Promotion after launch week
A book is on sale for years. Most self-published books are promoted for a week, and then nothing happens to them again.
That gap is the largest unworked opportunity most authors have. The book does not expire. It stays in the catalog, indexed, available, with a page that can be improved at any time and a story that stays relevant to somebody every month of every year. What ends after launch week is the author's attention, not the book's life.
What follows is what still works on a book that came out eight months ago.
Seasonal hooks, planned early
Some books have a season built into them. A romance set at Christmas, a gardening book, a guide to filing your taxes, a horror novel, a book about grief that people look for in January. If yours has one, it is the single cheapest promotion available, because the audience arrives on its own and you only have to be visible when it does.
Plan it weeks ahead, not on the day. Price changes propagate slowly, listing edits take time to appear, a promotion booked with a newsletter service needs lead time, and advertising needs a run-up to find its audience. Being ready the morning of the day itself means being late.
Only claim a season the book actually has. A thriller that happens to mention snow is not a Christmas book. Readers looking for a seasonal read and finding something else leave a review that says so, and that review is permanent.
Write the calendar down once. Two or three dates a year, in a file, with a note of what you will do a month before each. Seasonal promotion fails almost entirely for scheduling reasons, not creative ones.
News pegs, where they are real
If your book is genuinely about something that is suddenly being discussed, saying so is legitimate and it works. A local history when the site is in the news, a memoir about an illness during an awareness month, a technical book when the thing it covers changes.
The test is whether a reader who came for the news would find the book relevant. If they would not, the attention converts to nothing and you spend credibility for it.
Price promotions
A temporary discount is a promotion in its own right, and it is the one most stores' recommendation systems notice.
It works best when there is something to read next. A discounted first book in a series pays for itself through the other books. A discounted standalone earns you the difference between the two prices on the copies you were going to sell anyway, and some genuinely new readers who may never buy from you again.
Put it back up. A price you meant to be temporary and forgot about is now just your price, and you have taught the store what your book is worth.
Do not run one every month. Readers who follow discounts learn to wait, and a book that is always on sale has no sale to run when it matters.
In the tools. A refresh is work you already have the files for: the Cover Maker re-exports every printer's wrap and the 1600 × 2560 ebook cover from the same design, and the A+ Creative builds a new set of listing images from your existing artwork. Start a book → · about the tools
Refresh the listing — it costs nothing and compounds
The page is not finished. Everything on it can be changed, at any time, for free, and every improvement applies to every visitor from then on.
Rewrite the blurb. You know things now that you did not know on release day: what readers say the book is about, which line in a review keeps getting repeated, which comparison lands. A blurb written a year in is almost always better than the one written the week you were exhausted.
Revisit categories and keywords. Where a book sits decides who is shown it. Reviews and sales since launch tell you who is actually reading it, which is often not who you aimed at.
Build or rebuild the listing images. A better set of A+ images, a new mockup, a short video — none of it requires a new book, and it changes the page for everyone who arrives afterwards.
Add the editions you skipped. A hardcover, a large print edition, an ebook you never made. Each is a new listing, a new reason to mention the book, and a new way for a reader to find it.
A cover refresh, carefully
Sometimes the original cover is simply wrong for the category — it reads as the wrong genre, it fails at thumbnail size, it looks homemade beside the books it sits next to. Changing it is one of the few interventions that reliably changes sales.
The caveat is real, though: a new cover discards whatever recognition the old one had built. Readers who half-remember seeing your book will not recognize it, existing reviews and posts show the old image, and any promotional material you made is now out of date. Change the cover when the old one is genuinely working against you, not because you are bored of it — and when you do, change every edition and every mockup on the same day.
The most reliable promotion is the next book
A second book does more for the first one than any campaign you could run for it. It creates its own traffic: a new release is shown to people, and each of those people can walk backwards into everything you have already written. A series compounds — three books sell each other, and the back of each one points at the next.
This is why the honest answer to "how do I promote my book" is often "write another one". It is not a deflection. It is the intervention with the best return, and it is the only one that gets better with time.
Aim for three or four small deliberate pushes a year — a season, a price promotion, a listing refresh, a new edition — rather than one launch and silence. None of them is large. Together they are the difference between a book that sells for a month and one that sells for a decade.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Back to: Advertising a book, honestly · More: Launch week, without the panic · A+ content, and what to put in it · Categories and keywords, without the folklore