7 Easy Ways to Promote Your Book on Amazon Free

With thousands of books struggling to gain visibility online, finding the right strategies to promote your book on Amazon could be the game changer that will make or break your success as an author.

No, I’m not kidding you.

One of the best kept secrets of best selling authors is marketing, marketing and more marketing. No one is telling you that.

Unless you’re Stephen King, Oprah Winfrey, or J.K Rowling you’ll still have to go all out to promote your books after publishing else it will literally get dusty on Amazon’s shelves.

Again, I’m not kidding!

The reason for this is not far fetched. There’s way too many books competing for buyers on Amazon. In fact, according to a recent report, 7500 kindle books are published on Amazon every other day.

So, if you really want to get your book to stand out from this crowd and command the attention it deserves you must go all the way, to get it noticed.

And the number one way to do this is by promoting your book and getting it right in front of your audience. This is your best bet and easiest route to become a best selling author.

Of course there are many ways to promote your book on Amazon but there are only a few proven strategies that work, consistently, even for beginners.

So, in this guide, I’ll be listing out in the following paragraphs, the top proven strategies to promote your book on Amazon free.

Enrol in KDP Select

This is by far one of the biggest and most popular ways to promote your book on Amazon without lifting a finger.

Not only is it very straight forward, usually, the fact you’re a published author with an ebook, on Amazon KDP makes you automatically eligible to enroll your kindle book in the KDP Select program.

The KDP Select in turn allows Amazon to promote your book across it’s platform especially to it’s subscribers.

Below are some of the benefits you stand to gain when you enroll your book in Amazon KDP Select…

Kindle Unlimited

With Kindle Unlimited, your book gets promoted to KU subscribers and you’re paid based on the number of pages or times your book is read. (Read more about KU here).

Kindle Countdown Deals

For one week (5 days) in each 90 day period, you can discount your book by putting it in a count down deal. With this you still earn up to 70% royalty even if your book is priced below 2.99 USD, during the countdown.

Kindle Free Promotions

As part of the benefits of enrolling in KDP Select, you have 5 days free book promotion within every 90 days. During this promotion, your book will appear in Amazon Deals Page, giving you some more publicity in the process.

Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL)

Just like Kindle Unlimited, Kindle Owners’ Lending Library allow authors to earn a fee whenever their book is read via the KOLL program.

Like I mentioned earlier, as a rule; in return for this FREE promotion, you give Amazon the exclusive right to manage and sell your book for 90 days.

This means that as soon as you enroll on the KDP Select program, you literally lose the right to sell your book on any other platform (not even your website) within 90 days, or as long as your book is enrolled in the program. (Of course you can still sell your hard copies offline if you have them).

While this might sound a bit off and not-so-enticing for some aspiring authors, a lot of authors have benefitted from the KDP Select program. At the same time, so many have counted their loss.

In a nutshell, the KDP Select program has a handful of benefit for your book. For instance, it allows you to key into the Amazon discount programs and Free book promotion among other benefits.

But at the same time, you want to have a critical look at the options available before you, the gains you stand to make and the cons before enrolling your book on KDP Select.

You also have to note that as soon as you’re enrolled on KDP Select, your book cannot be removed from the program until after 90 days.

Set your eBook for Pre-Order

Another popular step to promote your book on Amazon is to get your book set for pre-order and then go all out to get the buzz on for the book before you hit publish.

Amazon pre-order, allows you to update your new eBook details and make the book available for customers to pre-order even before it gets released.

Although this is currently unavailable for paperbacks, you can make your new ebook available for up to a year or some days before the final release of the book.

During this period, your ebook will be available for pre-orders before the set publish date. And you can always make changes to your book’s content until the dateline.

Within this period also, you can work on promoting and getting people to pre-order the book, visit its page or just get to search up the book on Amazon.

Doing this can contribute to a better search rank and prepare the book for a decent visibility, before it goes on live.

Personally, I believe this is a good strategy you can use to get the noise out for your book while putting the book together.

It is also one of the strategies you can use to work your way to the Amazon best sellers’ lists, after the book finally gets published.

PS: Do not enroll on pre-publishing unless you’re sure that your book will be ready on the target date. Or, work on using only a pre-set date that’s realistic. And if you must use pre-ordering be sure you’ll get a decent visibility and possibly, actual pre-orders before the book goes live.

Sell at Limited Discount

If you’re already enrolled in the KDP Select program, you can use the Kindle Countdown deals as one of the major ways to promote your book on Amazon.

With the count down deals, Amazon offers you about 7 days to sell your book at a discounted price to your audience.

Unlike the ordinary KDP where you’d earn 35% royalty for books sold below 2.99 Dollars, the KDP Select allows you to still earn up to 70% royalty for all sales made within this period.

Such promotions like this can help you slice down the selling price of your book in order to attract more customers thus boosting your sales.

It can also give you access to generate the data that can help you predict the accurate price your book is sold for, based on the amount the majority of people are buying it.

Opt in for Free Book Promotion

All books enrolled in the KDP Select program are eligible for the Amazon free book promotion.

Yes! I know you’re wondering about why you should give out your book for free to readers after you’ve put in so much effort to get the book together.

But here’s it…

The free book promotion is a very good strategy to promote your book on Amazon and get some free publicity in return.

What it does for you is that it allows you to set your books to be read and downloaded for free, for 5 days, within every 90 days period of your enrollment in KDP Select.

During this period, a lot of people might get to download the book, visit your page or get the noise out about your book. And in turn, this has a way of boosting your book’s visibility.

After your set period of free promotion is over, your books will be sold at the original list price.

PS: While this can generate a lot of buzz for your book, it may also have it’s own disadvantages which you have to watch out for, before settling for it.

Use Social Media Marketing

Social media Marketing is one of the go to strategies you can use to promote your book on Amazon, as an author.

Done well, it can work for both newbies and established authors, regardless of whether you have a large audience on social media or not. Although naturally, you’ll get more out of this strategy if you have a very engaged audience.

You can key into this, to market your book on Amazon either through the use of your own content or with the help of social media influencers.

Note that if you’re enrolled on the KDP Select program, the KDP policy bars you from selling your books directly via your social media handles instead you’re encouraged to promote the links to your books on Amazon, via the social media.

And you can do this organically through the use of content marketing or you can also use paid advertising to promote the links and get the traffic over to your Amazon page.

Try Paid Ads

Paid advertising is another strategy you can use drive sales for your Amazon published books.

In order to market your book via paid ads, you can decide to use the social media paid ads on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook etc. search engine ads or the digital publishers paid ads, in this case, Amazon paid ads.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that a lot of authors prefer using the social media and to some extent, the Amazon paid ads over search engine ads.

Before deciding to use paid ads for your books, you should consider the cost (which might be prohibitive in some cases), the impact and the overall returns on investment.

Do not choose to engage in paid ads promotion or use a particular kind of promotion services just because other authors are doing it. Do your research and make some findings before embarking on this kind of promotions.

Besides the other strategy listed above, guest blogging is another essential strategy to promote your book, sell your brand and expand your audience as an author.

Engage in Guest Blogging

Compared to the others, Guest Blogging is one of the most rewarding promotional strategies you can use to promote your book on Amazon.

And comparatively, it is also one of the hardest strategies you can use to promote your book.

To get your way around this easily, you can develop a good relationship with bloggers or other influencers with large platforms.

With this relationship, you can get to write original content for their platforms, request for interviews or get special features, in return for a piece of content.

If you have a lot of funds to spend, you can even get paid features where the free ones are difficult to pull through.

Final Words

In conclusions, I want you to realize that it is very important to generate a decent number of sales and reviews for your book, during the first few weeks of publishing on Amazon.

It helps a lot in your book’s rating and Amazon SEO. The more people buy and review your book, the better your chances of getting the book seen by even more people.

This is part of the reasons you need to pay attention to promoting your book as soon as it is published.

Of course, these book promotion strategies are not exhaustive but they will go a long way in getting the word out for your book, if you get to use them.

Need further help? Work with our team to promote your book. Reach out to us here let’s get’s your book’s promotion started.

Meanwhile, to get optimum results from these strategies, it is very important you bring into perspective, the cost implications, your target audience and the overall benefit of a particular promotion strategy before getting to use it.

Now, it’s over to you! Which of these strategies are you going to implement to promote your book? Drop your comments below.