Marketing Your Book & Making Money With Your Book
EXPANDED BOOK CHAPTER #10 FROM MY SELF-PUBLISHING MANUAL
by Bart Smith
INTRODUCTION & HOW TO USE THIS PAGE
This special report is the EXPANDED ONLINE COMPANION to Chapter 10: Marketing & Making Money With Your Book, from My Self-Publishing Manual. The printed was limited in page-count and only gives you the shorter, tighter version, while this online report below opens up the bigger book marketing toolbox with more ideas, examples, sales angles, and ways to make your book work harder for you.
Below, you’ll find THREE (3) MAJOR SECTIONS covering how to make money with your book, identify buyers, build your author platform, promote online and offline, create marketing materials, and use visibility, media, interviews, video, and authority-building tactics to reach more readers and create more opportunities. So, having said all that, let's gooooo!!!!
Section 1
Get Ready To Market & Sell Your Book
Before you begin promoting your book, you must align yourself, your manuscript, your target market, your digital platform, and your primary sales concepts. Get crystal clear on how your book will generate revenue, exactly who it is for, and the specific action steps required to launch your promotional campaigns with absolute precision.
SECTION 1 • LESSONS INCLUDE
SECTION 1 • PART 1
Before you start promoting your book, get your author platform ready. This section walks you through the website, email list, media room, reviews, photos, videos, materials, payment tools, and preparation steps authors should have in place before they start marketing.
SECTION 1 • PART 2
Your book needs more than a buy button — it needs a sales page that shows the book, explains the value, answers buyer questions, and makes ordering easy. This section gives you a practical checklist for building a stronger book sales web page.
SECTION 1 • PART 3
If you want interviews, make it easy for podcast hosts, radio shows, TV producers, livestream hosts, and event organizers to say yes. This section shows authors how to build an “Interview Me” page that positions them as ready, credible, and easy to book.
SECTION 1 • PART 4
A lead generation page helps turn visitors into subscribers, prospects, buyers, and future fans. This section shows how authors can use free chapters, checklists, reports, videos, and other offers to build an email list around their book.
SECTION 1 • PART 5
Your book can create income in far more ways than royalties alone. This section explores 30+ ways authors can turn a book into sales, services, speaking, courses, consulting, events, products, licensing, and long-term business opportunities.
SECTION 1 • PART 6
Selling books takes more than hoping people find you online. This section gives authors practical sales ideas, promotional angles, outreach methods, and selling opportunities that can help move more books and create more revenue.
SECTION 1 • PART 7
Once your book marketing is underway, there are still more smart moves to make. This section helps authors think beyond the first launch and keep building momentum, visibility, follow-up opportunities, and future income paths.
SECTION 1 • PART 8
This section will point authors to helpful tutorials, training resources, examples, and how-to guidance on BartSmith.com. As new tutorials are updated and added, this area will become a deeper training gateway for authors who want more help.
Section 2
Online & Offline Book Marketing
Authors should take advantage of using both online and offline marketing tactics to promote their book, reach wider audiences, and keep their messages permanently visible. Blending both online campaigns with offline strategies ensures you capture tech-savvy digital book buyers while building deep personal rapport with readers in your local community offline. Remember EXPOSURE = LEADS = SALES! So, the more people who know (of or about you), who then come to LIKE you, who then come to trust you ... will most likely buy from you.
The following list of online and offline marketing tactics are not in any special order, and a few could be implemented both online and offline, so make note of those that can and DO that! Feel free to jump around, try a few marketing tactics that you’re comfortable with, create a budget and/or curiosity to see how they’ll pan out. Make note of what works and what doesn’t, and with time, make note so you can scale up your marketing efforts in the direction that feeds you the most results for your time and money. Be patient, work fast and have faith that good things are about to happen to you!
SECTION 2 • LESSONS INCLUDE
SECTION 2 • PART 9
Before you promote your book, you need to know exactly who your buyers are and where they already gather. This section helps authors build a “book buyer map” of websites, groups, podcasts, newsletters, communities, events, influencers, and media outlets to target.
SECTION 2 • PART 10
Online marketing gives authors countless ways to reach readers, build visibility, and drive people back to their book sales page. This section covers practical digital tactics authors can use across websites, email, social media, search, content, and online communities.
SECTION 2 • PART 11
Authors no longer have to be on camera every time they want to create a video message. This section explores how AI video avatars, including tools like HeyGen, can help authors create book promos, updates, event messages, chapter teasers, and ongoing video content faster.
SECTION 2 • PART 12
Advertising can help remind people about your book, promote offers, drive traffic, and support your larger marketing campaign. This section gives authors simple ad concepts, layout ideas, checklist items, and promotional angles they can adapt for their own book.
SECTION 2 • PART 13
Offline marketing still matters, especially when authors want local exposure, event sales, community connections, and real-world visibility. This section covers practical ways to promote your book through events, businesses, organizations, handouts, displays, and face-to-face opportunities.
SECTION 2 • PART 14
TV exposure can give authors credibility, visibility, and a powerful media boost. This section shows authors how to think about television opportunities, prepare their pitch, and position themselves as interesting guests with a message worth featuring.
Section 3
Promotional Materials & Tools
Create a comprehensive suite of polished sales materials, eye-catching signage, double-sided flyers, digital web assets, and professional promotional tools to ensure your book commands attention everywhere it appears. Investing the time to prepare these high-quality visual materials guarantees that your branding looks completely seamless and professional, whether your title is being discovered on an online landing page or featured at a live workshop presentation table.
SECTION 3 • LESSONS INCLUDE
SECTION 3 • PART 15
Book posters can make your book look bigger, more professional, and more exciting at signings, tables, workshops, events, and displays. This section shows authors how posters can be used to attract attention and make their book stand out.
SECTION 3 • PART 16
Pricing squares are simple printed price signs you can use at book tables, signings, events, and back-of-the-room sales. This section shows authors how to create reusable pricing pieces that make buying easier and keep your table organized.
SECTION 3 • PART 17
A good flyer can promote your book signing, seminar, workshop, author talk, or local event before people ever meet you. This section gives authors a simple way to think through flyer layout, messaging, benefits, and event promotion.
SECTION 3 • PART 18
Postcards and flyers are still useful tools for promoting books, events, websites, free chapters, workshops, and author offers. This section shows how authors can use printed pieces to spread their message online, offline, locally, and at events.
SECTION 3 • PART 19
Quarter-page flyers are small, affordable, flexible promotional pieces authors can hand out, stack on tables, include with orders, or use at events. This section shows how one simple format can promote books, offers, events, free downloads, and more.
SECTION 3 • PART 20
Bookmarks are more than reader giveaways — they can become mini sales tools for your book, website, events, offers, and author brand. This section gives authors ideas for using bookmarks as practical, low-cost promotional pieces.
CLOSING THOUGHTS & WORDS OF WISDOM
Book marketing is not something you do once and then walk away from. It is something you keep testing, improving, expanding, and learning from as you promote your books in the real world. This report already gives you a powerful collection of book marketing ideas, sales tactics, promotional tools, author platform strategies, media angles, and money-making opportunities you can start using right away.
That said, this report is not finished forever. In fact, it will probably keep growing because I have 35+ books of my own to promote, market, test, relaunch, reposition, talk about, create content around, and sell in different ways. You can bet some books will respond better to certain marketing tactics while other books will respond better to completely different strategies. That is one of the advantages of having a large book catalog: I get to test a lot, learn a lot, compare what works, and keep adding new lessons as I go.
So, as I continue finding every way under the sun to promote my own books — through websites, interviews, videos, special reports, AI tools, social media, book sales pages, email marketing, speaking, consulting, events, thumbnails, sales graphics, video avatars, and whatever else comes along — I’ll keep paying attention to what works. Some of the best tactics may not even be obvious to me right now. They will reveal themselves as I keep publishing, experimenting, promoting, and watching how different books perform in different places.
That means this report can continue to become more valuable over time. Think of it as a living book marketing lab — a growing author-business field manual built from real publishing, real promotion, real design, real websites, real books, real sales tools, real experiments, and real lessons learned along the way.
So, don’t feel like you have to do everything at once. Start with the tactics that fit your book, your audience, your budget, your personality, and your current stage as an author. Then keep coming back, keep learning, keep improving, and keep building your book marketing machine one smart move at a time.
And while you’re doing that, remember two of my favorite author slogans:
A.B.M. → Always Be Marketing
— AND —
A.B.W.A.B. → Always Be Writing Another Book
Your current book deserves to be promoted, but your next book may become the one that opens even bigger doors. Keep writing. Keep marketing. Keep testing. Keep building your author platform. Keep getting your message out there.
Your book can be more than a book. It can become a platform, a lead generator, a credibility builder, a speaking tool, a consulting doorway, a training product, a media hook, and a long-term business asset.
And hey, reach out to me and let me know how you’re doing with marketing your book. I’d love to hear what you’re trying, what’s working, what’s frustrating you, and what kind of progress you’re making.
Now go promote it like you mean it.
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