The three areas of promotion are branding, publicity, and marketing. We often just lump all three together under the more general umbrella of “promotion,” or “marketing.“ It’s also possible you’ve heard them referred to as “owned, earned, and paid media,” as I’d been taught when I started in the industry.

Any and every author needs a culmination of all three to succeed, but many make the mistake of limiting their promotional efforts to one, maybe two, most often marketing and publicity.

I’ll admit, it took me a bit to get them all straight when I got going at the beginning of my career, but it’s now the #1 topic discussed in my consultations. Luckily for my authors, that means I have a nifty little spiel to help lay it all out.

Branding (owned media)

The easiest mistake to make is thinking that a book is the end-all-be-all of an author’s brand. It’s actually the author themselves. Everything they create falls under their name. This is why we recommend author website urls should be a variant of their name and not their book title, lest they end up with half a dozen websites to keep up with and control. Within their brand are their many owned creative elements: website, book, social media accounts, newsletters, etc. An author’s brand is what their target audience invests in with their time, money, comments, and likes. It’s what they engage with and subscribe to to learn more and keep up with new projects and releases.

Building a solid brand is every author’s first and most important job (outside of writing the books that make them an author—which is still part of branding!). Marketing without a brand is like trying to organize books without a shelf. They just fall into the void and get lost in the mess of our modern world.

Publicity (earned media)

Publicity is what most people think of when they think of promotion. Back in the day, it used to be book reviews in newspapers and interviews on TV. To this day, I still have authors tell me that their dream is to be on Oprah (I’m so sorry to tell you that Oprah is no longer talking about books on TV). And yes, traditional media publicity is still a worthwhile goal for some authors, especially with the growth of podcasts and social media influencers. What gets overlooked are book reviews from consumers.

The primary goal of publicity is to add credibility to your overall author brand and its elements. That means we need other people to talk about the author and their book. Any author who has ever asked anyone in publishing what they should do to promote their book will say the answer is a universal resounding, “Ask for reviews!” When deciding between books, do you lean towards the book with five reviews on Goodreads, or the one with 500? What if there was another with 5k? We trust readers and their feedback more than we might think. Reader reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, StoryGraph, and other reader platforms and retail sites are essential for getting your book bumped up in search results and encouraging purchasing decisions.

Social media posts from influencers, podcast interviews, online articles/blog posts/reviews, and more traditional print media are secondary and tertiary goals to racking up reader reviews. It’s case by case whether or not I recommend outreach for my authors at all.

Marketing (paid media)

Now that the author has carved out space for their brand and earned social proof for it in the form of reviews, how do readers find it?

Otherwise known as advertising, marketing is visibility for your brand. Every time I hear it, the saying about how many impressions (views) are needed for sales changes. It’s typically somewhere between 5-15 impressions per sale. Advertising is a quick way to get your brand in front of as many eyeballs as possible in a short period of time. The trick is making sure to get in front of the right eyeballs; the eyeballs attached to the people most likely to buy and enjoy your book. Stay tuned for the riches in niches rant in another article.

Overlapping the Three

Without a brand to engage with, authors can’t build an audience of dedicated readers. Without publicity, that brand is one of millions and more likely to get overlooked or ignored. Without marketing, it’s unlikely anyone will be able to find your brand at all.

They also feed into each other. Brand content adds to what publicity can talk about. Publicity gives authors content to share in their branding and quotes to use in marketing. Marketing increases impulse purchases which can lead to more reviews and word-of-mouth publicity for your brand.

It’s a vicious cycle I encourage authors to take full advantage of for the best chance of success.