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.