6-Week Book Publicity Intensive by Book Publicity School

We live in the age of the search engine, which means that if you’re an author promoting a book, you need to think about what comes up when people Google you.  

Imagine a potential reader hears about your book on a podcast, or sees it in a store. They may be intrigued and want to learn more! Do you want them to wade through irrelevant results, like your abandoned blog, a less-than-stellar article you wrote in your 20s, a list of your recent political donations?

Or do you want them to find a smart website where you control the narrative of how you, your work, and your book are presented?

Your author website is your digital storefront: it should be inviting, accessible, and clear in its message. Some pro tips:

• When creating or updating your website, try to put yourself in the shoes of a future reader who is mostly unfamiliar with your book. What do they need to know?

• Provide a compelling author biography and a professional author photo, so your work feels personal and contextualized.

• Link to your favored social media platform(s), the one or two where you’re consistently posting engaging content.

• Spotlight the biggest and best accolades, interviews, and reviews. (There’s zero reason to list anything chronologically — make the best info the center of attention.)

• Keep it up to date. After pub day arrives, change “forthcoming” to “recently published”. After a few months, update again. After events have passed, move them to the bottom of your site or otherwise note that they have already happened.

PS: your website doesn’t need to be expensive. Platforms like Squarespace and Wix allow you to make professional looking sites fairly easily. You could also hire someone from a site like Upwork or Fiverr to help when you get stuck.

If you want to learn more about how you can successfully promote your book, the Spring session of our 6-Week Book Publicity Intensive kicks off in just under three weeks on April 10.