10 days remaining in your free trial.

To make sure you don't miss out on any content, you can purchase the Publishing Master Course at any time from your member account page.

Publishing Master Course Outline

Publishing made easy header display.png

Free Content and Previews on Your Blog

Click here to get great self publishing content via email

One of the best ways to market and promote books is by utilizing free content and previews on your blog. This content gives potential readers a preview of your writing style, photography, and the types of recipes your book has. There are many ways to implement free content and previews. You can also use any of these methods with other blogs to help spread your content through your blogging network.

Recipe Posts

Posting existing recipes on your blog is a great way to drive up interest in your book. Any recipes in your book that have nice pictures and are creative, fun, or tasty are great candidates to share. These posts can be part of your normal blogging structure or added as special posts.

Highlighting the best recipes from your book on your blog has several benefits. Showcasing the best work from your cookbook drives interest for potential readers. Adding these posts to your blog helps increase the content and quality of the material on your blog.

To alert readers where the posts came from it is helpful to call out your book multiple times in the recipe post. Here's an example callout:

If you like this recipe you can get it and more than 100 other recipes that will help you create remarkable cocktails, hors d'oeuvres and small plates that will amaze your friends. It's all in my book Modernist Cooking Made Easy: Party Foods - Get Your Copy Today!

Callouts like these will help drive people who are interested in content like this to the sales page for your book. From there you can give them more information and complete the sale.

I tend to make a recipe post out of any recipe in my books that has a nice photograph. You can see a few examples of my recipe posts here with my Sous Vide Fennel and Chicken Piccata with Lemon Caper Air.

Sample Recipe PDF Downloads

You can also provide PDFs of recipes for people to download. This has the benefit of being able to show the formatting of your book. Here are two examples for Monkfish in Dashi with Spring Vegetables and Flank Steak with Argentinian Chimichurri. You can also require users to provide an email address to download the PDFs, increasing your newsletter mailing list.

Informational Posts

Similar to the recipe posts, informational posts are a great way to highlight the best content from your cookbook. Picking parts of your book that will really resonate with readers and/or hits good Google keywords is ideal for successful informational posts. Including callouts in the posts will lead interested users to the sales page for your book.

Chapter Previews

Chapter previews are similar to the sample recipe PDF downloads. They are PDF snapshots of certain chapters in your book. Often the first few chapters are good to use because they provide an overview of what the book is about without giving away too much information. You can see an example of a Sample Sous Vide Chapter.

Placing ads and alerts for your books in the sample PDF is a great way to let people who like the sample buy your actual book. You can also require users to provide an email address to download the PDFs, increasing your newsletter mailing list.

Photo Galleries

Another way to showcase the content in your books and drive potential readers is by posting photo galleries of all the images in your book. This is especially helpful if you publish in black and white, as it allows you to provide full-color images to people that have already purchased a copy.

If you provide a description of each image you can also harness some Google results based on the descriptions. You can see some examples of photo galleries for Sous Vide and Party Foods.

placeholder image

Cookie Consent

This website uses cookies or similar technologies, to enhance your browsing experience and provide personalized recommendations. By continuing to use our website, you agree to our Privacy Policy