The Top 3 Easiest Ways to Market Your Book on a Budget

You’ve written a book and published, and that felt like the hard part. But marketing your book is one of the most important items on an author’s to-do list. Or at least it should be. After all, how can you expect any sales if you don’t get your book out there, in front of the hungry readers who want to dive into your story?

In this article, we’ll look at three easy ways you can market your book on a budget. 

1. Newsletter Swaps 

The first step to building a great author platform and making your marketing efforts easier is growing a mailing list of your readers. You can do this by: 

1. Writing a reader magnet (this is a short, free book or resource that you give away to your readers to get them to sign up for your list). 
2. Signing up for a mailing list service. I suggest MailerLite because you get so much with your free account and you can have up to 1,000 contacts. It’s also super easy to set up. 
3. Put a link to your reader magnet in the back of your books, asking readers to sign up. 
4. Distribute your reader magnet using either BookFunnel or StoryOrigin (StoryOrigin is free). 

With that out of the way, let’s talk about newsletter swaps. 

Newsletter swaps are when authors who have mailing lists take turns sharing each other’s books. So, Author A shares Author B’s book and vice versa. 

It’s important for both authors to be in similar genres. For instance, if you write sci fi, you probably wouldn’t benefit too much from a romantic mystery books author promoting you to their readers. And you should make sure any books you choose to promote are books your own readers will enjoy. 

But how do you find these other authors? Well, that’s where StoryOrigin comes in. 

It’s a completely free service authors can sign up for, and they facilitate author swaps by connecting you with other authors in your genre. It’s pretty neat. 

2. Revamp Your Cover and Blurb 

This might not be the most obvious marketing step you take, but it is probably the more important one. 

If your cover isn’t right for your genre, readers simply won’t click on it or buy your book, because they have expectations that match what they’re used to. So, if you’re writing sci-fi military books, your cover should probably look something like the bestsellers in the genre. 

It’s safe to say that readers in this genre would expect your cover to be similar if your book was a military sci-fi. And the same can be said for your title and your blurbs. 

Follow these steps to make your book more appealing to your target customers: 

1. Check out the top 20 books in your category (independently published ones) and note down what their covers look like. 
2. Note down what keywords the books are using in their titles, subtitles, and book descriptions. 
3. Rewrite your blurb to better suit the genre. Check out Bryan Cohen’s book, How to Write a Sizzling Synopsisfor more direction on how to do this. 
4. Redesign your cover (either yourself or with a cover designer). For DIY cover redesign at a low-cost price, I suggest checking out BookBrush. They’re an author friendly service that can help you redesign your cover quickly and professionally. 

3. Change Your Kindle Keywords

This might not be the most obvious way to market your book, but it’s a big one. If you’ve ever set up a book in your KDP Dashboard before, you’ll have seen 7 boxes on the first page of setup.

Basically, your goal is to enter keywords into these boxes that help Amazon present your books to readers browsing the Kindle Store. But how do you find those keywords? 

Well, you can follow this method: 

1. Open Amazon in your browser’s incognito mode and select ‘Kindle Store’ from the dropdown menu. 
2. Type in a keyword that best suits your book ‘military sci-fi’ for instance. Type in ‘military sci-fi a’, ‘military sci-fi b’ etc. and note down all the auto-fill keyword phrases that Amazon gives you. These are all search terms that readers have typed into Amazon before. 
3. Check out the competition for these keywords by looking at the top 3 books and working out how many books they sold to get there. You can do this by noting their ABSR then heading over to my Amazon Sales Rank Calculator and working it out. If they’re not selling many books, the keyword might be no good. 
4. Once you have your list of keywords, make sure they’re ‘allowed’ by Amazon by checking out their keyword requirements here.
5. Now you have your list of keywords, input them into the boxes. 

If you already have these keywords boxes filled, start by changing only two of them (and write down the original keywords you had in there before you change them). Then, wait 5-7 days to see if your sales go up. If they don’t, change back to the old keywords, if they do, keep the new ones and consider performing more experiments. Here’s a full guide on changing your keywords. 

Final Thoughts

Publishing a book can definitely cost money, but marketing your book doesn’t have to be super expensive. That’s why I recommend the above three methods for getting the most bang for your buck. 

Cheers! 

Dave Chesson is the creator of Kindlepreneur.com, a website devoted to teaching advanced book Marketing which even Amazon KDP acknowledge as one of the best by telling users to “Gain insight from Kindlepreneur on how you can optimize marketing for your books.” Having worked with such authors as Orson Scott Card, Ted Dekker and more, his tactics help both Fiction and Nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers.