Hayley Zelda, Guest Contributor

February 2021

8 Ways To Promote Your Poetry Book Online

It’s one thing to write poetry, but it’s another thing entirely to market a poetry book online. With so many people vying for attention, how do you make sure that your book gets seen? First, understand that you’re not in the business of promoting your book — you’re in the business of promoting yourself. Sure, you want to share your book with the world, but if you try to get in the way of people actually reading it, they’re going to see right through you. There are several ways to promote your poetry book online, and this article will walk you through them.

1. Build your author platform

Author platform is distinct from your writing platform. When you’re writing a book, you need to ensure that you have a good writing platform — a place where you can showcase your writing for potential editors, agents, and publishers. Online, this can include sites like Wattpad, Tumblr, and Commaful where you can get feedback, or your blog, where you can post your own study notes — where you’re building your own library as you learn. However, as you start publishing — especially on sites like Amazon and Goodreads — you’ll also want to ensure that you have an author platform. This has two components. The first is lead generation. Find out where your readers congregate online, navigate poetry sites, and reach out to them. Then, promote your book to them. The second part of an author platform is social proof. Goodreads and Amazon are crowded places, and readers need to know that your book is worth their time. This requires reviews, promoted posts, and other incentives to gain user attention.

The most effective way to build your author platform is to write 2-3 blog posts every month and then share them on your social media. You can easily create your own author website and you should do so immediately – if for no other reasons than to have an online space for readers to get to know you.

2. Optimise your website

Don’t underestimate the value of a well-designed, professional-looking website. Your site is your online home, and it’s how you open doors and get people interested in you and what you do. Don’t go making things complicated — after all, you want to be easy to find and contact. Choose your website’s color scheme and typeface with care, asking yourself how your current font will provoke an emotion in people, and deciding on a color using that emotion as your guide. Use easily-understood eye-catching graphics to your advantage, inviting people to look further. Giving your readers choices every step of the way will help keep them engaged and coming back for more. Make sure they know they can contact you for more information any time — and they can share your book with their friends, too.

If you decide to sell products through your own site, show pricing and let people add items to their carts. You can also ask people to sign up for your newsletter, or purchase relevant additional books or swag. Don’t hesitate to direct people to your Amazon page — informing them that you have an author page where they can buy your book right is one of the easiest-to-use self-promotional ploys out there, and is even more helpful in checking weblinks for accuracy. Don’t forget to link these items on your accounts on social media sites, too.

3. Grow a mailing list

If you don’t have a mailing list that you can constantly feed with new content, eventually, the number of followers that you have will become irrelevant. So before you throw money at Twitter ads, subscribe to an email-marketing service to build your own database of interested readers. With each book you write, funnel readers back to your mailing list with an offer to get a free short story, excerpt, or behind-the-scenes information about the characters. When you have a mailing list of your own, you can afford to get followers from Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, because they can be converted from your list back into lifelong readers.

Once you have a mailing list, really make the most out of it by making sure that every email is valuable to the people who receive them. Send out a newsletter at least once a month, or more frequently if you have significant news, and promote and share the list around to other authors until the people on it start getting excited about receiving it. Take the time to make the newsletter personal. Regardless of what software you use to send your newsletter, make it a habit to personalize every single one, with a photo and some information about yourself. This puts an extra level of human connection in your relationship with your readers.

4. Think laterally

If you’re in one of the newer social media on the block, you’re probably better off breaking free of the constraints these major online retailers place on your marketing efforts. Since social media is all about marketing your personality, your best bet when it comes to marketing your book online is to market yourself first, and your book second. This means you should promote your personal brand, not just books you’ve written specifically. This means posting shameless selfies and witty quotes to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and creating more informative, less promotional pictures, quotes, and videos for Instagram and Tumblr. On a practical level, this means writing up some tips for writing a book or general business tips to share on your LinkedIn page, and starting an email newsletter to people who love to read your online content. Infusing your social media presence with this sort of useful and personalized content will turn you into a trusted authority in your field. And people who trust you will happily pre-order your next book, just because.

And while anonymity on an online social media presence is the norm, it’s important to your marketing efforts that people know where your social media is coming from — which means a little bit of self-promotion. Your social media accounts will feel a whole lot more authentic if you’ve made an honest but modest effort to explicitly tell people that you’re the person behind them. If they know that it’s you, a real person — especially if you mention your day job — it becomes a little easier to take you seriously.

5. Talk to everyone you meet

To connect online, you first have to be connected yourself. It’s hard to drum up new friends if you never meet anybody out in the world. So when you are out in the world, do more than keep your nose in a book! Engage with people around you whether you’re at your children’s soccer game, or filling up your car on a Saturday afternoon, or having a drink at the bar. Commit a few hours a week to a volunteering activity that gets you out of the house and into another culture. Attend a convention sponsored by your favorite writing sites and make yourself memorable. Get in the habit of talking to people you don’t know, as you’ll get used to communicating effectively and sharing your ideas with the world.

6. Be brave

There’s no need to be shy if you’re unsure of your marketing plan. Don’t copy others’ work or ask for help if you don’t need it. As long as you play into your online strengths, you can make your plan work for you. Also, don’t force your universe-building to conform to expectations. It’s okay if some parts of your cosmology are similar to others — after all, you’re writing in a genre and there are some established rules and elements. But don’t discount your ideas just because they don’t line up perfectly with another’s book. Your universe is yours, and only you can really understand the nuances and allusions. But if you still aren’t sure — ask some of the people that follow you on social media or subscribe to your mailing list — get active in your community and query them.

If you think there’s something off or just want to be sure you’re doing things right, reach out to as many people as you need to, until you feel satisfied with your answer. This is an important mind-set to have when you’re promoting your book online, and it will go a long way towards your goals, even for the tough questions you might be afraid to ask. You’ll have many opportunities for promoting your book online by telling people about your work, participating in communities, or just being present on social media, so pay attention to how you feel during each interaction. The more skilled you are at asking for help and receiving criticism, the better you’ll be at promoting your poetry book.

7. Keep trying something different

When you sit down to do any kind of project that you haven’t done before, it’s hard not to feel like you have no idea what you’re doing. And in fact, that’s fine — everyone has a learning curve, especially when it comes to marketing a book. The key is to not get discouraged. Instead, use every chance you get to try something new and unprecedented with your work. Don’t fall into the same old habits — take a risk! Sure, you can meet new people and gain some new skills just by diving into something new, but in the event that it goes terribly wrong, it’s not like anybody in the world is reading your book at that specific moment.

This is true for just about every interpersonal aspect of your work, but it’s especially true for online marketing. So break the rules, make sure you have fun with whatever you’re doing, and if you can’t decide whether to brand as yourself or the book itself, pick a few channels to use for each. No one is going to kill your book over it, especially not a few months after it’s been published. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that you’re committing to being consistent, as meetups, group chats, and newsletters with different styles are all great ways to stay in touch with different communities of people.

8. Advertise your book

Book advertising is one the oldest promotional strategies used by authors, but it’s also one of the best. While book advertisements might seem rudimentary, companies like Goodreads, Audible, and Amazon use them to gather data. When you do advertise, stick to preferred channels that will help to support your fan base, including favorite blogs, writing platforms like Wattpad and Commaful, and poetry websites.

Book advertising can add to your popularity among book-lovers and serve as a great tool to establish your brand. By helping promote other writers, you’re building influence and establishing yourself as a trustworthy person in the community. And by including book advertisements, as opposed to ads for yourself, you’re building value for your writing while also being strategic with how you market your book.

The best way to promote your poetry book online is to spread the word in the most genuine and authentic way possible. Build connections with people, participate in conversations, acknowledge people and their contributions to conversations, etc. This will not only get your name out there, but it will also establish you as a thought leader for your area of expertise. This is a great strategy for not only promoting your poetry book, but also growing your audience. And all that exposure helps people find your book, which is the entire point, right?