This post contains affiliate links
A couple of weeks ago I published my first book 30 Halloween Crafts for Kids. Writing the book was pretty exhausting but of course that was only part of the issue – the other part was that I then had to try and sell it! As it was my first experience I set myself a small but what I hoped would be achievable target of sales and I met that in just over two weeks. My biggest challenge wasn’t just trying to promote my book but that I had to do it on zero budget. Not ‘oh, I’ll spend some money on Facebook ads and see how that goes’ but literally zip all, not a penny, nada. We’d just moved house and the thought of investing money into something that I didn’t know what the return was just sounded like a no go to me. So because I managed to sell my book without spending a penny on promotions I thought I’d share what I learnt and the strategies I used in case they can help someone else.
Ways to promote your book without spending any money
Write a blog post about it – this is the post I wrote introducing my book which is affiliate linked to it on Amazon.
Tweet about it – one tweet is not going to work here. Twitter is like a big waterfall and if you look at your own feed you probably won’t get past stuff from the last 30 minutes. I’d heard a lot of bloggers talk about using Social Oomph to schedule tweets because you can choose how often you want each tweet going out and how many times. I tried out their free one week trial and absolutely loved it and I know that I got sales from it too. After my weeks free trial finished I went back to Buffer…and then started the paid version of Social Oomph because it took so much stress out of my life. The free trial is perfect if you are just trying to get something out there though.
Write about it on your business Facebook page – bit of an obvious one that. I also changed my FB blog header to an image of my book saying ‘click here to get your copy now’ and then added links in the text to my page on Amazon.
Instagram an image – actually I’ve shared a few. The cover of my book has a collage of some of the crafts in it so I’m sharing one of those images every few days on IG. I’ve also changed my IG link from being to my blog’s homepage to being the post about my book.
Write about it on your personal Facebook page – Now I normally never ever share blog stuff on my personal Facebook page because I don’t want to spam my friends but I figured this is the first book I’ve written and I thought people might be nosy about it. I didn’t expect my friends to buy a copy but some did and others shared about my book on their timeline.
Make a pinnable image for Pinterest – I’ve used a 3D book image for my blog post but used the actual book cover image (made in Picmonkey and Canva) for Pinterest, uploading it as an image to Pinterest, getting some good search words into the description and then linking it back to my blog post.
Share it everywhere on Pinterest – I have a paid account to Tailwind because I pin an awful lot of stuff (I’ve written here about how I got a massive boost in my Pinterest followers) but if you pin at a normal person’s rate or are ensuring that you do this all for free you can try out their free trial which should be fine for while you are promoting your book. I pinned my image to each of my relivent boards and also shared it into my Tailwind tribes – which again you can use for free and are fantastic for getting your stuff shared and seen!
Ask other bloggers to review it – like most people who write I’m in quite a few Facebook groups and I asked in one of them if anyone would like to review a copy in return for a copy of the book itself. As a blogger myself I’m really aware of how much time it takes to put together a proper blog post and to promote it so I made sure that in return for the reviews I tried to give as much back to these bloggers as I could, sharing their posts across my social media, linking back from my site and commenting on their posts. They all did amazing jobs in their reviews and as bloggers they want to get their posts as much out there as they can so it’s been a great way to share what I do with other people who might be fans of those blogs but not aware of mine and it’s also been fun to get to know some of the bloggers a little better.
Got any ideas for self promotion on a shoestring? Thinking of writing a book? drop me a message below as I’d love to know what you think!
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