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).
Keep it small enough to survive a writing week. These steps are our advice, not a published rule.
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.
| Tool | Good for | Published price |
|---|---|---|
| Canva | Graphics and short video, using a free editor. | Canva Free is available to anyone. |
| BookBrush | Author-specific templates and animation tools. | Plus $149 a year; Gold $149 a year (shown as a discount from $199); Platinum $246 a year. |
| StoryOrigin | Universal 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). |
| BookFunnel | Group promos and author swaps, plus delivery of reader magnets. | First-Time Author plan $30 a year, paid annually. |
| Book Ad Pack viral hook pack | Four ready-to-film reel scripts in your book's voice plus a 30-day posting calendar. | 6 credits (1 credit = $1). |
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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:
Three hours a week is enough if the assets exist before the week starts. A schedule that authors actually keep:
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Instagram feed and Reel formats, with sizes, and why on-book beats flat-cover posts.
Read the guide →When an organic winner deserves a budget — the six-step setup and the launch-week timeline.
Read the guide →The 90-day plan social media slots into: pre-launch, launch week, and the long tail.
Read the guide →Channels, costs and the hire-or-DIY decision.
Read the guide →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.
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.