Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Using AI in Your Book Marketing

Book marketing has always been hard and expensive, and it still is in some ways, but as a self-published author, there are great ways you can use AI tools to make your book marketing more effective, and improve your overall strategy and day-to-day tactics.

Leveling the Playing Field

Book publishing companies have been using AI-type technologies in their book marketing for a long time.

Of course they have - they're competitive companies trying to make a profit (even if it's just enough to financially support another purpose), and they need to do everything they can to make sure they invest in the right authors writing the right books at the right time.

The fact that every self-publishing author can now have affordable access to AI technology is a game-changer, potentially empowering you to compete in ways a single person never could have in the past.

Brainstorming and Devising Your Strategy

If book marketing is not your profession, you can learn chatting with an AI about book marketing strategy and tactics.

You can ask it to take on the role of your book marketing consultant, explain what your book is about it, what stage you're at writing it, who you are, and go from there.

You'll learn about the different social media channels people use - or don't use - for book marketing, as well as important things like keywords, frequency of posting, and even the right times of day to post.

Creating Marketing Content

One of the most obvious uses of AI is to create marketing content.

This can be anything from scheduling a week's worth of AI-generated and you-curated social media posts, to creating short video clips from longer videos.

You can tailor the topic and tone of your posts to the individual channel: most people don't talk the same way on, say, LinkedIn, as they do on Threads or Bluesky or Instagram etc.

Developing Your Pricing Strategy

One of the hardest things to in book marketing is pricing.

That's because there's typically no right answer. It depends on what you're trying to do.

You can use AI tools to develop pricing strategies for your book over time. What should the Minimum Price and Suggested Price be when I publish the first version? The third version? The final version? The print version on KDP?

Just Get Started

Starting to use a new technology like today's AI tools can seem overwhelming at first.

The best thing to do is just get started and see what you like and don't like, what excites you and what doesn't.

But always remember, books don't sell themselves, and the big book companies are out there all the time using every tool available to them. They literally increase the margins to make print books bigger to crowd others off the shelf at the bookstore, not kidding.

So we recommend you embrace these new tools in your book marketing efforts - and keep your mind open to the possibility that we're living in a very exciting time, where the tools and resources the big companies have, you can now have yourself.

Clips from the Livestream