How to Promote an Ebook After Publishing: Beyond Amazon and Your Website

Hitting "publish" feels like the finish line, but seasoned authors know it's actually the starting gun. Most ebook marketing advice stops at "optimize your Amazon listing" and "add a buy button to your website." That's table stakes. The real growth happens in the channels your competitors ignore: libraries, communities, audio platforms, and even AI search engines. Whether you wrote every word yourself or partnered with professional ebook writing services to bring your idea to life, the promotion strategies below will help your book reach readers long after launch week.

At Berg Publishers, we've watched hundreds of titles go to market, and the pattern is consistent: books that sell for years are promoted in at least five channels outside Amazon. Here's how to build that kind of distribution muscle.

Amazon controls roughly two-thirds of the ebook market, but that dominance is exactly why relying on it alone is risky:

This is the single most underused channel in independent publishing. Platforms like OverDrive (Libby), Hoopla, and BorrowBox serve millions of readers who borrow instead of buy, and libraries pay for the copies they lend.

Podcast guesting is the modern book tour — no travel, no bookstore politics, and audiences that already trust the host.

Reddit, Discord servers, and Facebook groups can move hundreds of copies, but only if you follow the 90/10 rule: 90% genuine participation, 10% promotion.

Here's what almost no competitor guide covers: readers increasingly discover books by asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews questions like "best books on productivity for new managers." This is generative engine optimization (GEO), and authors can influence it.

Your manuscript is raw material for months of promotion:

Promotion without measurement is guesswork. Use:

The authors who win treat marketing as an ongoing system — a few hours a week across libraries, communities, podcasts, and content repurposing rather than a frantic launch-week push. If the workload feels heavy alongside writing your next title, this is exactly where full-service book publishing services earn their keep: handling distribution setup, metadata, and outreach infrastructure so you can stay focused on the work only you can do. It's the model we've refined at Berg Publishers, and it's why backlist titles under this approach often outsell their own launch months a year later.

Start with two channels from this guide this week. Consistency beats intensity every time.