How to Announce Your Book Release on Social Media

Congratulations on your new book! It is an amazing achievement to pour your energy, ideas, creativity, passion, and belief into a pile of paper and transform it into an impactful piece of literature, ready to positively influence its future readers. And it would even be more amazing if your book reaches as many people as possible! With the help of social media, which is where anything and everything happens now, you can promote your book and name as an author and achieve sales goals. Traditional means of marketing such as print, TV, and radio still exist, but even these media have adapted in the internet age through the method of streaming. So let’s talk about how to announce your book’s release on social media.

Table of Contents

Book marketing and promotion on social media help generate buzz and get people excited. A well-written book press release is an excellent marketing tool and a great way to build an audience base and reach new readers. Remember these things when launching your social media campaign.

Audience demographics – Always consider the target audience. How old are they? Are they middle-aged people who use Facebook to get their digital information? Teens who prefer tweets over posts? Or professionals who use LinkedIn? Know where their social media accounts are.
Audience interests – Does your book talk about a specific skill, a hobby, a passion, a sport, or a profession?
The types of content their audience consumes – Are your audience more into reels and videos over static images and text on social media? Study their social media activities.
Social media hangout places – TikTok and Instagram are currently essential digital social assets for young adults.

If you have to, choose the one or two platforms that are best for you, especially the ones you’re more likely to stick with for the long term. Posting to one social media platform strongly, consistently, and effectively is infinitely better than trying to use all of them with less quality and vigor.

Always include a call-to-action (CTA)

Remember that posts are not just to tease and inform during a book launch; they’re also used to sell and engage.

In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know regarding announcing and promoting your book through the help of social media, no matter which stage of launch you are in right now.

First, let’s go over the three stages of announcing your book’s release social media campaign.

New releases require a few things, including information about the book, the launch date or when your book becomes available, and selling and distribution information. All of these must be addressed during these three stages.

Pre-launch

Also called a book press release, this stage is maximized to generate awareness around you and your new book and build anticipation in your target audience. This is an excellent time to get people excited and where most authors focus their marketing efforts.

Launch period

This stage usually lasts a week, starting on the book’s actual release date, and focused on getting as many sales and pre-orders as possible.

Post-launch

This last stage is an ongoing implementation after the launch period is done to maintain momentum and interest through audience engagement and other sustainable and long-term digital marketing and PR strategies.

This stage is very important in informing your audience, hyping them up about your upcoming book and making a splash in the writing scene. If you do not take advantage of this period with the right strategies, there will be no awareness or excitement around your book.

Create an announcement post

To make an impression that your audience will easily remember, announce your book’s launch on your social media platforms not more than a month before your book’s release. This will be the start of your book launch social media campaign.

Tease your customers by sharing your book and why you believe they would love it, and set the release date. Write a press release, including an eye-catching and compelling image or video to grab your audience’s attention and increase their interest in reading your full post.

If you can’t choose or come up with an image to include with your post, the safest option and basic requirement is to feature your book cover.

After your first post announcing your book release on your preferred social media, create weekly posts for that month, worded differently and with a varied accompanying image, that the release is coming up to get people talking about your book. This will maintain the engagement and excitement you share with your followers for the book launch.

For every post you make, it’s important to include creative assets like post pictures or rich text (i.e., using bold, italic, etc.) that help grab your audience’s attention and increase engagement. It’s important to make people excited about your book as you get closer to publication dates.

There are different engaging and creative ways of taking full advantage of the pre-launch stage:

A branded and compelling image that includes a short excerpt from the book.
Offering a free chapter from the upcoming book in exchange for the reader’s email address as an opt-in to the newsletter or email list.
Moment marketing — aligning your book with current topics and issues by using an excerpt to relate to it.

Prepare for Week 1 of the launch

Don’t forget that during pre-launch, it’s crucial to prepare for your first week of launch period promotions (aka week 1 post-publication date); you can use the engagement and feedback during pre-launch to adjust your strategies for launch period promotions.

Reach out to influencers

Make sure that you reach out to 25-30 readers who can sample your work before you announce your book’s release, preferably social media influencers with supportive fans of their own. This relationship-building with influencers helps get early reviews for your book. This is a great content marketing strategy, meaning once the book is published, there’s already social proof of your new work for your target audience. This lets you provide basic information to your potential readers, get the word out for your book, and show credibility and relevance.

Also, you can leverage these influencers’ reach and access a bigger audience that may be interested in your book. Start messaging and offering copies to these early readers/influencers at the very start of your pre-launch stage to give them enough time to finish reading your book and leaving a nice review.

How to promote your book during the launch stage

Group of People Reading Book Sitting On Chair

Posting in moderation during your book launch is recommended EXCEPT on the day of and the first week that follows that launch. Your book launch is only a once in its lifetime event, post EVERY day of that week with impressive images and reviews on your chosen social media sites. You can also announce your book launch to your mailing list.

Your first week of promotions should involve collecting as many book reviews as you can. Remember the early readers you identified during pre-launch? Follow up with them about leaving a review on Amazon. This can help you hit the retailer’s bestseller list.

On launch day, make the formal announcement that your book is live and for sale. You don’t need an elaborate storytelling format for the day that your book launches. Assuming you’ve consistently promoted your book throughout the pre-launch phase, your audience should be primed and ready to take action.

The main objectives of your launch day promotions are:

Tell your audience that your book is now for sale;
Ask your audience to buy the book;
And ask the readers to leave a review for it.

Always include a picture of the book as your visual asset and link your posts directly to your book’s purchase page during this week.

The best way to approach your first week of sales is to update your audience about everything exciting that’s happening around your release. Post any interviews you’ve done and share all articles in which you or your book has been featured. Utilize all assets and opportunities to remind readers that the book is live and ready for purchase.

Engagement with your building community is important, so don’t forget to like and reply to positive comments readers are leaving about you and your work. This will help build excitement around your book and grow your relationship with your readers.

And because you’ll be promoting every day of that launch week, implement a diverse list of content that pursues the same objectives we have discussed above.

Post Calendar example

Day-of: A post announcing the book is finally for sale. Posting about a special sale or discount for the book.
Day 2: An interview you are featured in where you discuss the book, where you talk about the challenges you’ve faced in writing your book.
Day 3: An excerpt, a beautiful paragraph, or even a book page to showcase your writing and attract your readers.
Day 4: Reminding that the special sale or discount is only available during that launch week.
Day 5: Videos of readers (could be your own circle) holding and enjoying their copies of your book.
Day 6: Announcing that an E-book version with the same discount is available.
Day 7: Reviews of your initial readers. They could be the influencers you tapped during pre-launch.

The more readers you can get during the beginning of your book release, the stronger your momentum gets and the higher your book’s chances of becoming a bestseller. Your book’s commercial and social success is based on how many people are buying your books and talking about them. So focus your energy on getting those launch sales during this period.

After your book is released (congrats!), you can ease up on social media and take it down a notch when it comes to posting. Limit your schedule to not more than three posts a week to keep the quality up and still remain consistent and engaged with your audience.

Regularly post updates showing the growing coverage that you and your book have received. These can be podcasts or print interviews, articles written about your book, as well as bestseller rankings.

Your other posts can be amazing visuals that also feature various passages from your book — be careful not to give everything away, though. To encourage likes and reshares from your followers, you should choose compelling, relevant, and relatable excerpts.

The energy around your book will die down after its launch; that is inevitable. When that happens, regularly scheduled and better quality post-launch posts can regenerate interest, and a giveaway can be a nice kick to reinvigorate excitement and engagement.

How to do a post-launch giveaway

Giveaways are a fantastic way to boost engagement on your social media and attract new potential readers to your brand and books. They can revive the excitement and attention towards your book after your launch hype has calmed down. Here’s how you can go about this:

Announce on social media that you’ll have a giveaway, and only a few copies of your book will be available.
Include a call-to-action for your interested audience to leave a comment sharing why they want a copy of your book and require them to also tag a friend to qualify for the giveaway. This way, the word spreads.
Choose a deserving winner from those who participated in your giveaway post.

There are many articles discussing what to do when announcing your book release on social media, but only a few discuss what not to do. These are the things you need to avoid:

Don’t post without a calendar of content

Grey Apple Keyboard and Grey Ipad showing calendar

Because a lot of writers are meticulous, some overthink and worry about the right time and content to post on social media. Some are afraid that the book is not really ready, so they end up not posting about their book. Others worry that they are late posting.

When it comes to social media promotions about your book, the right time is the timeline we discussed above based on your release. It’s as simple as that. Your emotions and impulses are not good dictators when it comes to the marketing side of things. Thoughtful planning and prompt implementation are key.

Writers and social media managers who are strategic will always reap great results. So establish a regular social media posting schedule to maintain engagement with your followers, and post valuable and diverse content to offer value. Also, remember calls-to-action (CTA)? A great way to diversify your posts is to use different CTA’s.

For example:

Visit the author’s website.
Read the author’s latest article.
Watch my newest video.
Listen to this podcast interview.
Buy this book today.

The right posting frequency will vary depending on the stage of your book launch (pre-launch, launch week, or post-launch). But you don’t need to post something daily unless it’s the launch week. Posting every day can lead to both your and the audience’s burnout. Scheduling posts that will be published consistently 2-3 times per week is a good standard.

Set aside time to prepare your calendar of content. Better yet, build on this posting calendar and pre-schedule their publishing using social media scheduler tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social. This will make posting on schedule so much easier and streamlined.

If you are finding it hard to stay consistent due to work and life demands, we recommend hiring help or relying on someone else to create and maintain your social media content calendar for you.

Don’t neglect relevance in your content

It’s not enough that you post thoughts and excerpts from your book and not connect those things to what’s happening in the real world. You then miss the opportunity to communicate your book’s relevance and provide value to your potential readers.

If you can connect the morals and ideas in your work to current issues, you can attract the interest of a more insightful and thoughtful audience and encourage new readers to give your book a chance.

Don’t forget to engage with your readers

Posting is not enough, it’s just as valuable to your brand to engage with your audience. In doing so, you come across as more relatable, approachable, and likable, generating more support for your book as a result.

Aside from allotting time to create your content calendar, you should set aside an hour a day to like and reply to your audience. This is also a great time to reach out to more potential readers.

And you might ask, who are they? Follow people in your niche that you like and peek into their conversations on social media; who are they engaging with? You can join in relevant hashtags on specific platforms to find discussions to participate in. This will allow you to find relevant books and connect with influencers and readers who have also helped promote these books’ launches.

An effective social media strategy does not equate to creating posts for every existing platform. But trying to post content on everything, you will be overwhelmed because you must reformat content appropriate for each platform. Imagine posting between Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok; it can be draining. And it does not look good when you and your book seem to be sprouting everywhere.

Don’t be pressured to be active and post on every social media tool in existence. Find and pick the best social media channels that are most relevant to you and your audience and follow your launch plan. This will help make your social media promotion less hectic and easier to maintain and improve.

Don’t be inconsistent

person sitting at a coffee table, writing on a notebook

It’s easy to forget to tend to your social media strategy. Writers are busy people. Many of you are preoccupied with other income sources like full-time jobs, and by the end of the day, many of you seem to not have the time or energy for social media marketing implementation.

Or maybe you feel disappointed by that one month when your efforts don’t look like they are paying off well on social media, so you get discouraged and slack off. Social media is constantly evolving, so it’s important to pay attention to the community you belong to, your readers, and the kind of content they engage with. This is so you can replan your strategies accordingly. Take this as an example: it’s beneficial to note the best times of day and days of the week when your posts perform well. Update and pattern your posting schedule after that.

Don’t get too fixated on creating the “perfect” post, this is a highway to procrastination. As important as they are, social media posts are still just fleeting moments in the digital space. Even the most viral videos die down. Focus on posting consistently and regularly, monitoring and considering what works, and adapting your strategies accordingly.

Enjoy Your Book Launch!

It may not be as fulfilling and rewarding as writing your book, but using social media to its fullest when announcing your book release and promoting it can be fun and exciting! You get to widen the reach of your book, boost your earning through sales, meet new interesting people, challenge yourself out of your comfort zone, and engage with readers who truly appreciate your work.

Things to remember when using social media during a book launch

Choose your book/brand’s social platform based on key criteria