A guest article written by Ashleigh Heaton of Enchantress Marketing
As book marketers, we’re used to making the moment around a publication date, but jumping on a trend is about meeting the moment. Unlike launch campaigns, trend promotions require more flexibility and fast action. When you see something happening, be ready to jump in: these moments are fleeting.
Stop Chasing Trends: Alright, I know this sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. Just as every book isn’t right for every reader, not every trend is right for every book. When you see a trend happening, first ask yourself: “Does this connect to my book or audience in an authentic, meaningful way?” If the answer is no, don’t add to the noise. Focus your energy on what actually works, not on chasing trends.
Sentiment Signals: This is a fancy industry term for “checking the vibe”. Signals come in many forms, be it social listening tools, reader reviews, or search aggregate tools. When it comes to trends, the key is to look for patterns: what keeps popping up?
Social listening: One of the most reliable ways to receive live, of-the-moment feedback from readers, especially on Bookstagram and BookTok. While there are plenty of paid options to gather social listening data, you can often do a deep dive yourself by looking through comments, hashtags, and trending formats. Be specific with your query, and always ask a question that you plan to take action on.
Plan Ahead: Some trends can be predicted–or, at least, anticipated. Make a habit of looking at upcoming events, media releases, or cultural beats that are likely to generate conversation. For example, romance publishers should always know when the next season of Bridgerton is set to drop, because it always sparks conversation about the genre (and a viral VSQ meme.) Notice when trends are cyclical or seasonal. For social, have templates on hand for rapid response posting.
Ashleigh Heaton is an accomplished book marketing expert based in New York City and the founder of Enchantress Marketing, a full-service book marketing agency for authors and publishers. With over a decade of experience in Big 5 publishing and 113+ career bestsellers, Ashleigh launched Enchantress in 2026 to bring her bespoke approach to clients both in and beyond the traditional publishing landscape. Fluent in fandom, her expertise and passion range across all things genre, including books with magic, spaceships, vampires, and/or kissing.
The People Behind the Posts Share Their Best Advice
In Part 1 of our Ode to Micro-Influencers, we made the case for looking beyond follower counts and building relationships with micro-influencers. But what does that actually look like in practice? We asked publishing professional, Jillian Hinz, Digital Media Coordinator from PR by the Book and book influencer Laraib at literarycatlady_ to share what they look for, what works, and what they wish authors and publishers knew.
Publicist’s View: Jillian Hinz, Digital Media Coordinator, PR by the Book
What do you look for when you work with a micro-influencer?
For us, the biggest thing is authenticity, not simply audience size. We look for micro-influencers who have built real trust with a clearly defined community and whose interests genuinely align with the book. We also look at how a creator actually talks about books. Are they thoughtful about their recommendations? Do their followers respond, ask questions, and share their own opinions? Are they consistently creating content rather than simply posting sponsored or gifted books? Those signals tell us much more than a follower count.
For authors, micro-influencers can be especially powerful because their recommendations often feel like they are coming from a fellow reader rather than a traditional advertisement. That personal connection is exactly what we want to tap into.
Any particular amazing success stories?
Some of our most successful influencer campaigns have come from finding creators who are incredibly specific about what they love. Rather than trying to put a book in front of the biggest possible audience, we focus on finding the right audience.
We have also seen success outside of traditional book influencers. For some of our nonfiction titles, the strongest partners can be creators in adjacent communities: architecture and urban design creators for a book about neighborhood development or legal creators and law students for a book centered on real cases. Those audiences may be smaller, but the alignment can make the resulting conversation much more meaningful.
The takeaway for us is that the “success story” isn’t always the post with the biggest reach. Sometimes it is the creator whose audience immediately understands why the book belongs in their world.
We try to avoid treating micro-influencers like a numbers game. A large follower count does not automatically translate into influence, and chasing vanity metrics can lead to partnerships that don’t feel authentic. We also avoid overly scripted partnerships. If a creator has built a relationship with their audience around a particular voice, we want to give them room to use that voice. The goal is to give them the right book and the right information and not dictate exactly what they should say.
Finally, we look for genuine engagement rather than inflated or superficial metrics. An account can have thousands of followers but very little meaningful conversation. On the other hand, a smaller creator may have a highly engaged community that trusts their recommendations. For books, that trust is incredibly valuable. Our biggest piece of advice is simple: don’t underestimate the “micro.” The right small creator can have a much bigger impact than a large creator who is simply a demographic match.
What does all of this look like from the other side? We also spoke with literary content creator Laraib H. (@literarycatlady_) about what she looks for when deciding whether to work with an author or publisher, and what can turn a one-time interaction into a lasting relationship.
What do you look for when deciding to work with an author or publisher?
The first thing I look at is credibility. Who is this person/company and what do they publish? I think about how much time I can invest in our partnership. I want to make sure it aligns with the kinds of books I read or am interested in. Because if I do decide to work with them I want us both to help one another.
Any particular success stories about creating a relationship with authors or publishers?
I reached out to Harper360 and told them about my interest. I included my follower count and a little bit about what I post. They were really receptive and took the time to look through my information and added me to their creator circle. I recently met an author, M.S. Masood at BookCon and we really connected! Now I’m moderating an author talk with her in the fall and she asked me personally. I’m really happy I built that relationship with her enough for her to ask me.
Any tips for authors who want to reach out?
A good tip I would give is reach out to creators that you trust and see yourself working with in the future! I think reaching out to small creators is important. Don’t ignore them.
Wade through any list of “top book influencers” and you’ll land on familiar names: reviewers with six-figure followings, brand deals, and a mountain of publisher gift boxes stacked in the background of posts. We love these reviewers and they’ve earned their reach! But today, we’re singing the praises of the micro-influencers whose impact often exceeds their follower count.
What Is a Micro-Influencer?
A micro-influencer is generally defined as someone with a following under 100,000 people. In the book reviewing community specifically, the number isn’t as significant as the influence.Trustis the foundation of a literary micro-influencer’s success rather than size.
Micro-influencers’ followers choose to stick around because they consistently deliver authentic, personal, and relevant recommendations. Think of the romance reviewer with 4,200 followers, whose readers pre-order everything she recommends. Or the horror BookToker with 18,000 followers whose stitch-duets move backlist titles years after publication. Post after post, these influencers prove they understand a specific genre, subgenre, microtrope, or reading mood better than almost anyone else.
Their Role in Helping Books Succeed
While scale has been, and always will be, a carrot that book publicists chase for book marketing, scale isn’t the same thing as conversion, and conversion is what actually sells books.
Micro-influencers tend to outperform on the metrics that matter most: click-through rates, saves, and comments that become actual conversations. They’re also great at one of our favorite metrics of interest: the word-of-mouth effect that gets people in a certain community talking, recommending, and buying.
Arcadia Publishing recommends following this formula to calculate an influencer’s level of engagement with their community: “Take the median number of engagements (likes, comments, etc.) across all the influencer’s posts on a particular profile, divide by the total number of followers, then multiply by 100. So if an influencer has 10,000 followers and averages 300 likes and comments per post, their engagement rate is 3%.”
How to Find Your Micro-Influencers
Modern book discovery isn’t a single funnel built on traditional media gatekeepers. It’s a network of overlapping, trust-based communities—but where do you start, and how do you reach these micro-influencers?
Look beyond follower counts. Prioritize engagement and audience fit.
Search by genre or niche, not just “book influencer.” Hunt through hashtags and social groups for influencers that specialize in your book’s area. Similarly, you may find your Non-Fiction influencers in podcast circles, rather than on Instagram. Get to know these communities and encourage your author to join in!
Look at who’s engaging (and how) The comments can tell you almost as much as the account itself. Are readers asking for recommendations? Tagging friends? Discussing similar books? Or are they mostly posting emojis and generic comments?
Start early. Build relationships well before launch. ARCs are key here!
Give them something worth talking about. Exclusive material, author Q&As, behind-the-scenes content, comp titles you’ve seen on their platforms, etc. The goal isn’t simply to get them to post, it’s to give them a reason to want to talk about the book.
For marketers and publicists building a promotional strategy, micro-influencers are more than a nice-to-have. They’re a strategic way to build awareness within the communities most likely to care about your book. A launch strategy built entirely around scale can miss the readers who are only ever going to trust a familiar, specialized voice.
So here’s to the micro-influencers! We celebrate those who build engaging genre communities one post at a time. “Smaller” numbers are doing some of publishing’s biggest work!
NetGalley + Enchantress Marketing: Mastering Perpetual Discovery for Backlist
Last week we had the pleasure of sponsoring the U.S. Book Show, where we attended many excellent panels focused on how data, modern discoverability, and emerging technologies are shifting the landscape and addressing industry-wide challenges. Topics ranged from shaping trends by leveraging data for strategic acquisitions to reacting to trends using social listening tools and surfacing backlist, and, of course, experimenting with AI to streamline workflows. It was within this context that we took the stage with our session: “Beyond Launch: Mastering Perpetual Discovery for Backlist.”
Moderated by Darcy Piedmonte (Director, NetGalley + Booktrovert), and including Kristina Radke (SVP, NetGalley + Booktrovert) and Ashleigh Heaton (Founder, Enchantress Marketing), we focused in on ideas for how to maintain sales velocity once the initial launch budget is spent. Here are a few highlights and takeaways from our conversation:
Photo: Enchantress Marketing
1. Marketing is Applied Human Psychology
Ashleigh said it beautifully, “Marketing is applied human psychology. It is both an art and a science.” As with all science, robust data is essential. Marketers often rely on intuition and emotional connection with a project to fuel campaign decisions, which should always be the throughline of that work. And rich audience data can confirm intuitions or point out potential internalized bias or assumptions.
To get at the data, social listening tools can help publishers identify social media influencers, understand the online conversation for a brand or book, highlight top-performing platforms/accounts, and offer a big-picture summary of an audience or trend. Ashleigh specifically mentioned Brandwatch or Meltwater for deep consumer insights. And other social scheduling tools that also offer social monitoring for your owned channels: Sprout, Metricool, Hootsuite.
2. Reviews as the Cornerstone
Overlapping with social listening, Ashleigh recommended digging into consumer reviews to understand consumer sentiment. These reviews are dynamic data that help publishers identify common themes, keywords, descriptors, tropes, tags, and comps. Kristina reinforced the idea that publishers should leverage data from reviews to ensure the best positioning for backlist titles. For instance, ensuring that a trending trope is explicitly mentioned in the book description, or adding new words, like “romantasy”, to your metadata. That is the type of information that may not have been relevant 10 years ago, but will ensure better discoverability today.
Sentiment has always been among the most important things that marketers need to understand about their readers, and now it also matters for online search and discovery. Sentiment signals are one way that AI search models (like the “AI Overview” in your Google search, now powered by Gemini) understand how to answer a particular question that readers ask. These AI models synthesize information from online sources, including book reviews, to learn how to talk about your book. Reviews give these tools a more nuanced understanding of which books to mention when someone asks for a “standalone romantasy book”, for instance.
3. Leveraging All Your Data
There were many sessions about AI throughout the conference, and Kristina called forth a number of points made in other sessions related to context, clarity, and intent (Cameron Lennon’s session on GEO) and the opportunity to use data across all parts of the publishing workflow to create “superdiscoverability” (Brooke Dobson & Keith Riegert’s lunchtime session).
Kristina emphasized that AI now makes it possible to surface backlist in a more nuanced way than before. Where publishers once relied on institutional knowledge and keywords to search for backlist books that might match a hot trend, now they can connect data across title management, social listening, and consumer analytics tools to prompt a more specific search: “Look at books published 5 or more years ago, identify the top 10 titles to be included in a Pride Month marketing campaign, filter based on LGBTQ+ main characters and openly LGBTQ authors, with high lifetime sales that have slowed in the last 12 months, and focus on currently-trending themes like queer joy or found family.”
This relies on publishers doing the work to connect these databases (ask your technologists about “Model Context Protocol”), and to fully understand what types of robust searches they want to do. Kristina encouraged managers to ask team members to deliver specific questions like the example above to share with technologists as an example of what they want to achieve.
In Conclusion
What this all points to is a future where data supercharges marketers’ intuition. By treating reviews as dynamic data and utilizing advanced search, publishers can move past the initial launch hype and establish an ongoing ROI for the true backbone of their business: the backlist. The conversations we had both on and off the stage reminded us that while technology continues to change rapidly, our core mission as an industry – helping readers find the most relevant books for them, whether newly launched or deep in the backlist – remains the same. Beyond the excellent programming, the U.S. Book Show remains one of the best places to meet our clients and partners who share this dedication to driving discoverability.
By pairing the direct-to-consumer Booktrovert campaigns with the trade reach of a NetGalley newsletter, publishers were able to create new opportunities for both professional reader discovery and consumer engagement.
NetGalley and Booktrovert work together to extend marketing reach to any audience.
NetGalley helps publishers generate reviews and nominations, reach trade professionals and influencers, and drive buzz. Booktrovert creates excitement among consumers via urgency-driven giveaways, increases sales and pre-orders, and grows the author’s mailing list.
Together, they create a full-funnel approach to book promotion. NetGalley plants the seeds of interest and advocacy pre-publication, and Booktrovert nurtures the growth at and beyond launch by expanding awareness and engagement. Then, both platforms can be used to keep the momentum flourishing as a book moves into the backlist.
The results of the newsletter reinforce just how effective this combined approach can be:
The special NetGalley newsletter resulted in more than 8,700 unique clicks to the featured Booktrovert campaigns. In fact, in all 11 cases, engagement with the Booktrovert campaigns experienced noticeable lifts in activity immediately following the newsletter, with some seeing the number of entries increase by more than double after the newsletter was sent out.
Day one has organic discovery via the Booktrovert Feed and Digest Newsletter, and then a second spike with the added NetGalley Newsletter.
What makes this especially impactful is the context in which these readers are discovering the campaigns. NetGalley members are already primed for book discovery as tastemakers; they’re actively seeking new titles, exploring upcoming releases, and making decisions about what to read or buy next. By introducing giveaways with a lower barrier to entry via newsletter (especially for those who weren’t approved or may have missed the original request window) they now have a second, immediate way to engage. Plus, the reach has also expanded to consumers via the Booktrovert feed and daily digest email. These are readers who may be hearing about your book for the first time.
You might also be familiar with the “I keep hearing about this book!” metric that we collect on NetGalley, and we are firm believers in this principle. The more often an audience hears about a book or sees a creative marketing effort by the publisher, the more likely they are to engage with it. Seeing your book in more than one bookish space increases the likelihood that you’ll convert that person into a buyer!
Ultimately, the multi-pronged approach works because it reflects how readers actually discover books.
It’s rarely a single moment—it’s a series of reinforcing actions that create sales velocity and success.
Having your book on NetGalley organically introduces a book to industry professionals and early advocates. A newsletter brings that same title back into focus. Adding a Booktrovert campaign demonstrates ongoing marketing effort to these trade audiences, and offers them an easy way to both act on their own interest and share the opportunity with their own audiences. Each step builds on the last!
By connecting these touchpoints, publishers and authors can create a better path from discovery to engagement to sales.
Independent author M.J. Etkind recently shared her experience on Reddit about using NetGalley for her books — including landing a feature in the The New York Times and generating meaningful library sales. Her biggest takeaway? NetGalley is far more than a review tool. When used strategically, it’s a professional marketing platform designed to connect authors with booksellers, librarians, media, and industry professionals.
Here’s what indie authors can learn from her approach.
Remember Who NetGalley Is For
Many independent authors view NetGalley as a way to collect reviews on Goodreads or StoryGraph. And yes — reviews in these places absolutely matter, but M.J. believes they’re not the only thing that matters!
NetGalley was built primarily to serve industry professionals, ranging from booksellers, librarians, media, reviewers and educators. But M.J. has found that if your only goal is consumer reviews (meaning reviews shared on retail sites like Amazon or social sites like TikTok), you may be underutilizing the platform. Authors can, and should, think bigger! Trade visibility, library discovery, and retail relationships are all within reach when using NetGalley. M.J. discovered that one of her biggest long-term values came from focusing on professional audiences, particularly within libraries and bookstores.
Budget Conscious? You Have Options.
For budget-conscious indie authors, M.J. recommends working with a NetGalley reseller to reduce the cost of the investment.
For independent authors, you have options:
Work with NetGalley directly: You have full control over your own account and title listing, with instant access to data. Plus, participating in NetGalley’s built-in promotions and Booktrovert are just a click away!
Work with a NetGalley reseller: Resellers may provide some discounts and/or shorter time commitments. Some even have marketing and PR options bundled into their offerings, which can benefit authors looking for a bit of extra help!
M.J. has used Victory Editing Co-Op, one of the longest-standing NetGalley co-ops/resellers available. Additional experienced resellers can be found here.
How to choose?
Authors who want full control, detailed data access, and the ability to actively manage and scale their campaigns may prefer working directly with NetGalley. Those looking for a lower upfront cost, shorter listing durations, or a more hands-off experience may find a reseller to be the better fit.
Anne Victory, owner of Victory Editing and facilitator of the Victory Editing Co-op, says, “My co-op gives authors maximum control while making NetGalley far more accessible. I focus on removing friction so authors can spend their energy where it matters—reaching readers.”
Know the Communication Rules
To maintain member privacy and trust, NetGalley has important guidelines regarding member contact. Based on her experience, M.J. recommends following these two lines of outreach to ensure broad engagement and relationship-building with readers:
Send a gentle email to past ARC readers notifying them of a new book
Send reminders to approved members encouraging them to download and review
In fact, NetGalley offers template language to help you get started with outreach like this!
Plan your communication strategy carefully to ensure you’re following best practices that will help you stay on the right side of GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy-related regulations.
Have Your Retail Infrastructure Ready
Timing matters. M.J. emphasizes making sure pre-order links are live everywhere, especially on Amazon, Goodreads, and through IngramSpark. This will ensure your retail links are available by the time your NetGalley listing gains traction! Metadata distribution through Ingram can take over a week from file approval to bookstore visibility, so plan ahead.
If industry professionals discover your book on NetGalley but can’t easily order it, you risk losing momentum.
Invest in Your Cover
M.J. saw a dramatic difference in performance between books with strong covers and books with weak ones.
On a platform like NetGalley where books are browsed quickly and feedback on the cover art is encouraged, cover quality directly impacts request rates. This is especially true of cover images that were generated by AI. While many indie authors are understandably conscious of budget, your cover image is not the area that you should scrimp on!
Include Industry-Focused Materials
In addition to the book file, M.J. ensures that all of her developed marketing materials have been added to her NetGalley listing, so that industry professionals know how and where to reach her. She includes:
A sell sheet
Ordering information for bookstores and librarians
Contact details
Backlist catalog information
Direct links to social and retail sites for reviewers to cross-post reviews
This reinforces NetGalley’s professional purpose and makes it easier for industry members to act, as well as helping more casual consumer reviewers share their reviews widely!
Integrate NetGalley into Your Bookstore Marketing Plan
For M.J., NetGalley isn’t a standalone tactic — it’s part of her broader bookstore outreach system. She includes her NetGalley link when pitching bookstores, giving them a frictionless way to preview the book in order to help them decide to carry it in their store, hand pitch to readers, and enhance sales. In this context, NetGalley serves not only as a review tool, but as a professional access point within a more comprehensive marketing strategy.
M.J. Etkind, author of the New York Times Featured book, The Witch of Wall Street.
M.J. Etkind lives a double life. By day, she is a corporate girly with a business degree. By night, she writes romance novels in a cozy book filled apartment in Boston. M.J. Etkind’s most favorite fun fact is that she once took an entire vacation to visit a bookstore. Etkind has previously published two romance novels. Dishwasher Safe (2024) and The Witch of Wall Street (2025) which was featured in The New York Times Book Review.
