How to market your book

What to consider six months before publication

Naomi’s next picture book The Hug Button illustrated by Rebecca Ashdown will publish in six months time. That means it’s now time to start thinking about how to promote it…

Which is why last week Naomi and Rebecca met with a marketing manager from their publishers to make a promotional plan.

We want Words and Pictures to help demystify all aspects of the children’s publishing industry, so we thought it would be helpful to give you a behind the scene glimpse and share what we discussed in that meeting.

Why does marketing and publicity matter?

Having a marketing and publicity plan is essential. It might be obvious to say it, but the better a book sells, the more likely it will be that someone will pay you to write/illustrate another one.

Unless you’re a big brand, big name or received a huge advance which the publisher is keen to recoup, chances are your publisher will only be able to allocate a fairly small marketing and publicity budget to promote your book.

Marketing and publicity teams are often full of great ideas and are super knowledgable but they tend to be incredibly busy. After all, they’re always juggling publicity and marketing for multiple books on a list at once, not just yours.

Which is why in our experience the more you can do to help promote your own books and work closely with the marketing and publicity teams, the better.

It’s six months before publication - what should you plan?

The Hug Button will be Naomi’s eighth published book. We’ve learned a lot about marketing and publicity over the years - both from four years of being published and our time working in house in the industry. (Naomi’s first job was as a temp in the marketing department at Puffin.)

So, this is what we discussed with our publisher six months before publication:

Launch party

Having a launch party isn’t essential but it’s such a huge achievement to get to the point where your book is being published that we really highly recommend celebrating.

We’ve done a mixture of in person launch parties at local bookshops and online virtual ones, either with schools in the daytime, or family and friends in the evening.

Often the publisher will contribute a small amount towards the food and drinks for in person parties which we’ve tended to arrange ourselves.

Launch parties are a great opportunity to invite family, friends, agents, publishers, fellow creatives and people from the industry. They also provide content for social media.