Happy Thursday Critters! This week we have a guest post by Desiree Villena, a writer with Reedsy, who’s sharing some tips with us about marketing your picture book as a first-time author. I’m so excited to have Desiree with us today and we hope to share more posts like this in the future along with our stellar line-up of author interviews. Critter Lit’s mission is to help give authors and illustrators a platform to share their work. We hope you find the information we post, share, and promote useful on your creative journey.
5 Tips to Market Your Picture Book as a First-Time Author
By Desiree Villena
If this is your first time publishing a picture book, you’ve got an exciting journey ahead of you! The playful world of children’s publishing will make marketing your book one of the most joyous tasks you can find in the literary industry. It’s still important and serious work, of course — but you can also benefit from that freedom to be a little extra creative and silly! With that in mind, here are five tips to market your first picture book both effectively and enjoyably.
1. Craft a fun author bio
As a children’s book author — and a picture book author at that — you can afford to be a little less formal than you’d usually be in a professional context. One place where this informality might manifest is your author bio, which can be as absurd and nonsensical as you like.
Take, for example, the beloved Greek children’s author Eugene Trivizas: a criminology professor who completely eliminates his real life from his bio in favor of a more whimsical, child-friendly persona. “Eugene Trivizas is an explorer, inventor and a juggler of runny eggs,” his bio reads. “Eugene lives on the Island of Fireworks together with his Parrot, Cynthia, his White Elephant, Pukipon, Lilly, his Spotted Leopard, the Invisible Horace, the Invisible Kangaroo and many other friends and acquaintances.”
If you’re publishing your picture book traditionally, you probably put together an author bio when you were looking for a literary agent. However, the bio that will appear on your website can be more playful and intriguing than that, and more in line with the eccentricity of many pictre books!
That said, as a first-time author, it’s understandable that you may not want to go all the way with a completely wacky author bio — and you might be inclined to keep it shorter, too. Still, you can introduce an element of playfulness at the end of a completely serious bio. Anything that makes your reader smile will do the trick!
As a concrete example, pets are always a safe bet. If your bio ends with, “She lives in Ontario with her cat, Estelle,” you could add a detail about that pet, like “She lives in Ontario with her cat, Estelle, whom she deeply admires for her ability to communicate with household objects.” This sort of bio may be especially effective if your picture book is related to animals, like Sarah Kurpiel’s Lone Wolf. But animals aren’t the only way to make a bio fun; check out Abi Kushman’s bio at the bottom of this interview with Critter Lit for another great example.
2. Keep your design materials consistent
To ensure that your author brand is recognizable, you should aim to keep all design materials within a consistent aesthetic. What I mean by this is that the visual impression conveyed by the design of your book cover should not be at odds with the appearance of your website, or any other promotional materials (like social media image posts).
In fact, these visual elements should not just avoid clashing messages; they should be perfectly synchronized. This is a key concept of branding, which involves establishing a clear visual identity. Such an identity includes things like your color scheme, typography, or any logo-style shape by which you might market a series of picture books.
Visual consistency helps make your marketing campaign more memorable and holds your online presence together. So as you embark on this journey, talk to your illustrator/designer and agree to some rules that will guide the visual side of your marketing strategy.
3. Go out and meet your readers
Possibly the most exciting part of a marketing campaign for both yourself and your young readers is going out and meeting each other! If your book is being published traditionally, talk to your publicist about attending book festivals, visiting schools, and doing readings in libraries and bookstores. If you’re self-publishing, reach out to the people organizing these things yourself, and simply state your interest in (and enthusiasm for) being part of their future events!
You can even suggest some activities yourself to keep your requests from being too broad and vague. For example, say you’re happy to visit their school and hold a writing or illustration workshop, followed by a short reading of your picture book. And it should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: whatever sort of event you end up suggesting, always make sure to arrive armed with copies of your book to sell!
The pandemic may make it tough to implement this part of your marketing plan at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to reach your target market. Plenty of bookshops are holding their regular events online, so don’t hesitate to get in touch and highlight that you’d still be happy to be part of an online event. It’s less than ideal, but better than nothing!
4. Use social media to your advantage
While we’re on the subject of online promotion, social media will be enormously helpful to you during this difficult COVID-19 period. If you’re successful in holding some online events, as mentioned above, you’ll hopefully see flurries of interest on your social media pages. Stay active on these pages by sharing both promotional and fun, helpful materials (such as book recs for parents who are struggling to keep children occupied at home).
Again, if you have a publishing deal, your publisher’s marketing team will be able to help with this; otherwise, be creative! Can you put together any educational activities using some of the illustrations from your book? Or perhaps you can ask your illustrator for outline-only drawings of your characters, to supply to young children as a coloring exercise? Anything that will get your audience to interact with you digitally is a hugely positive addition to a marketing campaign conducted from home!
If you have a mailing list (as you should), make sure to repeatedly provide sign-up links on your social media pages. A mailing list is an incredibly valuable tool, even for picture book authors — your young readers may not have email yet, but their parents do! Use your mailing list to keep up a friendly stream of communication and resources for these parents (and teachers and librarians and more), and always notify them when you have a new book coming out.
5. Give author interviews
On the note of promotional activities you can safely conduct from home, one of the most fun ways to improve your digital networking is to give author interviews — just like the interviews on Critter Lit’s website! Aside from children and their family members, another part of your audience is going to be fellow authors, illustrators, and publishing professionals who love picture books and will be keeping up-to-date with new releases.
These readers will be curious to hear where you find inspiration, how you arrived at your picture book idea, and how your overall creative process works. Remember: interviews are a crucial aspect of belonging to a professional literary community in which authors help one another promote their books. And these interview articles will definitely be something to share on those social media accounts we discussed!
I hope these tips are helpful to you and that they inspire you to create (or expand upon) an amazing marketing plan of your own. As a first-time author, it’s okay if you make some mistakes — what you don’t want to do is be too afraid to be creative, and end up launching your book with a fizzle rather than a bang. Be brave, and best of luck!
Huge thank you Desiree for stopping by Critter Lit today and sharing some wonderful tips with us!
DESIREE VILLENA is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. She's very passionate about helping authors reach their dreams, and enjoys reading and writing short stories in her spare time. Desiree hasn't yet written a children's book of her own, but maybe someday!