What comes to your mind when it comes to how to promote books online?

If you’re like most authors, you probably find that using paid ads is the way to go.

Yes, it costs you money, for sure.

But the return on investment tends to be way more than the amount of money you spend on the ads, provided that you know how to do paid ads properly, though.

And not to mention, the treasure trove of data that comes with it.

Rinse and repeat based on the data you’ve accumulated, and you no longer have to worry about releasing your book into the void ever again.

Not going to lie, paid ads can be an amazing marketing tool if you have the budget for them.

But if you don’t, then what about using your book’s sample chapters to market the hell out of your book?

Yes, I admit it’s a strange strategy indeed, since no one was talking about it.

Well, not anymore now that I’m talking to you about it right now.

Why sample chapter?

Some of you must be wondering, why the sample chapter?

Is promoting the sample chapter just as effective as the paid ads?

And why would we need to do that when Amazon will generate the sample chapters for you when your book is available for sale on Amazon?

Aren’t we only wasting our time and effort when Amazon already does the heavy-lifting for us?

Well, you’re not wrong about that.

You don’t have to worry about generating the sample chapter on your own when Amazon can do that for you automatically.

But here’s the thing about the sample chapters generated on Amazon: you don’t have much control over how much Amazon will generate your book’s sample chapters.

For all we know, the sample chapter generated may have been too little to convince your target readers to buy your book.

If you want the sample chapters to provide enough interest to get people to buy your book, then your best bet is to generate your own sample chapters.

Of course, you can’t do that with the sample chapters generated on Amazon and other retailers.

But you can do that if you intend to post your sample chapters elsewhere.

The sample chapter promotion strategy that I used in the past

There are many ways to post your sample chapters online to promote your books.

One of them is to use Wattpad to post your sample chapters online.

What makes Wattpad a perfect place to post your book’s sample chapters is that it does allow you to do just that, as long as you make it clear that it’s a sample chapter.

This is what I do when I first publish my very first novel, The Diary of Modern Cinderella.

What I did was to post the first few chapters on Wattpad and have a link where they can buy the book at the end of the sample chapter.

I also posted the link on the book’s description page besides the end of the sample chapters.

Does this approach work?

Well, it did result in one person buying the book right away after reading the sample chapter on Wattpad.

But that was the only time I made a sale with this approach.

The thing about Wattpad is that anything you post on Wattpad will end up in a slush pile when there is no engagement with your story or page in general.

Rather than trying to appease the Wattpad god, you may as well put your book marketing effort elsewhere.

And then there was iAuthor.

Don’t bother trying to look for the website since the URL will lead you to the Internet black hole.

Unlike Wattpad, the website was meant for you to post your sample chapters.

But I didn’t get any sales from it, though, not even one.

I can’t say for sure what went wrong, but I’m guessing it has a lot to do with the website’s lack of traffic.

The best way to promote books online using your book’s sample chapters

If posting on Wattpad will only lead your sample chapters to end up in a slush pile, and a website like iAuthor doesn’t do much, then what else can you use to promote your sample chapter?

Well, guess what?

You can use your own website to promote your sample chapter, of course.

There are two ways to go about it: you can post the sample chapter like you would for a blog post.

Or you can create a dedicated page with all of your book sample chapters in it and get people to join your email list if they want to download your sample chapters.

Between the two options, I suggest the latter.

Not only do you get to build your email list.

But you have all your sample chapters in one place, as opposed to all over your website if you choose to post your sample chapter as a blog post.

Keep in mind that not everybody will join your email list just to download the sample chapter.

But if they do, you can bet that they’re interested in your book and may buy your book if they like it enough.

You can use this option as well to promote your book’s sample chapters

Good news for you if you use Payhip to sell direct since Payhip allows you to upload your own sample chapter.

But even with that, I still recommend that you use the list-building approach to promote your sample chapters.

The reason for that is simple – the way the sample chapters work on Payhip is the same as Amazon.

People will download your sample chapter only for you to never see them ever again, unless they decide to buy the book from you.

Until then, you have no way to contact them.

Using your sample chapters as a lead magnet allows you to remain in contact with them, even if they’ve downloaded your sample chapters many moons ago.

You can also notify them when you have a new book coming out.

They can download the sample chapter from the same download page after that.

The key here is the follow-up after they download the sample chapter, which is the missing part if you rely on the sample chapters you upload on Payhip.

Does this approach even work?

We already know that posting the sample chapter on Wattpad and the now-defunct iAuthor website doesn’t work as we had hoped.

But what about turning the sample chapter into a lead magnet to build the email list?

Does this approach work this time around?

To be honest, I don’t know the answer to that question since I’ve just implemented this approach on my fiction author website.

So, I can’t say much other than believing this approach is way better than what I did in the past.

But all I can say is this – give it a try and see for yourself if it works for you.

You’ll never know, this simple strategy may have been the best strategy you’ve ever adopted in your book marketing strategy.

And if it does work, feel free to share in the comments so that we can all learn from it.