Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Marketing A Book You Haven't Published Yet
When self-published authors think about book marketing, they typically think about marketing a book they've already finished writing.
This is a natural enough assumption, but it's a big mistake! Marketing your book while you're writing it unlocks lots of time and opportunity to build excitement and grow your potential audience for publication day.
How To Market a Book You Haven't Published Yet
There are lots of ways to promote a book you haven't published yet.
Leanpub Support
If you're writing a series of books, like a trilogy, the marketing is right there on the book cover or in the subtitle, for example.
You can do pre-sales on some platforms. On Leanpub, our version of this is to give you a free landing page from the moment you create your book, where people can sign up to be notified when it's published for the first time. (Leanpub encourages authors to publish serially or in-progress, chapter by chapter, where people who buy your book get all the updates until it's completed, so you'll probably by publishing multiple versions of your book.)
Spreading Word of Mouth and Getting Feedback on Social Media and Other Platforms
One great way to get attention for a book project is just to talk about it every chance you can, while maintaining politeness and professionalism of course!
Post about it, ask for feedback on the title, let influencers in your area know, do Instagram livestreams about your progress - anything you do to spread the word can help.
Don't Hide Your Work
One of the biggest mistakes self-published authors make is basically hiding their work.
If you've just finished a draft of a chapter, tell your network. Share samples of your writing frequently. Ask for feedback. Record and post audio snippets of you reading what you've written.
A/B Testing
This is a little technical and maybe only advice for more advanced self-published authors, but A/B testing the book projects you're considering is a great way to make sure you're working on the right thing.
Make a sign-up form - like Leanpub gives you for free when you create a book - and use some of your marketing spend up-front to buy ads sending people there.
Then do the same thing for the same book project, but with a different title, and see which one works better.
You can do this for multiple book projects, not just the same project with different titles.
Watch the livestream for this Lean Publishing Tip of the Day for Leanpub co-founder Len Epp's thoughts on these an other ways you can market a book you haven't written yet!
Watch These Clips From The Livestream
