Delise Torres

If you’re an author looking for a new way to market your books, you may want to consider Pinterest. The social media platform currently has 553 million active users, mostly women between the ages of 18 and 34. Unlike traditional social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, Pinterest functions more like a visual search engine, a place where people go to find solutions and inspiration. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the platform, this post will show you how to get started and what type of content you can share to market your books.

How Pinterest Works

For those who enjoy creating graphics, Pinterest may be a good way to increase visibility, especially if women are your target readers.

The best use of Pinterest is to drive traffic to your website. The links you’ll find in Pinterest typically take a user to a retail website. However, instead of adding links to your pins that lead to Amazon or Goodreads, you want to drive people to explore your website and learn more about you, your books, and your brand. 

Pinterest is best suited for evergreen content which remains relevant regardless of when you post it. Treat it as a means for long-term discovery. If Pinterest remains true to its current form, users will be able to engage with the pin at any time, sometimes years after you pinned it. Focus on creating visually interesting posts for your boards and let the Pinterest algorithm work for you.

Basic steps to get started

When you’re ready to start your Pinterest page, follow these steps to create a fabulous account that mirrors your personality and helps achieve your marketing goals.

• Create a business account so that you can access your analytics.
• Connect your author website to Pinterest.
• Use Canva or Photoshop to create visually interesting content.  
• Add pins to Pinterest, using keyword-rich descriptions and relevant links.

For a more detailed guide, check out this article.

Ideas for author content

Pin photos and/or videos of your books and your author life. The easiest way to save time and still use Pinterest effectively is to reuse photos, videos, graphics, and captions from Instagram or Facebook. Canva Pro can easily resize repurposed content to fit Pinterest.

Pin quotes from your books. Create beautiful graphics with compelling quotes from your books to hook potential readers.‌ You can also create graphics and/or videos using your book’s cover with blurbs, reviews, tropes, etc. Take a look at the Pinterest board for my debut novel, One Tough Cookie. Note: You’ll be prompted to sign up for Pinterest if you don’t already have an account.

Pin your blog or newsletter content. If you enjoy blogging, cross-promote your posts on Pinterest. Write posts about a topic related to your book, like the setting, any research you did, or your book’s themes.

To lead traffic to your blog post from Pinterest, create a pin with a photo or graphic that represents the topic and the title of your blog post (Canva has great templates). Either add the image to the end of the post or create the pin on Pinterest with a link to your blog post. If you re-pin from your post and you’ve enabled rich pins, your blog post title and metadata will show up with the pin.

Take a look at my blog’s Pinterest board to get a better idea of how this works.

If you have a newsletter incentive, like a short story or a guide, you can create a pin for that, too, with a link to your landing page. Here’s how mine looks.

Hopefully, you have a better understanding of how to use Pinterest to market your books. Even if it doesn’t lead to direct sales, it can help increase visibility for your brand. And in a crowded market, that is always good.