Promote a Book on Social Media: A Weekly Plan | Book Ad Pack
How to promote a book on social media

How to promote a book on social media: one platform, one link.

To promote a book on social media, pick one platform where your readers already are, repeat a few post types, and send every post to one link. Canva Free has graphics tools, and Book Ad Pack's viral hook pack gives you four ready-to-film reel scripts in your book's voice plus a 30-day posting calendar for 6 credits ($6).

The plan

How do you promote a book on social media?

Keep it small enough to survive a writing week. These steps are our advice, not a published rule.

Pick one platform
Choose the one where readers of your genre already post about books. Add a second only after you have kept the first going for a couple of months.
Choose a few post types you can repeat
For example: a line from the book, a character or trope post, a behind-the-scenes post, a reader reaction, and a launch or deal post.
Make the graphics
Canva Free is available to anyone. BookBrush's Plus plan, $149 a year, lists animation tools and 3.5K+ author-specific templates.
Plan the week
Set a rhythm you can keep up while you write. Book Ad Pack's viral hook pack includes a 30-day posting calendar and four ready-to-film reel scripts for 6 credits.
Send every post to one link
Use a single destination, such as a retailer link or your newsletter signup, so you can see what each post sends. StoryOrigin lists universal links, and BookFunnel lists group promos and author swaps, for reaching readers beyond social media.

How do you know which posts work?

Send each post type to a link you can count, such as a retailer link or a newsletter signup page, and compare the results after a month.

Prices and features as published on Canva pricing, BookBrush pricing, Book Ad Pack pricing, StoryOrigin pricing and BookFunnel pricing, read on 9 October 2026.

Tools

What tools do authors use to promote a book?

ToolGood forPublished price
CanvaGraphics and short video, using a free editor.Canva Free is available to anyone.
BookBrushAuthor-specific templates and animation tools.Plus $149 a year; Gold $149 a year (shown as a discount from $199); Platinum $246 a year.
StoryOriginUniversal book links, newsletter swaps and group promos.Basic plan free (universal retail links, word count goals). Standard $10 a month or $100 a year (group promos, newsletter swaps).
BookFunnelGroup promos and author swaps, plus delivery of reader magnets.First-Time Author plan $30 a year, paid annually.
Book Ad Pack viral hook packFour ready-to-film reel scripts in your book's voice plus a 30-day posting calendar.6 credits (1 credit = $1).
Step one

Pick one platform. Then earn the second.

Authors burn out by trying to be everywhere. Each platform rewards a different habit, so start where your genre's readers gather and where you can sustain the format for six months:

TikTok (BookTok)

Short vertical video, 9:16, 1080 × 1920. The discovery engine for romance, fantasy, thriller and YA — the algorithm shows new accounts to strangers, which no other platform does as generously. Best for: fiction with a strong hook or trope. Cost: you need to be on camera, or to have video of your book that isn't a static cover.

Instagram (Bookstagram + Reels)

Reels are 9:16; feed posts do best at 4:5 (1080 × 1350). Slower discovery than TikTok, but a warmer community, and the place readers go to check you're real. Best for: building a recognisable author brand and a launch-day audience. Bookstagram templates cover the feed formats.

Facebook groups & your page

Organic reach on a page is near zero, but reader groups (genre-specific, "what to read next") are still where 35+ readers talk books. Best for: romance, cozy mystery, women's fiction, Christian fiction. Rule: read the group's promo rules before you post; most allow self-promo only on set days.

Pinterest & YouTube

Both are search engines more than social feeds: a pin (2:3, 1000 × 1500) or a video can keep sending traffic for a year. Pinterest suits aesthetics-driven genres (fantasy, historical, romance mood boards); YouTube suits non-fiction and author-craft channels. Slow start, long tail.

Whatever you pick, your bio carries exactly one link — the book's Amazon page, your reader-magnet signup, or a link page that leads with the newest book. Every post points back to that one place.

Step two

The five post types that sell books.

"Buy my book" posts don't work and feel bad to write. These five do, and together they give you a month of content from a single manuscript:

1. The trope / hook cardA still or 5-second clip with the book's tropes or one-line hook over a scene image. "Enemies to lovers. One bed. Her brother's best friend." Readers search by trope; this is how they find you.
2. The scene teaserA 15–30 second video of a moment from the book — the meet, the reveal, the first kiss, the body in the library — with a line of dialogue on screen. This is the post type that converts; it's the book selling itself.
3. The on-book imageYour cover placed in the world of the story — on a café table, a nightstand, a windowsill in the rain — not a flat JPEG. It's the social version of a bookshop display and it performs far better than the cover alone.
4. The character introductionOne character, one image, three lines: who they are, what they want, what's in the way. Series authors get one of these per character per book. Readers fall for characters before they buy books.
5. The reader-facing author postYou, the writing desk, the edit you cried over, the playlist. Not every post — roughly one in five — but it's what turns a viewer into a follower who buys the next book too.
On-book social post example — a romance paperback staged in a real scene from the story Social media book promotion image — cover placed in a story setting at feed size Example of an on-book image used to promote a book on Instagram
Post type 3 in practice: on-book images generated from one of our own pen-name manuscripts. The cover is the real cover; the setting comes from the book.
Step three

A week that fits around writing.

Three hours a week is enough if the assets exist before the week starts. A schedule that authors actually keep:

1

Sunday: batch (90 min)

Make or pull the week's five posts from your asset folder: one hook card, two scene teasers, one on-book image, one author post. Write captions in one sitting. Schedule with the platform's own scheduler (Meta Business Suite and TikTok both have one, free).

2

Mon–Fri: post + reply (15 min/day)

One post goes out each weekday, ideally the same hour. The 15 minutes is for replying to every comment within the first hour — early replies are what the algorithms reward, not hashtags.

3

Saturday: look at the numbers (15 min)

Which post got saved and shared (not just liked)? Make two more like it next week. Which got nothing? Drop the format for a month. Saves and shares predict sales; likes don't.

Hashtags: three to five specific ones (#enemiestolovers, #darkromancebooks, #cozymystery) beat thirty generic ones. Launch weeks: double the cadence for seven days, then return to normal — sustained beats spiky. Paid boost: once a post has organically proven itself, putting a small budget behind it is the cheapest Facebook/Instagram ad you'll ever run.

The honest landscape

Tools authors actually use.

Canva

The default for DIY graphics; free tier is generous and Pro adds brand kits and background removal. Best for hook cards and quote graphics. The limit: it's a blank canvas — you still need scene images, and most authors end up with stock photos that could belong to any book.

BookBrush

Built for authors specifically: 3D cover mockups, box sets, animated templates, and an Instagram-friendly library. Strong on mockups and templates; the content inside them is still yours to supply. See BookBrush alternatives for a fair comparison.

BookBub, BookFunnel & newsletter swaps

Not social media, but where social traffic should land. A free sample on BookFunnel plus a newsletter capture turns a TikTok viewer into a reader you can reach again. BookBub Featured Deals are a paid promo, not a social channel.

Book Ad Pack

We read the manuscript and generate the raw material for post types 1–4 — scene video, on-book images, character art, and captions from real scenes — so the Sunday batch is picking from a folder, not starting from a blank canvas. You post it from your own accounts; we don't run your social or your ads.

Fair questions

Social media for authors, asked often.

How do you promote a book on social media?

Pick one platform where readers of your genre already post about books, repeat a small set of post types, and send every post to one link so you can see what works. Canva Free has tools for the graphics, and Book Ad Pack's viral hook pack gives you four reel scripts and a 30-day posting calendar for 6 credits.

Which social media platform is best for promoting a book?

No platform is best for every author. Start with the one where readers of your genre already talk about books, and keep it up for a couple of months before you add another.

What should an author post?

A few repeatable post types are a simple way to start: a line from the book, a character or trope post, a behind-the-scenes post, a reader reaction, and a launch or deal post. This is our advice rather than a published rule.

Do I need to pay for tools to promote a book?

Not necessarily. Canva Free is available to anyone. Paid options such as BookBrush Plus, at $149 a year, add author-specific templates and animation tools.

What is in the Book Ad Pack viral hook pack?

Four ready-to-film reel scripts in your book's voice plus a 30-day posting calendar, for 6 credits, where 1 credit is $1.

How do I know which posts work?

Send each post type to a link you can count, such as a retailer link or a newsletter signup page, and compare the results after a month.

Keep reading

More on selling your book.

Where our numbers come from

Counted, not claimed.

Why this comes from real data

Book Ad Pack is not a template library. Its creative is generated from your manuscript (or your book’s listing where none is supplied), and its ad copy is scored against reader-demand data that we build and count ourselves. The database behind it holds 5,338 reader personas (profiles built from real Goodreads reviews and Reddit posts) and 975,962 dated Amazon snapshots of sales rank, chart position or price. The pipeline has delivered 10 paid customer orders (test, complimentary and free-credit orders are not counted), including 52 ad creatives and 17 videos. Counts are live table counts taken 9 October 2026; each one is re-counted daily, so a figure can fall when a corpus is rebuilt. Compared with a Medium post, which is one writer’s view: the numbers above are table counts from our own database. See how we compare with Canva, Placeit and BookBrush.

Your book next

A month of posts from your manuscript.

Upload the manuscript or paste your Amazon link — we read the actual book, then show you the scene video, on-book images and captions it can become.