Our Favorite Tools and Services for Successful Book Marketing
In full disclosure, some of the links on this page are affiliate links. If you chose to purchase the resource using our link, we may receive a small commission. However, we only recommend those resources we have first-hand experience with and can confidently recommend to those who trust us to help them navigate their book marketing options. And often, by being an affiliate, we’re able to get you a better deal from some of our partners.
Our Products
Overview of a Book Launch Course
Getting ready to launch your book and wondering how to do it right? Or have you already launched your book, but not gotten the results you’d hoped for?
If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, then this course is for you!
The Overview of a Book Launch explores the various components involved in launching and marketing a book successfully, whether your book is fiction or nonfiction, then takes a deeper dive into the products, tools and services we recommend to our authors to make their book marketing easier.
Publish with Purpose
Writing a book isn’t easy. And marketing one isn’t any better. But the case studies and exercises contained in our award-winning Publish with Purpose will provide you with the roadmap you need to make it effortless to engage the right readers and achieve the results you want for your reader, your book and yourself.
After all the effort you’ve put into your book, don’t stop short of your goal! Learn what it takes to make your book a success.
Publish with Purpose Virtual Summit
With over a dozen speakers, all experts and influencers in their fields, the replay recordings of this summit contain a treasure trove of information for any author who wants to learn how to market their book more effectively.
We talked about audiobooks, Amazon ads, schools, libraries, bookstores, reader reviews, courses, book awards and more!
With over 14 hours of content, you won’t want to miss out on these replays.
61 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Publisher
There are different paths one can take to publish a book, and each has its pros and cons. So, it’s important that you know which publishing model suits your needs best.
If you decide that working with someone else to publish your books is right for you, then you’ll want to iron out all the details ahead of time, so you know who is responsible for what and when.
These questions allow you to compare apples to apples as you speak with various publishers about your specific book and needs.
Editing and Writing Resources
PerfectIt
This tool is unlike any other editing tool out there in that it’s not so much a spelling and grammar checker, but a consistency checker. And the longer your document is, the more crucial a tool like this becomes.
Did you use “first” and “1st” in the same document? And is it a “dead end” or a “dead-end?”
And with PerfectIt 5’s integration with the Chicago Manual of Style, it highlights problems and issues your manuscript may have that contradict accepted standards.
Check out our review of it below.
ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid is a tool that acts as a grammar checker, style editor, and writing mentor all in one package.
It’s ideal for both writers and editors in that it helps to polish manuscripts and other documents by showing you where common problems appear.
And this tool can be used almost anywhere you write. It integrates with Word, Scrivener and Google Docs, works on both Mac and PC, and can be used in many browsers as well, making it accessible to Gmail, Facebook, WordPress and elsewhere.
Check out our review of it below.
QuickWrite
QuickWrite is a cloud-based writing platform that allows authors to write, edit and collaborate on their books from anywhere.
Created by the same company that brought you MockupShots, it was designed to help authors be more productive and efficient in their writing process. We love that this AI has so much to offer in terms of creating content authors need to facilitate their writing process.
Check out our review of it below.
Book Marketing Courses
Kindlepreneur Amazon Ads Course
Dave Chesson, who created the Kindlepreneur Amazon Ads course, is a master of Amazon Ads. We credit him with everything we know about advertising on Amazon.
We have been advertising our catalogue of books on Amazon continuously since October 2017, and our average cost of sale (ACOS) as of December 27, 2020, is 9.71%. Essentially, for every $1 we spend, we make approximately $10 in sales. And that’s all thanks to Dave Chesson and this free course.
Starting from Zero
If you’re just getting started building your author platform and learning how to publish, you couldn’t do better than this course. It’s free and David Gaughran knows what he’s talking about! An excellent resource for any writer.
Throughout the course, he references two of his books, Let’s Get Digital and Following, which he provides for free as well.
Mark Dawson’s Ads for Authors
While this is a big-ticket purchase, it’s also much more in-depth than any of the other advertising courses I’ve seen out there.
Currently, the course goes through advertising on Amazon, Facebook, BookBub and TikTok, and you get lifetime access with all future updates. So, if you’re thinking long-term about your author career, this may be a very good investment for you.
Book Marketing Tools
MockupShots
MockupShots is a tool that can be used to create mockups and professional product shots of books and information products. Users receive lifetime access to over 600 professional mockups ideal for promoting your book online and in social media.
Check out our review of it below.
Book Blaster
Book Blaster is an ever-ready A.I. marketing assistant on standby to help you create high-quality promo content to help you sell more books, in just a few clicks, at a fraction of the cost!
You may wonder what the difference is between QuickWrite, which I mentioned above and Book Blaster. While QuickWrite supports your writing process, Book Blaster is for marketing content. It creates social media posts, pitch letters, book trailers, and more.
Publisher Rocket
Choosing the right categories and keywords is important to the success of your book. So is understanding who your competition is, what they’re doing, and how difficult it will be to rank against them.
Publisher Rocket, created by Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur, will help you do the research you need in order to position your book the best you can.
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Viral Loops
This tool allows you to create all sorts of viral giveaways and referral programs to encourage your followers to share and promote your book.
Leverage the power of “word of mouth” marketing by creating a Viral Loops campaign for your next launch or to build your mailing list.
Kindle Spy
KDSpy is a Chrome extension that helps you do sales research on Amazon to see how well other books are selling. This type of research allows you to identify the more profitable keywords and categories for your book.
Missinglettr
Missinglettr helps you create strategic, automated social media campaigns for your blog posts that drive traffic to your website all year long.
Imagine writing your blog post, then having a dozen ready-made social media posts for it ready for you to just review, tweak and approve, all scheduled to go out over the next year. And it’s quick and easy to do!
Book Review Services
BookSirens
This service helps you launch your book with more reviews. Simply submit your book for consideration and, if accepted, your ARC will be shared with their community of 15,000+ book reviewers and influencers.
While many review sites have a fairly low ratio of downloads to actual reviews, this one boasts that approximately 75% of downloads from its community result in reviews.
This is a reflection of how much BookSirens respects their reviewers. They do this by ensuring that only the highest quality books are offered to them.
NetGalley
NetGalley helps publishers and authors promote digital review copies to book advocates and industry professionals. Publishers make digital review copies and audiobooks available for the NetGalley community to discover, request, read and review.
While the reviews are intended primarily to be left on the NetGalley site, many reviewers will also post them to the Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites as well.
While it can be expensive to list your book directly with NetGalley, there are shorter-term listings available through IBPA (for members only) and BooksGoSocial (for anyone).
Readers’ Favorite Reviews
In addition to its book award competition, Readers’ Favorite offers a free editorial review to anyone who wants one that’s published on the Readers’ Favorite website and can be used elsewhere as well.
It typically takes six to eight weeks to receive a free review, or you can order an expedited review for a nominal fee.
Either way, when the review is ready, it’s announced to 500,000 libraries, bookstores and schools.
Book Promotional Services
LitNuts
LitNuts promotes only books from independent presses and authors. They know their 25,000 subscribers want info about indie books. So there are no books from the Big 5 corporate publishers or their imprints. Just great books from independent publishers and authors.
They have all sorts of different ways you can promote your book with them, including featured deals, newsletter mentions, giveaways and bundles.
We have done multiple customized promotions with them that we’ve been very pleased with, and their prices are more than fair.
The Fussy Librarian
The Fussy Librarian sends subscribers a daily email, which is where your ebook will be featured once.
There are two separate newsletters here. One is for bargain ebooks and the other for free ones. As of January 2023, there are 109,000 subscribers they reach with these newsletters.
BookBub
BookBub provides authors and publishers with a suite of marketing tools designed to help them achieve their book marketing goals, whether they’re aiming to drive preorders, launch a new release, promote backlist books, or build an author’s platform and visibility. Tap into BookBub’s audience of millions of engaged, active power readers hungry for their next great read.
FreeBooksy
Freebooksy is an online resource for readers to find free and discounted ebooks. Their goal is to help authors reach new readers and introduce them to new genres and books by providing their readers with a daily email of free and discounted books from a wide range of genres, from romance to mystery and beyond. They also offer a blog, featuring book reviews and author interviews.
Hidden Gems Books
Hidden Gems Books helps authors by providing a platform to promote and sell their books. They feature authors and their work on their blog and use their searchable database to help readers find their books. They also provide authors with an opportunity to connect with their readers through their social media channels and email list.
BookRaid
BookRaid has a different approach to newsletter promotions. Rather than charging a fee to appear in their newsletter, which goes out to 40,000 subscribers, they only charge when someone clicks on your book listing in their newsletter.
The nice thing is, all promotions have a maximum spend of $60, even if the value of your clicks is higher. So you never have to worry about breaking the bank on a runaway success.
If you’re looking for even more promotion sites to check out, visit David Gaughran’s “The Very Best Book Promotion Sites” or Kindlepreneur’s “127+ of the Top Free and Paid Book Promotion Sites.”
Book Awards
Book Award Pro
This service automates the process of finding book award competitions that your book is suitable for and then submitting your entry.
We have paid virtual assistants good money many times over the years to do all the necessary research for finding ideal award competitions for our books. Yet Book Award Pro is easy, economical and automatic. Well worth looking into!
FAPA’s President’s Book Awards
The Florida Authors and Publishers Association runs an annual book award competition that is a juried award competition, where each book is judged by as many as three independent judges who are industry professionals. A rubric is used for scoring each book, and awards are assigned based on the book’s total score among all its judges.
That means that in any given category, there may be multiple books that receive the same medal and some medals that are not awarded at all. Your book is judged based on its own merit, not necessarily against other books in the same category.
Readers’ Favorite Book Awards
In addition to offering a free book review service, Readers’ Favorite hosts an international award competition. Every entry receives a free editorial review as well that’s published on the Readers’ Favorite website and can be used elsewhere as well.
There are over 150 genre categories available and no publication date requirement. In other words, you can take an older title and still submit it to this annual competition.
Website and Administrative Resources
GeneratePress Premium
While we have worked with many WordPress themes along the way, our favorite, by far, is GeneratePress, especially when paired with the Generate Blocks plugin.
The free version of GeneratePress is great, but if you get the premium version, it provides a lot more customization of your layouts and designs.
Pretty Links
Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create branded links using your domain name that redirects to another location you specify.
We strongly recommend that our authors use PrettyLinks within their books when URLs are needed. That way, if something ever changes, you can update the PrettyLink and your readers won’t ever know the difference.
You’ll also gain some insights into which URLs your readers access the most, which helps you identify what they want more of.
Book Like a Boss
This is our favorite calendar system. It’s easy for us to create appointments that sync directly to our personal calendars. And for those calls that require payment in advance (like our VIP Coaching calls), it integrates with our payment processor to make it easy to take care of everything all at once.
Since it connects automatically with Zoom, new conference links are created any time someone schedules a call with us, ensuring that there are no unwelcome guests on the call.
Ecwid
Ecwid is the tool we use to power our online store. It allows entrepreneurs and small businesses (and authors!) to get started selling online with a free (forever) account.
It’s easy to set up and is self-hosted, so you don’t have to worry about maintaining it beyond setting up your products and fulfilling your orders.
If you’re just getting started selling products on your website, this is the tool to use!
Better Proposals
Any time we need a document signed, we use Better Proposals. This is the tool you’ll see if you ever receive a publishing proposal, our contract, copyright permission requests, galley and cover approval requests, or speaker agreements from us. As far as we’re concerned, it’s the best tool around for obtaining electronic signatures.
Its template library makes it easy to get started. You can even include pricing tables with optional or add-on items.
You can also use your own branding (good for brand reinforcement) and domain (good for your SEO).
Lead Gen Resources
Marquiz
Marquiz is a simple tool that allows you to quickly and easily create engaging online quizzes. This is one of the fastest ways we know to provide valuable content that encourages people to subscribe to your mailing list.
Whether you make the quiz fun or informative (or a bit of both), quizzes are easy to take, easy to share, and easy to love.
Learn more about your audience through your website and social media, all without the help of designers or programmers.
Woorise
Woorise is great for hosting your own giveaways and contests, but it also does so much more.
You can build landing pages, create quizzes and surveys, and sell products in addition to creating giveaways and contests, all using templates that make everything quick and easy to set up.
No matter which function you choose to use, Woorise helps you connect with your audience, collect leads and sell more books by creating content they want to engage with and share.
HeySummit
If you’re wondering what platform we use for our Publish with Purpose virtual summit, we run it all using HeySummit.
You can create unlimited easy-to-run online events with all of the customization and flexibility you need to provide an exceptional experience for your audience and speakers.
Some of the links on the page above may be affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, we will receive an affiliate commission. We are disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
