9-Step Holiday Preparation Guide For Independent Booksellers
If you’re reading this, now is the time to think about holiday shoppers and the unofficial shopping holidays, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you don’t prepare now for holiday sales, you’ll end up wondering why you didn’t sell nearly as many books as you’d hoped.
Yes, I know, Pumpkin Spice has only just started to invade our lives and I’m over here telling you to get your store holiday-ready. Maybe not what you’d hoped to hear.
But why else would you click on a blog post about holiday sales? Remember that Boy Scout motto ‘be prepared’? Well, you would do well to make it your own motto.
Before you run off to join the Boy Scouts, I’ve got tips from my years of experience navigating the challenges of the holiday shopping season.
(What follows is a line from the original publication of this post in 2019. I’m only leaving it in because of how embarrassingly bad it is.)
These tips will help you get your store on track to sleigh the holiday shopping season! See what we did there? Slay… sleigh... holidays… get it? Great!
Holiday Sales, Booksellers, and Print-On-Demand
Boosting your sales during the holiday shopping season is critical for any author or creator business. October, November, and December is when you’ll earn about one-third of your total revenue for the year. You’ve got to be ready so that you don’t miss any sales from malfunctioning pages, broken links, or unhappy customers.
#1 Start Now
Well, okay if you’re reading this in July or earlier, maybe chill.
But anytime after that is a good time to start preparing for your holiday sales.
You’re going to need a plan that includes reviewing your site, developing an email strategy, proofing your products, and suring up your customer support plan.
My suggestion for any project of this scale is to open up a document and start making a list of what has to be done. Include any and everything. In fact, you should keep that list handy as we move on to the next section…
#2 Audit Your Site Pages
I strongly recommend creating a spreadsheet that lists information about your site pages. Here’s a clip of one that I use for this blog:
I’ve got the publication date, blog title, description, and link. You might also include product info (for product pages) and CTA for marketing pages.
The idea here is to have a quick way to reference each page on your site. Before the holiday rush starts, you should click through to each page and give them a quick look over. You’re primary after:
- Dead links
- Images with errors
- Page that just don’t load
There’s a few additional things you can look for that are just best practices for your website:
- Do images have alt tags?
- Does the page have a meta title and meta description?
- Do your links have UTM tags?
Finally, you should consider adding some holiday flair—like a unique banner or some updated copy. This is ideally on your home page and any high-leve shop pages that you’ll point your shoppers to.
#3 Make Sure Your Site is Mobile First
It’s 2025. There’s a 45% chance you’re reading this on your phone. There’s a 100% chance that you’ll look at a product on your phone today (I’m making that up, but I’m probably right).
The simple truth is that you need to be mobile friendly.
Fortunately, there’s very little chance the platform you use to manage your store isn’t built with a mobile-first design. Here are some helpful links with details for getting your ecommerce site ready for mobile shoppers:
- Mobile-First Design: Putting the User First [Shoify]
- How to make a website mobile-friendly [Wix]
- How to Increase Mobile Conversion Rates for Online Stores [WooCommerce]
Sell Your Book, Your Way
Sell books on your Wix, Shopify, or WooCommerce website with Lulu Direct.
Or use our Order Import tool for your next book launch.
#4 Plan Your Discounts & Sales
Are you offering discounts? Not all creators do, but they are a proven method for driving more sales. A promotional code in an email subject can have a positive impact on your open rates and click through.
Whether you opt to do a discount or promo code is up to you. You should gauge your decision on your audience, their expectations, and the leeway you have between production costs and your revenue.
Set up your discounts for each of our supported ecommerce integrations with these guides:
- Discount codes [Shopify]
- Wix Stores: Offering Discounts and Coupons [Wix]
- Managing Coupons in WooCommerce [WooCommerce]
#5 Create a Marketing Plan
Marketing is hard. You’ve got to put time and energy into creating content, sharing it with an audience, and building a following.
The thing to do, much like my first point, is to make a plan.
Think about the channels where you have the most followers. Those will be the most important during the holidays—you existing fans are the most likely audience for special holiday editions, unique products, or one-time sales.
Paul
#6 Email Strategy
Your email list the most important marketing resource you have. These are your most dedicated fans, people willing to give you acces to their inbox.
You email strategy should focus on encouraging your fans to make a purchase. I encourage you to look at Really Good Emails, a company dedicated to finding the best in emails. They offer commentary on thousands of emails and can help you craft unique messages that really land with your followers.
Remember what I was saying about starting now? Email is a perfect example. Start creating and scheduling emails as soon as you have a product and discount plan ready. Even before then, if you’re so inclined. Emails like a Prepare for Black Friday email to tease discounts are great to send early and resend as the shopping days ramp up.
Your Free Lulu Account
Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world
#7 Use Tags (AKA Pixels)
This gets a little deep into some technical aspects of marketing. If you’re unfamiliar with Tags and Pixels, you’ll want to read up on their history and significance.
What it all amounts to is increasing your ability to track behavior on your web pages and social profiles. You can use this data to do retargeting ad campaigns—this means your paid ads will show up for people who have shown interest in similar products or services.
Tags and Pixels can be a bit of work to set up, but if you want to use any kind of paid advertising, they are crucial for finding relevant audiences.
#8 Word of Mouth and Influencers
In the lead-up to the holidays, the praise of an influencer in your genre can go a long, long way. People like to know other real people (not the marketing department for some large corporation) who recommend a product.
Reach out to other authors and influencers. Maybe offer them a free copy of the book for a review or similar. Trading posts is another way to build a connection with your fellow authors—it’s also a way to share networks rather than poaching another author’s readers.
#9 Look at Your Competition
How many other authors do you know? I will guess you’ve got a decent contact list with other authors you’ve worked with or met at events.
Go look at their websites and bookstores!
What are they doing for the holidays? Anything unique that catches your eye? Maybe your peers are using a clever pop-up banner to promote a sale. Maybe they’ve got a nice little slide-in that reminds you about their choice sale item this season. Or maybe they’ve written a satirical blog about the evils of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.
Whether you get inspiration or ideas from your peers (who are also your competitors), you’ll see what other shoppers are seeing out there.
Paul
Make More Money from Your Books
Make this year a winner by maximizing your profits, your reach, and your new readers. That means taking on a multi-platform, multi-faceted approach to marketing. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but by using Lulu’s Direct ecommerce integrations to manage your orders, you’ll earn the highest revenues and exercise complete control.
And what better gift could there be than a list of new contacts, new buyers, and eager readers waiting for your next email, blog post, or book? I can’t think of anything.
Sell Your Book, Your Way
Sell books on your Wix, Shopify, or WooCommerce website with Lulu Direct.
Or use our Order Import tool for your next book launch.
