Sell More Books with These Seven Promotion Steps

We recently launched Sell More Books: ALLi's Guide to Book Promotion and have been walking through it chapter by chapter in a member-only live series on SelfPubConnect, with replays available for members. This post draws on its framework.

Most promotions don't fail because the book is wrong, or the price is wrong, or the ad is ugly. They fail because there was never really a plan. A vague intention to “do something” turns into a frantic week of discounting, posting, and hoping, and when it's over you can't say what worked, what didn't, or whether to do it again.

A promotion is meant to be the opposite of that. Short, sharp, deliberate. A clear invitation placed under the right reader's nose at the right moment. The difference between a scramble and a campaign isn't effort or budget. It's having a shape to follow.

That shape is what this guide is about. Seven steps, drawn from ALLi's promotion guidebook, that take you from “I should probably run a sale” to a campaign you can set up, run, measure, and improve. None of them are complicated. Together they're the difference between firing in the dark and learning something every time you promote.

Before You Start: Marketing First, Then Promotion

One distinction underpins everything below, so it's worth a sentence before we begin.

Marketing is the always-on groundwork: your covers, descriptions, metadata, mailing list, the steady signal that tells the right reader “you'll like this.” Promotion stands on its shoulders. It's the time-bound burst that says “and here's a reason to buy now.”

The reason this matters: you can't promote your way out of weak marketing. If your platform is empty, your list is cold, or your book's positioning is fuzzy, a promotion just spends money pushing people toward something that isn't ready to receive them. So before you plan a campaign, make sure there's something solid for it to stand on. Then these seven steps will do their job.

The Seven Steps

1. Give your promotions an MOT

Before you plan anything new, look honestly at what you've already done. List every promotional activity you've run in the past twelve months: discounts, ads, giveaways, launches, Kickstarters, price pulses, newsletter swaps, cross-promos. Everything.

Then mark each one: working, so-so, or not working. For the winners, jot down why they worked, was it the audience match, the incentive, the timing? For the losers, note what you'd change: budget, targeting, copy, creative, platform.

This is the step most authors skip, and it's the one that makes all the others smarter. You already have data from your own past campaigns. You're just not looking at it yet.

2. Set one specific goal, with a time frame

Pick a single outcome. Not three. One. Chasing several results at once is the quickest way to achieve none of them.

The trick is to get specific. Start with a word, then a sentence beginning with a verb, then the actual numbers. “Sell more books” becomes “generate £3,000 in direct-store sales of [title] in 30 days.” Or “add 1,000 email subscribers interested in historical fiction during the launch.” Or “hit the top 100 in my category for 72 hours.”

Then write it where you'll see it every single day of the campaign. A goal you can't see is a goal you'll drift away from.

3. Time it with intention

You do not need to promote the moment your book is finished. Put your manager's hat on and ask: when will this give me the best chance to sell? Film studios shoot the scary movie in January and hold it until Halloween. You can think the same way.

Hook your campaign onto a date that suits your genre, Valentine's Day for romance, Halloween for horror, a seasonal gift window for poetry. Or onto a news moment your book genuinely speaks to. Just be careful never to look like you're hijacking a tragedy to sell copies.

4. Tailor to warm, cool and cold readers

Not every reader knows you equally well, and the same message won't land with all of them. Think in three temperatures.

Warm readers are your buyers, subscribers and backers, the people most likely to buy again. Use insider language, loyalty bonuses, exclusives: “here's the deleted scene, just for you.” Cool readers follow you but engage only now and then. Tempt them with sample chapters, character intros, small discounts. Cold readers don't know you at all, they just love the genre. Introduce yourself as if meeting a friend for the first time, and make the value obvious: “if you loved X, try Y, 99p today.”

Whatever the temperature, every element of your campaign should move a reader through three quick stages: notice (a sharp promise grabs attention), nod (yes, this is my kind of thing), and need (I have to click, buy, read, share). Map each piece of your campaign to one of those moments and you keep readers moving.

5. Budget to learn, not to win

Your first promotion of any kind is a learning experience, not a verdict on your career. Budget accordingly.

Start by asking three comparable authors what they spent on a similar goal, that's your baseline. Then do a pessimist pass: halve the return you're hoping for and check you can still afford it. Then cap the first test deliberately small. Scale only what proves itself.

A good rule of thumb: risk no more than one week's worth of your usual organic income on a first attempt. If it flops, you've lost a week, and learned something. If it flies, you scale it with confidence next time.

6. Build a plan

A campaign is a set of moving parts that need to line up on specific dates, so give yourself a simple board to track them. Trello, Asana, a wall of sticky notes, whatever you'll actually use. Four columns are enough:

Assets: the copy, graphics, video and lead magnets you need to create. Setup dates: retailer price changes, newsletter bookings, ad preparation, all the things with deadlines attached. Live actions: the things you'll do during the run, live streams, guest posts, podcast drops. Metrics: the daily numbers you'll watch, clicks, sign-ups, sales, return on ad spend.

Get the deadlines especially right. If you're discounting at a retailer or booking a promo newsletter, those have cut-off dates that dictate everything else. Miss one and the whole campaign slips.

7. Evaluate and iterate

The campaign isn't over when the sale ends. It's over when you've learned from it.

Hold a short debrief every time. Did you hit the goal, and by how much? What did each outcome cost you? How did warm readers convert compared to cold ones? And the three questions that matter most: what will you repeat, what will you refine, and what will you retire?

Keep these notes somewhere permanent, a promo playbook, whether that's a document or a binder. Over time it becomes the most valuable thing you own as a promoter: a record of which headlines convert your warm readers, which images fall flat with cold ones, when bundles beat single titles. Each campaign teaches the next one. That's how promotion stops being an emotional event and becomes a professional practice.

How to Run Your First One

If that feels like a lot, here's the reassuring part: most authors only need four to six promotions across a whole year. Promote constantly and you exhaust yourself and fatigue your readers, they stop believing the offer, because there's always an offer. A few well-shaped campaigns beat a permanent state of mild panic.

And the shape of a single promotion is simpler than it looks. Think of it as three weeks. Week one you prepare, assets, links, landing page, email copy. Week two you run it, the live push across email, ads and social. Week three you close and learn, final reminder, restore your prices, record your results.

So don't try to master all seven steps at once. Pick one small, real campaign, give it a single clear goal, and walk it through the shape. You'll learn more from running one modest promotion start to finish than from reading about a dozen.

What ALLi Members Are Doing

The framework holds, but it looks different depending on the kind of author you are.

ALLi director Orna Ross ran a Kickstarter in early 2025 for a historical novel about the poet WB Yeats and the activist Maud Gonne. It funded in 72 hours, because she paired a strong warm list of existing poetry readers with a video that spoke directly to their love of Yeats. That's the MOT and the warm-audience steps working together: she knew who her warmest readers were and gave them exactly the right invitation.

By contrast, when she tried a quick Amazon price drop on one of her novels, it barely moved the needle. Rather than write it off as failure, she treated it as data, it told her Amazon had become an ancillary retailer for her, and that her readers were now elsewhere. That single honest evaluation pushed her toward selling direct from her own site, a decision that's reshaped her whole business. That's step seven in action.

The pattern across ALLi members is consistent: the ones who promote well aren't the ones who do the most. They're the ones who pick one clear goal, match it to the readers they actually have, keep notes, and let each campaign make the next one smarter.

Where to Go Next

This post draws on Sell More Books: ALLi's Guide to Book Promotion by Orna Ross, which covers the full system in depth, the complete campaign planner, worked examples for different publishing models, promotional pricing, influencer and algorithm marketing, and how to build your promo playbook. It's available from selfpublishingstore.com, and ALLi members get the ebook free.

For the piece that sits just before promotion, choosing where to show up and how to reach readers in the first place, download our free guide below.