesting” if you enjoy finding out exactly how fast you can lose money.
Your royalty is only so much.
So if you earn, say, a few dollars from each book, there’s only a certain amount you can afford to pay per click before the maths becomes horrible.
And you still need enough of those clicks to turn into sales.
This is why “I’ll just run ads” is not really a strategy.
If Amazon is where you sell most of your books, Amazon Sponsored Products is probably the first ad system worth learning.
I’d start with automatic campaigns partly because they give you some idea of where Amazon itself wants to show the book.
Then, once there’s actual data, you can start moving toward manual targeting instead of sitting there inventing 150 keywords from your imagination.
BookBub Ads are worth looking at too.
Especially because you can test covers, authors and different audiences without immediately deciding you’re now a professional media buyer.
But I’d still put ads pretty late in the process.
I want the book page to have a fighting chance first.
Otherwise, the dashboard just becomes another place where I can stare at numbers and question my decisions.
I already have enough of those.
1. Your Email List
Yeah.
I know.
The email list.
Again.
It’s probably the least exciting answer on this whole list, but it’s still number one for me.
The reason is simple.
It’s the only audience here that I can actually take with me.
If Instagram changes something tomorrow, what am I going to do?
Write Zuckerberg a strongly worded email?
Amazon can change rankings.
Pinterest can change reach.
TikTok can disappear from someone’s feed.
A podcast audience belongs to the podcast host.
But if someone gives me their email because they actually want to hear from me, I can talk to them again.
That becomes especially important if you plan to write more than one book.
Because the first book can build the audience for book two.
Book two can build the audience for book three.
And, hopefully, by book five, you’re not launching every single time like you just arrived on Earth yesterday.
That’s the part I really like.
It stacks.
If I were starting from zero now, I’d probably set up some kind of reader magnet before launch.
For fiction, maybe a prequel, deleted scene, bonus chapter, character story, whatever fits naturally.
For nonfiction, maybe a checklist, template, workbook, companion guide, bonus chapter or something useful connected to the main book.
I wouldn’t create some random seven-page PDF nobody wants just because the internet told me I need a lead magnet.
It still has to be worth downloading.
BookFunnel is useful for delivering things like ebooks and bonus stories.
StoryOrigin has group promotions where authors help promote each other’s reader magnets, which can be useful when you’re trying to grow from basically nothing.
And then you need somewhere to keep those readers.
Substack.
Kit.
Beehiiv.
MailerLite.
Honestly, pick one.
I’ve wasted enough time comparing software tools to know there is always another tool with one more feature you suddenly convince yourself is essential.
The main thing is actually emailing people.
Because having 3,000 subscribers you never speak to isn’t much of an email strategy either.
If someone joined because they liked your stuff, keep sending them stuff they like.
Very advanced marketing advice, I know.
If I Had to Start Again
So if I had another book coming out tomorrow, I wouldn’t try to do everything at once.
That’s probably the biggest change.
I’d start building the email list early.
I’d make sure the cover, description and retailer page didn’t look like an afterthought.
I’d sort the ARC readers and review plan before launch instead of suddenly panicking about reviews afterwards.
Then I’d spend time getting the book in front of people through social content, podcasts, collaborations and whatever made sense for that particular book.
And once I had some signs that people were interested and the page was actually converting, then I’d put more money into ads.
Would I still probably get distracted by something shiny in the middle of all this?
Absolutely.
I know myself.
But at least now I have some idea what should come first.
And that’s really what I was missing before.
It wasn’t that I had never heard of any of these things.
Of course I knew authors used social media.
I knew reviews mattered.
I knew email lists existed.
I knew people ran Amazon ads.
I just had all of them floating around in my head as separate things I was supposed to “do.”
I didn’t really understand how they fit together.
That’s what cost me time.
Well, that and my strange ability to turn a ten-minute task into three hours of research.
Still working on that one.
This whole mess is also part of why I started The Sustainable Publishers.
I was already spending way too much of my free time learning about the business side of publishing anyway: Amazon ads, keywords, pricing, launches, getting reviews, finding readers and all the other stuff that comes after somebody says, “I want to write a book.”
So I thought I might as well write about it.
I’m not sitting there pretending I’ve cracked publishing and now have all the answers. I’m working through a lot of this myself, trying things, getting some things right, getting other things horribly wrong and sharing what I learn along the way.
If you’re writing a book, publishing one, or currently staring at an Amazon Ads dashboard wondering what exactly happened to your money, you can join me here.