New authors often make mistakes when going about promoting their books for the first time. Fortunately, most book marketing mistakes can be avoided with proper research beforehand and an effective marketing plan in place.

Want to know what to avoid? Here are some common book marketing mistakes:

Not being aware of who you’re audience is.

You may have your ideal reader in mind when writing your book, but you need to be absolutely sure that they are who be interested the most from your book. Interest is a huge component is sales, remember. (For example: you’re not going to want to promote a business book at teenagers. Unless it’s a book about how teenagers can start their own business that is.)

Solely focusing your marketing plans on one tactic.

Don’t get us wrong, if you get the bulk of your sales through speaking engagements, feel free to devote the bulk of your time to strengthening your presence as a speaker and getting booked for more events. However, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

Be sure you have some other way of getting attention on your book. If said illustrious speaking career happened to be going through a dry spell, do you want your book sales to dry up along with it because you didn’t have the foresight to plan other promotional activities for your book. You want to have a good balance.

You think social media success will immediately result in sales.

This one is a bit of a bitter pill to swallow because some authors think that just because they have forty thousand followers, that will automatically result in forty thousand sales. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

Social media is simply a tool to bolster your reach and bring you in front of many eyes with much less effort. However, it’s hard to convert those views, likes, and comments into sales. You have a better chance of that conversion, sure, but it is not guaranteed.

Remember: these people are following you because they find that something you are offering is useful to them. You do not want to turn them off by trying to hard sell them into buying your book.

Don’t know where to start with using your social media to promote your book? Check out our article here on what goals you should have in mind when using your social media account.

Read more tips about avoiding book marketing mistakes at the Author Marketing Services’ blog.