The holidays aren’t just a time for family gatherings, gift giving and memory making. It’s not just a season of heart-shaped candies, creepy costumes and twinkly lights adorning homes and shops. While holidays do offer opportunities for a change of pace, for authors, it also offers an opportunity to boost book sales.
Marketing isn’t reserved for merely your book launch or even a Christmas discount deal. Effective book marketing integrates timeliness and relevance into the equation, and holidays sprinkled throughout the year serve as tools for us to revisit our book’s message and remind current and potential readers why snatching a copy (or twenty) of our book would be a good idea.
No matter the holiday, here are some tried-and-true marketing tips for authors to make the most out of every holiday opportunity and generate visibility and sales for their books.
Give Your Book a Holiday Makeover
There are marketing tools, such as BookBrush for instance, that allow you to position your book in graphics that align with seasonal holidays. Create social media graphics to use in posts and your social media profiles, inviting your book into the holiday festivities. Better yet, work with a local photographer to gather photos of you with your book for each holiday with relevance to your book’s message. Use these graphics to align your social content posts with holiday-centric messages.
Make It an Easy Gift to Give and Get
Consider your target reader and who may be purchasing a gift for them. Can you create a gifting experience where you offer a signed copy personally wrapped and mailed to the reader by you? This makes it easy for someone who is looking for the perfect gift to not just get a special one but take out the wrapping altogether. You could also consider book bundles, pairing your book with a relevant item to help readers fully experience your book and its messages. A seasonal discount could also be enticing!
Don’t Just Focus on Getting; Focus on Giving, Too
When we come together, more is possible. Who could you partner with on a collaborative promotion? It could be another author in the community or a peer in your industry. Maybe it’s a complementary service provider? Find another person with a similar message or business ethos to partner with during a holiday and create a joint promotion where you leverage one another’s platform for greater reach.
Love on the Locals
Create an experience that local readers won’t want to pass up. Maybe it’s a local bookstore or library event where you’re a part of a holiday-inspired book signing? What about a targeted speaking engagement to a group of potential readers with a theme that’s aligned with the forthcoming holiday? Or it could be a concentrated book club experience where local readers can learn from you directly. By offering them something special, they become a part of your street army, loyal to your message and willing to tell others about it.
Outside of the lawn decorations, surplus of chocolates and the pressures for gift giving, the holidays offer a reminder of what matters most in book marketing: knowing the needs of your readers, what motivates them to take action on purchasing a copy and ensuring that your book and message remain timely and relevant.
You can deck the halls, go trick or treating, embrace the love that is in the air and be thankful, grateful and blessed. Yet, by keeping your message and book at the forefront of your reader’s minds and embracing book marketing, you’ll find that luck isn’t just for the Irish—it’s for the proactive author who knows the power of book marketing and takes action accordingly.
