The Successful Marketing Behind the Debut Novel "Lilac Girls”

One example to study is the remarkable success Ballantine Books has had with Martha Hall Kelly’s debut novel, Lilac Girls, which follows three characters whose lives converge at Ravensbrück, the women’s-only concentration camp in World War II. Kelly did almost ten years of research for the book, and it shows. Readers are raving about the book’s story, Kelly’s writing, and her ability to transport the reader to another time. More than 50,000 readers have added the novel to their Goodreads shelves in the first four months since it was published in early April 2016, and it has an outstanding average rating of 4.3 stars. So, the book already had an inbuilt advantage—it’s a great story that resonates with readers.

But a well-written book is not enough. This is where preparation and a good marketing strategy come together to give a good book the audience it deserves.

To understand the role Goodreads can play in your marketing strategy, you need to have the right mental model. Goodreads is about book discovery. Your goal is to get as many people as possible to add your book to their Want-to-Read shelves (Tip: You can see how many people are adding a particular book to their Want-to-Read shelves by going to the book stats page, linked in the upper right-hand corner of every book page on Goodreads) and to follow you as an author. Once you do this, you’ll see in this case study how Goodreads offers multiple ways to further promote your book.

Early Preparation: Setting the Stage for Success

One of the primary ways to get people to add your book to their Want-to-Read shelves is to run a giveaway on Goodreads. The publisher kick-started awareness of Lilac Girls six months before publication by running a giveway for 25 copies of the book. This giveaway resulted in a several hundred readers adding the title to their shelves. This had two benefits: 1) friends of people entering the giveaway saw a post in their Updates, 2) now this debut author had her book on the shelves of a few hundred people, starting to build her fanbase on Goodreads. Running a giveaway this far in advance of publication is one of our key recommendations for authors and publishers.

In addition, you should focus on building up your online profile. As a debut author, your biggest challenge is to make it easy for readers not only to discover but to remember you. As part of her marketing campaign, Kelly kept her online branding remarkably consistent. She uses the same author picture and images of lilacs across her website and social media pages. This helps readers distinguish and associate the author as they start to become aware of her through other channels. “Martha’s website was up way before publication,” explains Debbie Aroff, Deputy Marketing Manager at Random House, the publisher of the book. “We beefed up the book club section a few weeks after the book went on sale.”

When Delighting Your Readers Pays Off

Debut authors benefit from any opportunity to engage with readers, even if it’s just a small group of fans at first. As soon as the first giveaway ended, Kelly started taking questions from readers and engaging with them via Ask the Author. Ask the Author is the Q&A platform on Goodreads that allows readers to submit questions to an author via their author profile. Only when the author chooses to answer the questions do the questions become public. They show up in the newsfeed of people who follow the author, as well as to the friends of the reader who asked the question. In addition, the answers are included on the author’s page, helping build out a richer and more engaging profile. Readers value learning more about an author, so spend time on meaningful answers that share personal anecdotes, give more insight into the book, or show your sense of humor. Remember, you’re a writer so use that gift to write a good answer and don’t just dash off perfunctory responses.

This early buzz and activity for the author paid off and generated more awareness of the book. As a result, it helped generate twice as much demand for the second 25-copy giveaway a few months later. The snowball effect starts to build and more and more people added the book to their shelves, which in turn displayed the book to more and more readers in their Updates. All of the different pieces start to add up to significant buzz over time.

“Over time” is the key phrase there. Another important thing to remember about Goodreads is that social is at the heart of everything on the site. It takes time to build a groundswell of buzz through social interactions but the resulting fanbase can end up being one of your most powerful marketing assets.

The Most Critical Time for Bestsellers

The weeks around publication day are the most critical window for success. That’s when media will run their interviews, bookstores will host their events, and readers are finally able to purchase a book they’ve been hearing so many great things about. If you’ve done your early preparation work well, you’ll have a book page with several reviews and a healthy number of readers adding the book to their Want-to-Read shelf. This was the case for Lilac Girls around publication date. Awareness for it was high, and when readers visited the Goodreads book page they could already see several reviews as a result of those very early giveaways. These reviews played a key role in helping convince new readers to take a chance on the book.

Adding Extra Oomph Post-Publication

But the book promotion doesn’t end with the publication day. A few weeks later, to keep the momentum going, the publisher ran an Author Recommended email through Goodreads. Part of our paid marketing options, this is a personalized email sent to fans of another author. In this case, the email went out to fans of Kristin Hannah, whose book The Nightingale shares a similar theme with Lilac Girls (Be sure to read our case study of The Nightingale here.)

Adding more fuel to the fire, the publisher ran a third giveaway for the book, resulting in another round of updates about the giveaway and people adding the book to their Want-to-Read shelves.

If an Author Recommended Mailer is not in your budget, teaming up with a successful author in the same genre is a valuable strategy to explore. Perhaps this takes the form of an endorsement on the book or a review on Goodreads, or maybe a joint event at a local bookstore. Consider your resources and connections, and be creative.

Goodreads Editorial

Another boost for Lilac Girls came when–thanks to all the buzz the book was getting–the Goodreads Editorial team chose it as one of its Hottest Books of the Summer, driving additional spikes in interest when it was posted on the Goodreads blog and featured in the Goodreads monthly newsletter (note the increased interest on the graph above).

Lilac Girls made it on the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list as well as the Publishers Weekly and ABA IndieBound Bestseller lists, among many others, within several weeks of publication.

Takeaways for Authors and Publishers

We realize there’s a lot to digest from this case study, and it’s only a snapshot of everything that went on to make this book a success. Keep in mind you can apply the exact same tactics we outlined here and achieve different results as there are many variables in play.

Here are a few key takeaways that any debut author should consider when trying to build buzz on Goodreads:

Start planning your marketing campaign months in advance. Start outlining your campaign nine months in advance and start active promotions six months before publication date. Read Preparing Your Goodreads Marketing Timeline

Run as many giveaways pre- and post-publication as you can afford. Double down, especially if it appears that the book is losing momentum. Each time you list a giveaway, members who have marked the book as Want-to-Read are notified by Goodreads, as well as all the people who follow you.

Make it easy for your readers to find you online. Make sure your Goodreads profile is set up, be open to questions, and respond in a timely manner. Keep your online branding consistent. Allow readers to find you and immediately recognize the real you (especially if you have a very popular name).

Delight your readers. Interact with readers on their terms, and identify some universal themes from your book that will convince readers to take a closer look. As you’re building your reputation as an author, every interaction you have with a reader counts. Your readers will be the ones who insist that other readers need to read your book, so you want them to have a positive experience. Readers value any attention you give them personally, so make any connection you have meaningful to them.


Updated note: Lilac Girls continued trending throughout the year, and the ongoing efforts paid off when the book was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Debut as well as Best Historical Fiction. While the title didn't end up winning, it received an additional bump in shelvings and has continued to be a success with over 60,000 reviews to date.

Have a great tip that helped you break out as an author? Share it with us in the comments below!

Next: Preparing Your Goodreads Marketing Timeline

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