What to Post Before Your Book Is Published: A 12-Week Content Plan
EPISODE ONE HUNDRED TWENTY TWO
You know you should be talking about your book before it’s published. But what do you say when the release is still weeks away and you don’t want to sound repetitive, salesy, or like you’re forcing people to care too soon?
In this episode, Jenn will show you how to think about your pre-publication content so it builds interest naturally and gives the right readers a reason to keep paying attention long before launch day.
Links
Episode 120: "How to Identify Your Ideal Reader When No One Has Read Your Book"
Transcript
Your book is coming out in just a few months.
The panic might be setting in and now you're realizing, okay, I know I'm supposed to be marketing this book before it comes out...but what am I supposed to talk about for the next twelve weeks?
Because you can't keep posting, “My book is coming soon.”
You don't want people to get tired of hearing about it before it's even released.
And depending on where you are in the publishing process, you might not have a preorder link yet. You might not have a finished cover. You may still be making changes to the book.
So what do you post?
That's what I want to walk you through today.
And I want to make this easier than I think a lot of book marketing advice makes it.
You do not need to sit down and come up with twelve weeks of completely different and completely unique content.
You need to understand what your content is supposed to do during those twelve weeks.
I’m Jenn Hanson-dePaula, and I’ve spent nearly 20 years helping fiction and nonfiction authors simplify their marketing, connect with readers, and sell more books.
So let me show you how I would think about these twelve weeks before your book releases.
Before You Start Planning Posts
Before we even get into week one, I want you to do something that will make this whole process much easier.
Do not start with a blank content calendar.
Because I know what happens.
You look at twelve weeks and suddenly you're doing math.
You’re thinking, “Okay, if I post three times a week, that's 36 posts. And if I'm also doing Stories, that's even more posts. Do I need to do something different for TikTok?” And you slowly spiral.
Now you've gone from, “I need to market my book,” to, “Apparently I need to become a full-time content creator.”
Breathe easy because that's not what we're doing here.
Before you think about what to post, think about the person you're trying to connect with.
Who is this book for? I have a full episode on how to identify your ideal reader that I’ll link to in the description for this episode, but start simple.
It’s not broad like “women who like romance” or “people interested in leadership.”
Simply picture one person.
What are they looking for when they pick up a book like yours?
If you write fiction, what do they want to feel?
What kinds of characters do they love? What tropes do they immediately pay attention to?
If you write nonfiction, what is going on in their life right now?
What are they frustrated by?
What are they trying to figure out?
What would make them stop scrolling and think, “Okay, this is exactly what I've been dealing with”?
Once you know that, I want you to choose three to five topics you can talk about again and again.
For fiction, those might be themes, tropes, character dynamics, emotional experiences, or similar kinds of books or stories your readers already love.
For nonfiction, they might be the problems your reader is dealing with, common questions, misconceptions, ideas from the book, or the changes they're trying to make.
Those are going to become the backbone of your content.
And this is important to do because you are not going to spend twelve weeks trying to invent something new every time you sit down to post.
Weeks 1 Through 3: Help the Right People Find You
For the first 3 weeks, I want you to focus on discovery.
How are people who would love this book going to find you in the first place?
And this is where I see authors immediately jump too far ahead.
They start posting the book cover, start talking about the release date, they start counting down to the release.
And there's nothing wrong with any of those things.
But if I don't know you yet, and I've never heard of your book, the fact that your book comes out in 78 days probably does not mean very much to me.
So instead, start with what your reader is already interested in.
Let's say you're writing a second-chance romance.
You don't have to begin with, “My second-chance romance comes out in November.”
You could talk about why second-chance romances are so satisfying. You could ask whether they prefer second chance or enemies-to-lovers. Maybe you could recommend a few books that you've loved. You could talk about the kind of emotional tension that makes those stories work.
That will catch the eye and grab the attention of someone who loves that kind of book because they identify with what you’re talking about. They see themselves in those posts. They have connected with you.
And then, naturally, they're going to start realizing, “Oh, this person writes the kind of books I like.”
That is a much easier and more natural introduction than asking them to pay attention to your book before they even know what it’s about.
The same idea works for nonfiction.
Let's say you've written a leadership book.
Instead of spending the first three weeks talking about the book, talk about the situations or symptoms your reader is already dealing with.
Maybe they're a new manager and they're realizing that being good at their job did not automatically prepare them to lead a team.
Maybe they're struggling with a difficult employee, or that nobody on the team is communicating well.
Maybe they're asking themselves, “Why does this feel so much harder than I thought it would?”
Talk about that. Answer one small question. Share something you've noticed or experienced yourself. Help them understand something they didn't understand before.
You're giving the right people a reason to find you before you start talking to them about your book.
Weeks 4 Through 8: Start Bringing Them Closer
As we work our way into weeks 4 through 8, people are starting to understand what you talk about.
Some of them are following you.
Maybe they're engaging with your content or leaving comments.
This is where I would start bringing your book into the conversation more often.
Not constantly.
But more.
You can share why you wrote it, talk about one of the ideas or themes, share some of the process.You can introduce what the reader is going to find in the book.
And this is where I think authors get stuck because they think, “How many different ways can I possibly describe one book?”
Quite a few, actually.
Think about your book from different angles.
If you're a fiction author, one day you might talk about a relationship in the story.
Another day you might talk about one of the tropes or about the emotional experience.Maybe you talk about the setting or why you wanted to write a particular character.
You're still talking about the same book. You're just coming at it from different angles.
If you write nonfiction, maybe one post talks about a problem and another about why that problem keeps happening. You could share a small piece of your approach. You could address something people commonly misunderstand. And another post could be why you felt compelled to write this book.
Do you see how this works?
You're breaking it up and giving people more context over time.
They're starting to understand not only what the book is about, but why they might be interested.
Weeks 9 Through 12: Now You Can Build More Anticipation
When you get into weeks 9 through 12, this is where I want your book becoming more visible.
Now people should be hearing more about it.
This is where your cover can come in, the title, excerpts, specific hooks, early reviews or reactions, a preorder link if preorders are available.
And this is also where you can get much more direct about who the book is for.
Instead of simply talking about second-chance romance in general, now you can say, “If you love complicated second-chance romances where two people have a lot of history to work through, this is the kind of story I've written.”
If you're writing nonfiction, you might say, “If you've been trying to solve this particular problem and you keep getting stuck, this is exactly what my book is going to help you work through.”
At this point, promotion feels different because people have context.
They've heard you talk about these things before.
They understand what the book is about.
They may have been following along for six or eight weeks.
So when you finally say, “The book is available for preorder,” you're not introducing yourself and asking for a sale in the same breath.
They already know why they're interested.
And that's the whole point of starting before your launch.
You Do Not Need 84 Different Ideas
You might be hearing all of this and thinking, “Dang, this sounds like a lot of content!” I want to make sure you don't leave with that impression.
You are not supposed to come up with something new every day for twelve weeks. You don't have to do that to yourself.
Do this instead: go back to those three to five core topics we talked about at the beginning of this video. And here’s what you’re going to do: you're going to reuse them.
You're just going to change it up a little bit depending on where you are in the twelve weeks.
Let's go back to that second-chance romance example.
Early on, you could post about why second-chance romances are so appealing.
A few weeks later, you could talk about why you wanted to explore that kind of relationship in your own story.
And closer to publication, you can connect it directly to the book and say, “If second-chance romance is one of your favorite tropes, here's the next book to add to your list.”
Same topic.
But you're doing something different with it each time.
For nonfiction, maybe one of your core topics is a mistake your reader keeps making.
Early on, you explain the mistake.
Later, you talk about why people make that mistake.
And then closer to publication, you connect it back to the book and explain that this is one of the things you help them work through.
You don't need endless ideas.
You need enough clarity about your reader that you can keep talking about what is important to them.
Another way you can reuse content is to look at your analytics and see which of your posts from the last few weeks got engagement, follows, or profile views. You can take those posts and reuse them. If you shared it as a video the first time, turn it into a carousel. Or if you used it as a carousel, turn it into a video.
Recycling what you know is already working is one of the smartest moves you can make when it comes to creating content. And it saves you a ton of time.
That is how you work smarter and not harder.
What If You Don't Have 12 Weeks?
And if you're listening to this and thinking, “Well, my book comes out in three weeks, so apparently I've completely messed this up,” nope, you haven't.
You can absolutely use the same process we talked about, but just shorten the timeline.
You always want to start by sharing content that helps the right people recognize that you're talking about something they are interested in.
Then start bringing them closer to the book and become more direct about what the book is and how they can get it.
Whatever you do, don’t panic and spend the next three weeks posting the cover over and over again because you feel like you have to make up for lost time or that that will help sell the book.
You can't compress in relationship-building by simply promoting harder.
You can still make very smart use of the time you have. And remember, your book has a long life ahead of it - you don’t have to cram all of your promotions around the release day. Spread it out after the release to keep momentum flowing.
The Simple Way to Think About the 12 Weeks
So when you're planning those twelve weeks, I want you to think about it this way.
At the beginning, your job is to help the right readers find you.
Then your job is to help them understand what you're creating and why they might be interested.
And as you get closer to publication, you can be much more direct about the book and what you want them to do next.
That's the progression.
And once you understand that, planning content becomes much easier because you're not just asking, “What should I post today?”
You're asking “What do readers need to know about my book to make them excited to read it?” That’s a much better question.
If you are in this pre-publication stage and you want the complete plan for what to build before your book comes out, that's exactly why I created the New Author Marketing Playbook.
It's specifically for authors who are still writing, revising, editing, or getting ready to publish and know they should be marketing now, but aren't sure what to do or what order to do it in.
It walks you through identifying your ideal reader, creating your messaging, figuring out what to talk about, building your email list, and following a week-by-week plan so you're not trying to piece all of this together on your own.
I'll put the link to the New Author Marketing Playbook in the description for this episode.
But whether you use the Playbook or build this yourself, remember this.
You don't need to spend three months trying to convince strangers to buy your book.
Spend that time helping the right people find you, getting to know them, and giving them a reason to stay connected.
Then when your book is ready, you're not starting the conversation on launch day. You're continuing one that's already been happening, and can continue well after the release.
I’ll see you in the next episode.