How to Sell Romance Novels: 8 Methods to Stand Out Online
Bella Rose Emmorey
book editor, rogue behaviorist, digital marketer, writer, brand builder, plant aunt, and cheese enthusiast.
$ $ Love is universal, which gives books about love some far-reaching potential. But that doesn’t mean you’ll easily be able to sell your romance novel.
Most romance books end up online with crappy covers, an inadequate book description, and no marketing sending people there. No wonder they don’t sell!
While selling a book is not necessarily easy to do, it is quite simple with the right process.
But you can’t sell any product without first understanding what the customer wants.
Understanding What Romance Readers Care About: Your Book’s Elevator Pitch
Aside from the happily-ever-after (a non-negotiable for a true romance novel that isn't a tragedy), readers care about other details you can use to market your books.
Firstly, if you’re writing-to-market and $ planning your book$ for best-selling romance subgenres and tropes, you’re off to a great start. If not, then you’ll want to focus on using $ sellable elements$ to create your promotional material, your book description, and even which types of reviews to capture and share.
These are the sellable elements readers look for in a romance:
• Subgenre: Where else does the book fit under the general romance genre?
• Trope: What tropes are included in the book?
• Primary setting: What’s the broad setting, like a city or countryside or underground society?
• Character conflict: What gets in the way of this romance being easy?
• Spice level: How much physical intimacy is in the story?
Many readers look for something different in new books they buy, but romance readers don’t. They want more of what they love. Romance readers usually know exactly what they're looking for in their next read. By being clear about these five elements in your promotional material, you’ll capture the right audience.
• Subgenre: romantic comedy
• Trope: enemies to lovers
• Primary setting: corporate office in a city
• Character conflict: competing for the same promotion
• Spice level: slower burn, pg-13
You can summarize this as: A mildly spicy romantic comedy where enemies become lovers as they compete for the same promotion while being forced to share a single office in the corporate world of New York City.
One sentence that tells a reader exactly what they want to know. The readers who will like this book are drawn toward the inevitable conflict of enemies sharing an office and competing for the same promotion.
A big factor that gets a reader to buy a romance book is the amount of potential conflict.
A lot of potential conflict means an interesting plot and a higher level of satisfaction when it’s a happy ending. That, coupled with an emphasis on their desired tropes, makes a big difference in book sales. So much so that self-published authors are now using tropes in the title of their book on Amazon—see the image below for an example using the friends-to-lovers trope.
You’ll be able to single out each of these elements when creating promotional material, with your one-sentence summary as your guiding principle. Let’s get into that and how to use it to make marketing material.
Sell Your Romance Novels With These 8 Methods
No book is guaranteed to sell, especially if it’s rushed or just plain bad. For those reasons, we can’t move forward without recommending $ learning to thoroughly edit your book$ (or have it professionally done).
But if your book is up to par (meaning it’ll get enough good reviews to boost it on Amazon), then you can take your elevator pitch and break it down into content you’ll use to market your book.
1. Optimize your Amazon book page details (searchability)
Let’s just get to the point: there are specific things you have to nail down first if you ever want to sell romance novels. You can grow all the socials you want, but if your book’s page isn’t optimized for search, you’re fighting a losing battle.
Truth: Amazon’s algorithm works well if you know how to work with it.
This includes updating your:
• Book cover (for clicks)
• Book title
• Book description
• Amazon A+ content
• Categories & keywords
Here are some details for what to include in each.
BOOK COVER: If you don’t have the capability or eye for design needed to make one yourself, hire it out. You can even use $ pre-made romance covers$ for a cheaper price than hiring an artist. Make sure the cover matches the expectations for others in that genre and subgenre especially. For example, many romantic comedies are using illustrated covers with bright colors as opposed to real people, like in the example of bestselling ones below.
Also note that using similar-looking covers when writing stand alones will help readers pinpoint your book in listings like Emily Henry’s covers above.
BOOK TITLE: Your title will be your title, but it’s becoming more important to at least include the trope you’re using within the title, like the image shared in the elevator pitch section above. This will ensure that if someone does search for something like "enemies to lovers" in Amazon’s search bar, they’ll see your book as a contender.
You can also note the spice level. Some romance readers really do not want graphic sex scenes in their novels, while others want nothing but.
Here are some examples of how to format it:
Book Title: A Spicy Enemies to Lovers Novel
Book Title: A Heartfelt Love Triangle Romantic Comedy Series
Book Title: A High Spice Fake Dating Novel
You can see that this format is broken down in this style:
Book Title: | Spice Level | Trope/Subgenre | Novel/Series
BOOK DESCRIPTION: You can test this as much as you want to see what gets people to buy. The point of view you $ write your romance book$ in can determine how the description is written. If you use first-person POV, write your description from the perspective of the main character, like in the image below.
If you write third-person POV, you can use the standard format you might see on the back of the book (but you do NOT have to match the back-of-book blurb to your description).
AMAZON A+ CONTENT: Finally! A use for the many aesthetics you’ve saved to inspire your book! Or better yet, some custom graphics that fully encompass the vibe of your story. This $ sports romance is a good example$ , and you can see how in romance, the Amazon A+ content relates to the main love interest and what they look like.
2. Make it available on Kindle Unlimited
Look. Some romance readers aren’t comfortable with other people knowing they’re reading romance. This is especially true with the spicy variety of books with half-naked people on the cover.
For that reason, romance readers have Kindles and use Kindle Unlimited. This is a way fiction authors make the most income, especially if you have a book series. With two clicks, readers can get and read the next book.
You’ll have to opt to do this inside your author settings, and it means that your $ ebook options can only be sold$ on Amazon (exclusivity contract).
But it’s also a faster method to publish. Especially if you use a writing software like $ NovelPad$ where you can just export an EPUB file, upload to Amazon, and publish quickly.
3. Make second-person point-of-view TikToks & Reels
TikTok especially is a hotbed for romance authors. You can see examples of this in the list of good romance novel TikToks below. Basically, you’ll give your elevator pitch in a "What if you…" format, using several different scenes.
This doesn’t have to be anything fancy at all. You can just hold your phone up, hit record, and talk while looking into the camera. A pro at this one is author Kelsie Rae.
Examples of second-person POV TikToks:
4. Make scene preview TikToks & Reels
This method for selling your romance books works best if you have a pen name or just don’t want your face in the online world. We get it. With this one, all you need to do is record a video of your book pages flipping and put text from a scene on top. These little "trailers" work well to showcase your writing and pull people into fun scenes.
Here are some examples:
Bonus Tip: Use an audio compatible to the tone of your book.
5. Screenshot reviews & share on your platform
This one is easy! Take some positive reviews and share them. It doesn't really work for authors to hop on their platform and just say, "Hey! Buy my romance book, it’s so good!" but if they take someone else’s words that say the same thing, it can carry much more weight.
6. Use ads if you can—& wisely
If you have some budget to put behind your book and you’re not writing an erotica romance (since Amazon and Facebook will ban it 🙄), then ads can work well for you! You’ll have to research how to set ads up and where you want to promote them, like on Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or even BookBub.
What will help are the $ sellable elements$ you filled out from the section above. You’ll need that to choose your audience and craft who will see your ad.
7. Reach out to book reviewers or book list blogs
Websites like $ Reader Ranked$ and $ The Uncorked Librarian$ often compile lists of books or book reviews. Sometimes even an email can prompt them to check out and potentially buy your book. If they like it, it could end up on a list.
These websites can also often have sponsorship opportunities like BookBub’s model, where they charge a fee to include your book in an email round up, single review post, or list post. It’s worth a shot!
8. Write a series & more books
The more books you have, the higher the chance you’ll make more money per customer. In the business world, this is called Lifetime Value (LTV). The higher LTV you have as an author, the more money you’ll make. Instead of selling 5 books to 5 people, you can sell 15 books to 5 people just by having a trilogy.
It means you need to attract fewer new customers (less marketing effort), but you’ll make more money.
This is the single best way to make a living as a fiction author. It also means that you’ll have to front most of the work before you start to see a lot of results. And keep in mind, this definitely works with standalones as well, but you have to write $ series and standalone endings differently$ (especially for Kindle Unlimited).
Selling romance novels encompasses a whole network that works together. But most importantly, you have to know how you can get your romance novel into the eyeline of readers most likely to buy it in the first place.
Further reading:
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