Wholly-Books | Romance Book Cover and Romance Novel Marketing Tips

If you are reading this text, you are looking for information on how to sell your romance book, aren’t you? Congratulations, this is the main step: research and, of course, learn. This text is aimed at people who believe in your content and are looking to somehow boost their sales and their writing career.

First tip: do not believe in anything and anyone who promises sales. No one can in any way guarantee that your book will sell, much less charge for it. You will simply lose money and get frustrated, remember that there is no shortcut.

Assuming that your romance book already has a well-designed, creative romance cover design that speaks to your target audience, and that you know who you are writing for, all that is left is to create engagement.

If you are reading this text, you are looking for information on how to sell your book, aren’t you? Congratulations, this is the main step: research and, of course, learn. This text is aimed at people who believe in your content and are looking to somehow boost their sales and their writing career.

First tip: do not believe in anything and anyone who promises sales. No one can in any way guarantee that your book will sell, much less charge for it. You will simply lose money and get frustrated, remember that there is no shortcut.

Assuming that your book already has a well-done, creative romance cover that speaks to your target audience, and that you know who you are writing for, all that is left is to create engagement.

I’ve published my romance book, now what?

When you publish your book, your last concern should be sales, why? Because they will not happen, or at most you will have a few sales to a few acquaintances and of course you will be frustrated.

The reason is simple, you don’t have readers yet, you have family and friends.

The question is: how to create readers efficiently and effectively? Learn how to create engagement.

You have two important weapons to create engagement: your physical romance book and the Internet, and more specifically, social networks. This is an incredible advantage if you compare it to other writers a few years ago, when you didn’t have the Internet and it cost a lot to run ads.

Use your romance book as an important engagement tool. Instead of waiting for friends and family to buy your romance book, how about giving it to them, making dedications, and asking them to post and refer you on social networks, thus starting word of mouth?!

Think about it, it is important to promote your romance book, of course, but it will never have the same weight when someone else does it, after all, for a mother, her own son is always the most beautiful.

Launching your book is a powerful way to engage, sending the romance book to influencers in the publishing market is a smart tactic, because it requires a low investment and allows a large reach.

Give your book as a gift on commemorative dates such as Christmas, birthdays and others, this can yield content on digital networks and, of course, the all-important word of mouth.

Notice that so far it is enough to have a few copies in hand to carry out the tips. Acquiring your own book is never wasted money.

Work your social networks, think about your posts, if you have nothing to post, don’t post. Make partnerships with other writers, create Whatsapp groups, hold periodic raffles, in short, social networks have made it easier to spread the word.

The conclusion we reached, according to the writers who sell the most at UICLAP

The best strategy is to invest only in having a few copies of your own book to hold a launch, give away, send to influencers and share on social networks. If the content pleases, you will have sales.

Let’s understand a little more about the publishing market, and here it is worth doing a comparative exercise between the market before and after internet.

As we mentioned before, writers before the internet could not count on the ease of social networks to promote their books and engage readers, the sales channels were only the physical bookstores that served the regional market, and practically only traditional publishers existed as a way to make publishing possible. A difficult time, no?!

About the romance market

With the Internet, many things have changed, including the consumer’s buying habits, who nowadays buys almost everything over the Internet, and this sales channel is the one that grows the most (from 2018 to 2019 the purchase of books through e-commerce grew more than 300% while physical bookstores had a retraction in the same period of 17% and digital books had only 4% of participation, that is, 96% of sales were of physical books.

Today we are going to talk about some simple but extremely useful tips for beginners, independent authors or authors with some background in the literary world.

With very little investment or even without spending anything it is possible to execute practically all of the following tips. So, let’s go!

20 Romance Book Marketing Tips:

1- Plan in advance all the marketing and publicity actions for your romance book. Survey all the production costs and broadcasting of advertising materials and establish a schedule for the disclosure to start happening at least one month before the launch of the book.

2- Issue a release for your book! For those who do not know, a release is a journalistic text distributed to the press, with information about the work, the author, and the release.

3- List the differentials, curiosities and applications that your romance book and you, as the author, have. Make a list to facilitate and organize the thought and include it in the release. Be balanced, be careful not to be too modest or too pretentious.

4-Do you have influential friends or acquaintances? Do they write well? Ask them to write a short testimonial or review about your book.

5- Use Google to search for newspapers, magazines, radio, TV stations, websites, etc. and send your book release with a medium resolution JPG or PNG image of the cover. Do not send the email without contacting them first. Try to get the phone number of the responsible people and introduce yourself, saying that you would like to send a release presenting your romance book.

6- Create a launch event for your romance book! It can be among friends, at your school, college, church, condominium or at a bookstore.

7- Prepare a printed or virtual invitation with your romance book cover and send it to your personal mailing list. Ask your friends to replicate it for their friends as well. Do not SPAM in any way! Send e-mail only to those who allow you to do so!

8- Give lectures, workshops or participate in discussion forums related to the theme of your romance book.

9- Be present in the main social networks! Interact! Be a “meetable” and social personality.

10- As much as possible, attend all the fairs and literary events you can. Before the event takes place, contact the organizing team, present your book and assess the possibility of participating as an author.

11- Do not explicitly advertise your book all the time on social network posts! Once in a while it is okay, but the best strategy is to arouse the interest of your readership in a subtle way.

12- Post pictures of the launch, the romance book cover, excerpts from the work, the launch invitation, the links where your releases and reviews come out.

13- Post impacting phrases of your romance book on Twitter. You can create a specific account for your book on Twitter or use your own. There are sites like HootSuite.com, for example, where you can schedule several automatic posts.

14- Create a blog! It can be on blogger.com, wordpress.com, Wix or a hosting with more resources and make available for free small excerpts of your book. Include trivia about how you got the idea to write the book and other pertinent information.

15- Create a landing page to sell your romance book! Unlike the blog or website that has many texts, videos, pages and links on the theme of your book, the landing page is a site with a single page and with the sole function of selling the book or capture e-mails to your contact list offering free download of the eBook with the content in full or in part of your romance book.

16- Buy sponsored links on Google and on social networks pointing to your landing page or to the sites where your books are being sold.

17- If you can afford to invest a little more, produce a book trailer of your romance book. If you want to do something cheaper, record a personal statement or comment of your friends with the camera of your cell phone even presenting your book and put it on Youtube. Be sure to do it! Youtube is now the 2nd place where people do more research on the internet.

18- Partner with literary blogs or blogs that have to do with the theme of your book. Send a free copy of the book to be raffled off and reviewed by the blog.

19- Don’t forget that writers don’t write only for other writers. Be careful not to waste your time and energy participating in groups and pages where there are only writers who, like you, are after readers and promotion. It is important that you look for your readership where it really is.

20- Even if your romance book is only published electronically, I advise you to use offline pieces as well. A postcard, mug, or bookmark, for example, work well for promotion and are relatively inexpensive to produce.

What about you? What have you done or are you doing to promote your romance book? Leave your comment here!

You have followed all the steps that a good writer must take in order to get his book written and published. It took months of hard work until you saw, page by page, your long-dreamed-of romance book in your hands. But what now? What can you do to boost your sales and get a return on your hard-earned dedication? Well, you can hire an agent, who is trained to circulate your romance book in the most different means of dissemination that your book should be in. But there is also another way: betting on online dissemination. Today there are also agencies that deal directly with internet advertising.

Social Networks

When talking about online promotion it is impossible not to remember Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and some others. So there is nothing more fair than promoting your romance book through them. Facebook has its own ad system, Facebook Ads, which is very effective in promoting your book. You can also create a page for yourself or your work to promote your sales. On Twitter and Instagram, make the most of hashtags to promote your work.

Send to the press

One of the best ways to promote your romance book without leaving home is to invest in promoting it to journalists and opinion makers through e-mail. Therefore, you can make a release about the plot and send it to these contacts. The ideal is that you gather contacts from radios, newspapers, TVs, websites and blogs on the subject. If your romance book is more regional, search for contacts in about 10 cities in your region. Otherwise, you are free to choose with whom to share your work. Another tip is to send this release to niches related to the content of your romance book. This way the chances are even greater. You can even create a newsletter and share further content about your book such as book clubs and promotions, for example.

A romance blog will help you a lot

You can also generate content from your story and host it in a blog. There you will post short articles about the book, and you can relate them to current issues that will appeal to the readers of the blog. This is already halfway to a purchase. If you prefer, you can write about different subjects without such a strong link to the romance book in question, but don’t forget to mention it. It is important that your blog has a certain rotation, with posts at least once a week, on set days. This will build reader loyalty.

It sounds like bullshit, but sweepstakes work

There is no promotion without your obvious investment. That is why making partnerships with websites is a good idea. You can provide some copies for raffles in sites and blogs specialized in promoting romance books for readers. Remember this. After all, you are looking for readers, not writers. That’s why it’s important to promote your work on sites geared to this audience. There are many writers who sin in this respect and end up promoting their work to so many other writers who seek the same thing: to sell their books.

Have you heard of romance book trailer

Do you have some money left over to invest? One more alternative is the Book Trailer. Hire a good editor to create a short video about your book. Release this video along with the material on as many portals as you can. This will also help your book to circulate.

Don’t forget that the worst part is over: getting published. Now a certain patience is needed for the results of the promotion to come in. Believe me, with a good promotion campaign they will come. Stay focused and don’t give up.

Publishing your romance book:

Since Kindle offers options for templates and font sizes, as well as text selection to even save your favorite snippets, the file you send must be your EDITABLE text, i.e., no PDF! Accepted formats include Word (.doc, .docx) and web page (.html) files. The page layout of the e-book depends on the preferences of the reader, so it will not be visible in the final result, but other elements will, making it pertinent to bet on page breaks and titles selected to delimit chapters and footnotes, when necessary, they will be present both on the device and in applications for cell phones and computers.

On the other hand, they will not be considered different fonts, so watch out for that! My chapter beginnings contain an elephant and the pauses musical notes, both coming from different fonts, and I had to convert this into an image, since KDP turned everything into a normal letter. By the way, speaking of images, they work normally, see? In black and white, of course, but with quality and sharpness. The special characters inserted throughout the text, such as shapes and symbols, for example, also work.

This tool is divided into three pages on the site. The first one with information about the romance book, to put title, subtitle (since my title is in English, I chose one in Portuguese, since this is an international store), synopsis, author’s name, keywords, categories, among others. Fill out all the fields that you think are appropriate with much attention, because they are the ones that will make your story a sure-fire search for the reader when he or she searches for it! The second page is for the content, where you upload the text file and the cover, which can also be made on the spot from a “Cover Creator”, which I did not use because I already had mine, made by Mari, my friend. At the end, after the processing is finished, you can preview your e-book to see how it will look and even download the .mobi file to read on your or other devices.

Selling the romance e-book:

What about the third screen? Well, this is where you set the price of the romance e-book in the Kindle store! They give you several options to choose the best one: WHERE it will be sold (it can be globally or in selected territories), how much you will receive in royalties, how much you want to charge in the currency of your choice (and the system itself converts the others based on that!), if you want to allow user-to-user lending. Read this part very carefully and sell wisely! There is no point in wanting to charge a lot for a short story and it makes no sense to bargain on a didactic production, for example, right? If you don’t have any notion of this, as I myself didn’t, look for the value of similar titles to base yourself on.

Then there are two options: publish the romance e-book now or put it on pre-sale! If you opt for the second, the charge on the reader’s card only arrives on the day it is released and you can still edit your content up to 72 hours before the chosen date. By the way, my personal tip here is to keep an eye on the time zone of the shipping limit! I got it wrong and the people who bought it earlier received a version that was not the final one, with some very annoying errors that until today I couldn’t send them the update, even though I have already resent the corrected book. These little things catch us sometimes, but it is by making mistakes (and crying a lot!) that we learn.

Physical romance book and author copies:

OK, the e-book is nice, but if you REALLY want to have your physical romance book in your hands Amazon has a solution for that too: the regular paperback romance book, which is printed on the buyer’s demand. It’s a VERY SIMPLE edition, with a cover with no dust jacket or fancy stuff like that, but also possible to customize in some ways. Once again you are sent the editable file, but in this case, it will be EQUAL to what you created, with pagination, top-of-page elements, and all the things that already existed in the digital version. It also has a cover creator, with the option to download the template to assemble manually in some image editor taking into account all the final measures, as I did, and right there you can generate ISBN and barcode of your volume. In fact, it is having your romance book in hands, with everything you are entitled to, even the option of a matte or gloss cover, white or cream pages…