Publishing faces a marketing challenge unlike other industries. Every year, thousands of new products launch, but each only has a short window to find its audience. No matter what genre you like to read, publishers get the right book to the right reader.

But what happens between an author completing a manuscript and a reader turning the pages of the finished book?

Authors who take the traditional publishing route usually have to get their manuscript picked up by a literary agent. A publishing house then needs to accept it.

Publishers work on perfecting a book before marketing it to book retailers and avid readers alike. Everyone involved, from the author to the publisher to book retailers like Waterstones, needs to market the book in a unique, engaging way, which is why publishing and marketing are so closely tied.

That journey creates three marketing challenges most industries don’t face.

  • Short launch windows: A new title’s marketing push mainly happens in the run-up to publication, then stops. Campaigns must build demand before release day.
  • Someone else owns the sale: Publishers rarely sell books directly, so their marketing sends readers to retailers they don’t control.
  • Demand can arrive years later: Some titles are sleepers and take off long after launch, like how Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us exploded on TikTok in 2021 despite being first published in 2016.

This article looks at how publishers use digital marketing to deal with each challenge.

Reading and discovering books: Print vs digital

Many readers will argue that you just can’t beat a physical book. Cracking open the spine and feeling the slightly-brushed texture of the page as you make your way through each chapter is part of the experience.

But in an age where you can access stories from your phone, laptop, and headphones, it makes sense that so many publications are going digital.

The Amazon Kindle was first released in 2007. By July 2010, Amazon.com was selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcovers in the US over a three-month period, according to figures Amazon released at the time.

The increased popularity of the Kindle changed how we read books and how publishers market them.

Print never went away, though. In Pew Research Center’s 2021 survey, 9% of US adults said they read books only in digital formats (e-books or audiobooks) and 32% read only print. Pew’s April 2026 update found print remains the only book format most Americans use.

US print unit sales rose 8.9% in 2021, according to NPD BookScan data reported by Forbes. Yet digital platforms have changed how readers discover, order, and review books, and they still thrive. 

Goodreads, for example, is an online platform that enables readers to find new releases, update friends on their current read, give reviews, and connect with authors. Users can tailor their reading preferences to be notified of popular books across their favourite genres, allowing them to find more books than ever before.

Goodreads has more than 150 million members as of 2026, which shows how well books pair with digital. With so many readers now interacting online, literary marketers have a clear cause to embrace a digital publishing strategy.

What impact does digital marketing have on publishing?

Digital marketing has changed how readers find books. Print still leads the way for how people read, but discovery now happens on Goodreads, Instagram, and BookTok, in podcasts, on Google, and increasingly in AI answers.

For marketing in publishing, the job is to connect those streams with shared pages, data, and one measure of success: books sold. Having clear pages that every channel points to provides a digital marketing plan with something solid to build on.

Four platforms for your publishing marketing strategy

Marketing in book publishing means dipping your quill into every ink pot. Marketers need to know the story and the author, understand the editing and production process, and know how sales work.

The strongest publishing campaigns start early. Marketers are involved during editing and production, helping shape the cover, title, and book description with discovery in mind, including how the book will look and read online today.

Traditional advertising like poster displays and other OOH marketing efforts in public areas with good amounts of footfall and traffic are great for promoting to those with limited online interaction. But most of the physical campaigns we see out in public are almost always backed up by a digital version.

Physical and digital advertising work best together. A poster campaign for a new release should help increase branded searches for the title and author – a clear way to measure offline marketing activity’s success.

Combining traditional offline and digital marketing for publishing books isn’t just a suggestion anymore – it’s essential. Let’s look at some of the most popular digital platforms and how they can help literary marketers with their digital publishing strategy.

Whichever channels you use, they work best on shared foundations. Use one set of title, author, and series pages for every channel, and one way to measure the effect on sales.

Instagram

Instagram suits publishing because books sell on looks, as well as the story. The visual social media platform is ideal for sharing new book covers. Publishers use it for cover reveals, pre-order countdowns, and short author videos. The Bookstagram community – readers who post styled photos of what they’re reading – does plenty of sharing naturally.

It’s also a research tool. Following other publishing houses and Bookstagram creators shows which genres, tropes, and cover styles are trending and gaining traction. Story polls let marketers test a cover or title with the audience before committing to it.

Podcasts

Penguin Random House is one of the “Big Five” publishing houses, alongside HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. Each of the Big Five uses digital platforms to market books, but Penguin, in particular, has quickly built its own channels.

Its best-known example is The Penguin Podcast, hosted by Penguin’s own team and featuring well-known authors. Listeners learn more about their favourite writers and how each book came together.

The podcast positions Penguin as a digital brand, but it also allows the company to promote its products. It clocked up 220,000 listening hours in its first year, according to a Campaign case study, showing that author access can double as product marketing.

Podcasts work for publishers because each episode keeps working long after launch. You can clip an author interview for social media, write it up as a news or blog post, and link to it from the book’s page, giving lots of life and flexibility from just one recording.

X (formerly Twitter)

Given X limits standard posts to 280 characters, you might not expect it to be a thriving digital marketing platform for publishing.

However, sometimes all it takes is a short yet colourful description to help a release travel. Your followers can re-share posts about upcoming releases from their favourite authors and comment on threads, which will in turn be seen by their own followers.

Twitter reported 217 million monetisable daily active users at the end of 2021, before it became X and stopped publishing quarterly user figures. The reach is there if your posts give fans something worth sharing.

Posts from X can also appear in Google’s search results as a carousel – a row of recent posts, each with its own link and caption – most often for branded searches. Check how often a carousel appears for your own priority queries.

Where one appears, including targeted URLs in your posts for both branded and non-branded keywords gives readers a direct route to the right page.

Engaging with book influencers

BookTok shows how much influence readers now have over what sells. According to NPD BookScan, BookTok helped authors sell 20 million print books in the US in 2021.

Colleen Hoover’s success is a clear example. She had modest sales before BookTok took off in 2020. By August 2022, she held six of the top 10 spots on NPD BookScan’s US print bestseller list, including It Ends with Us, first published in 2016. Retailers noticed too: Barnes & Noble added BookTok tables to its stores.

TikTok’s format somewhat explains the effect, as BookTok creators often talk about how a book made them feel rather than reviewing its plot or prose. This fits in well with emotionally driven fiction, helping broaden its reach.

People like Jessethereader, abookutopia, and polandbananasBOOKS paved the way for book reviews on YouTube, while the likes of abbys_library3 and pjandbooks dominate the TikTok book community, often called BookTok.

If someone with a strong social media presence talks about a book they loved on their platform, their viewers will be more inclined to pick up a copy. Publishers would benefit from collaborating with well-read influencers with an engaged audience waiting for their next book recommendation for successful digital marketing.

Treat it like any digital PR campaign:

  • Work with influencers whose audience matches the book’s.
  • Provide them with early access to the book.
  • Measure results in branded searches, pre-orders, and reviews.

SEO for book publishing

Not all readers are on social media, so search still matters.

Readers couldn’t simply visit their local bookshop as they usually would during the height of the pandemic, which meant they had to source their next read online, in some cases simply searching “best books 2020” to find something new.

Readers who don’t use social media still use traditional search engines and AI search to discover new books. That’s why we treat SEO for book publishing as a core channel, not an add-on.

Literary retailers and publishers must optimise their websites for SEO so their pages rank in Google and can be cited by AI search tools such as Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude when readers ask for their next book.

Map content to where the reader is:

  • Discovery searches like “best fantasy books” call for curated lists
  • Decision searches, such as “books like The Hunger Games”, call for comparisons
  • Purchase searches – a title plus a format or edition – need a fast product page.

Gifting moments like “book gifts for Father’s Day” cut across all three.

When a user searches for something generic like “best fantasy books”, publishing houses and bookshops battle with the list of ads at the top of Google. Amazon usually dominates these ads, and has around 70–80% of online physical book sales in the UK, according to the Booksellers Association’s evidence to a UK parliamentary committee.

But ads just give book titles and prices – some users are likely hoping for a bit of context to help them choose.

When we first wrote this piece, Pan Macmillan ranked 6th in the SERP for the term “best fantasy books”, giving readers an extensive list of the 37 best fantasy books of all time. Beyond brand recognition, informational results like this appeal to readers who aren’t ready to buy yet.

The page tells you which fantasy books are popular and gives an overview of each story to pique the reader’s interest. It even categorises the most popular books over the past two years, using targeted keywords and headers such as “The best fantasy books of 2021”.

The page performs well as it’s evergreen with a URL that contains no year. Pan Macmillan can refresh it annually without starting from scratch, retaining its strength and performance, and update the yearly headings to match how readers actually search. Any publisher with a strong backlist can use the same approach for its own genres.

Let’s consider seasonality – if a user wants to buy a gift for their well-read dad on Father’s Day, they might search “books for father’s day”. Waterstones ranked highly for that particular search term when we checked, after paid ads, giving users an extensive and well-categorised page.

Creating content for seasonal occasions is a reliable way to capture gift-led book searches, planned against search demand, not just the calendar. Pages that give everything your user is looking for, from the author, title and genre to an overview of the story, are more likely to be revisited by readers for their next purchase.

Write for the terms readers actually use, then give them something worth reading when they arrive: a reason to pick this book over the next one.

How AI search is changing book discovery

Readers now have more options to discover new books beyond traditional search and social media. Many use AI assistants for direct recommendations, asking things such as “what should I read after The Thursday Murder Club?” The answer is often a short list of titles with links to read more or buy.

To appear in AI answers, publishers and retailers can improve the odds of being cited by having pages that AI systems can understand and trust:

  • A clear page for every author and series
  • Consistent book details (title, author, format, and ISBN) across your site and retailers to ensure a strong entity
  • Structured data such as Book and Person markup
  • Genuine reviews and editorial descriptions rather than copied blurbs.

It also means looking after your branded results. When someone searches for an author or series, the page Google and AI tools pick up first should be yours, not an outdated retailer listing or a fan wiki. AI search visibility is now part of any digital publishing strategy.

How to measure digital marketing in publishing

Measuring marketing success in publishing can be tricky. A reader who hears about a book on a podcast might buy it from Amazon, Waterstones, or a local bookshop, so the publisher rarely sees that journey as most conversions happen on someone else’s site.

Publishers need insights and signals that show demand building before and after launch to help measure their marketing success and room for improvement:

  • Branded search volume for the title, author, and series: Shows whether campaigns are creating demand.
  • Pre-orders: These numbers typically count towards first-week sales when the book is released.
  • Goodreads shelvings and reviews: Indicate interest levels before a reader commits.
  • Retailer affiliate programmes: Report on the sales your links drove.

Tracked together against each campaign’s dates, these can show which channels actually move books, and what makes the next launch better than the last.

Speak with our team to discuss an effective digital marketing strategy for your publishing project and how to measure its success.