8 Ways to Promote a Book With Gleam

If you're an author then you know how challenging it can be to reach out to a new audience and spread awareness about your book.

We know that promoting a book can eat up countless valuable writing hours, so we're here to help reduce the burden of promotion so you can spend more time focusing on what matters most: writing.

Gleam has a suite of apps which can help you promote your book and grow your following in highly effective and less time-consuming ways. In this guide we'll show you exactly how you can use Gleam's apps to promote your book and reach out to new audiences.

These promotional strategies are designed to work for writers of any level, so whether you're an indie writer or a well-established author we'll have something for you.

In this guide we will cover:

• 1. Run a Giveaway
• 2. Run a Secret Code Competition
• 3. Cross-Sell Other Books
• 4. Offer a Pre-Order Discount on Your Landing Page
• 5. Drive Sign-ups for Your Book Tour
• 6. Run a Preorder Campaign
• 7. Run a Book Signing Event
• 8. Incentivise Sales with Rewards

At Gleam, we love using giveaways to drive growth, and we’ve seen many customers successfully grow their audience with contest marketing. You can do the same to expand your following, engage users, and ultimately drive sales, all at an affordable cost.

With Gleam's Competitions app, you can encourage users to sign up for your mailing list, interact with your social media pages, leave book reviews, follow you on Goodreads, visit your book’s landing page, or even read an excerpt.

If you want to share excerpts, simply set up a dedicated website and link to it using Gleam’s Visit Action.

Making your book the prize guarantees a highly targeted audience of people who want to read your work. If you’d like to mix it up, consider offering prizes like e-readers, writing accessories, or gift cards to attract a wider pool of readers. It’s a great way to introduce new audiences to your writing and build lasting connections.

If you have existing publications, create a scavenger hunt by prompting readers for secret codes and keywords from a previous book.

This is a fun way to get readers to pick up an old book again and to re-discover what they like about your writing.

Have a look at our template to see what it could look like:

If you've written other books in the past then using Coupons to offer a discount on your latest writing can be an outstanding way to incentivise the purchase of previous books, or vice versa.

This is particularly effective if you're writing a series of books, as users who are interested in one iteration are highly likely to be interested in the whole series.

To overcome hesitation from new readers, you should try offering a larger discount when bundling two or more books.

The first customers are always the hardest to find, but once people start enjoying your book, word-of-mouth will take over, reducing your reliance on discounts in the long term.

If you have a website, Gleam's Capture app can help you collect email addresses from your readers and significantly grow your mailing list.

Capture allows you to define custom rules so you can target the right audience with the right pitch.

You can use Capture to offer your readers an incentive to sign up to your mailing list, and buy a copy of your book.

We recommend showing an offer like this to new visitors on your site, it is a great way to entice a purchase and encourage email signups.

Are you on a book tour? Using our custom rules, you can create highly targeted messages for your website visitors. For example, if you're touring Australia on specific dates, you can set up a Capture to run months before the actual tour so Australian users who visit your website will know exactly where you're going, and when you'll be there.

If you're publishing a book soon, a pre-order campaign can be a great way to gain early traction and generate buzz for your book before it's even released. Opt to run the campaign 3–6 months before the book's release date to start generating leads, and make some pre-sales.

So how do you run a pre-order campaign for your book?

Gleam Competitions can easily help you manage email collection, encourage audience-driven promotion and generate a lot of interest before the official launch.

There are a few different ways you can run a pre-order campaign. You can either incentivise pre-order sales with Rewards, or you can run a giveaway to drive social actions.

A book signing or author reading event is a great way to connect with your audience and build lasting relationships. Partner with a local bookstore or café to host your event and use it as an opportunity to collect email signups and gain followers.

Plus, pairing your event with a giveaway can help attract more attendees.

Use Gleam’s Event Mode to run a live giveaway during the event. This allows you to collect multiple entries on the same device so you can easily get your attendees to enter from a tablet you provide. This will save a tonne of time.

Here’s how to make your event stand out:

• Offer Exclusive Prizes: Signed copies, book bundles, or themed gift sets work well.
• Engage Your Audience: Combine the event with related activities, like a workshop or Q&A session, to add value and make it more memorable and fun.
• Simplify Entries: Limit entry actions to email signups or basic social interactions to keep the process quick and easy.

Using Gleam's Rewards app you can easily set up a campaign which will provide users with an instant reward for buying a copy of your book. This is a fantastic way to capture attention and give your audience a little extra motivation to make a purchase.

You can easily set up your own Rewards campaign to incentivise sales using Gleam's Custom Actions.

When setting up your campaign, think about what rewards will best entice your audience. Here are some ideas:

• Bonus content such as planning documents, mood boards, drafts or unpublished writing.
• A collection of short stories that you've written.
• A second copy of the book to give to a friend.
• A copy of another book you've written.
• Reading accessories such as book lights, bookmarks or scented candles.

Promoting your book effectively means connecting with potential readers wherever they already spend time, on social media, in newsletters, and across your author platforms.

With Gleam, you can run campaigns that bring all of those channels together, helping you stay visible and build lasting relationships with your audience.

Whether you’re an Amazon author trying to boost discoverability or one of many published authors looking to strengthen your online presence, Gleam gives you the tools to drive awareness and increase book sales without taking time away from writing.

Each app in Gleam’s suite supports a key part of book marketing:

• Competitions help attract new fans and reward existing ones.
• Rewards motivate readers to buy your book or share it with friends.
• Captures keep your mailing list growing so you can promote future releases.

Once your campaign ends, don’t stop there. Follow up with engaging content, excerpts, writing updates, or behind-the-scenes posts, to keep those new readers invested.

Every interaction helps turn a curious visitor into a loyal fan.