Spooky Season is Upon Us! Take Advantage of These Marketing Ideas For Your Book
You don’t have to write horror, thriller, or anything remotely spooky to take advantage of spooky season.
Fall gives authors in every genre plenty to work with. Romance, romantasy, fantasy, historical fiction, mystery, contemporary fiction, literary fiction… there’s probably an angle that fits your book without forcing it into a Halloween costume it doesn’t belong in.
And no, you don’t need to decorate your entire house with fake cobwebs. Unless you want to.
Here are a few ways to make the most of seasonal marketing this month:
1. Find Your Book’s Seasonal Connection
Start with your book and work outward. What naturally connects it to this time of year?
A thriller could become “books that will keep you up past midnight.” A romance might inspire a post about the perfect fictional date for a crisp fall night. A romantasy author could rank which characters would survive a haunted house. Historical fiction authors could connect a setting, historical event, tradition, or piece of research to the season. Fantasy authors might talk about magical creatures, witches, folklore, or the fictional world their readers would most want to visit this fall.
Even if your book has absolutely nothing to do with fall, you still have options. Talk about what you’re reading this season, your characters, your writing process, or your own fall favorites.
Find a seasonal conversation you can naturally join.
2. Create a Themed Reading List
Readers LOVE recommendations, and this is one of the easiest ideas to adapt to almost any genre. (These types of posts typically perform the best.)
Try:
Five spooky books to read this October
Romance books that feel like fall
Fantasy books to disappear into on a chilly weekend
Historical fiction for readers who want to get lost in another time
Thrillers that will keep you up past your bedtime
Romantasy books with magic, tension, and morally gray characters
Cozy mysteries for chilly nights
Books with settings that deserve their own main-character status
And, before you ask, YES, you can include your own book when it fits. That’s totally allowed. In fact, I encourage it.
Recommending other authors (and tagging the theme in the post!) gives readers (and the authors) a reason to save and share your post.
3. Have Fun With Your Characters
Your characters give you almost endless seasonal content, no matter the genre.
What would your protagonist dress up as for Halloween? Which character would refuse to dress up at all? Who would plan the perfect fall date? Who would get kicked out of a haunted house? Which fantasy character would accidentally summon something they absolutely should not have? Which historical character would be completely baffled by a modern Halloween tradition?
You can also make it interactive. Ask readers to choose a character to go apple picking with, survive a haunted house with, investigate a murder with, attend a masquerade with, or spend a rainy weekend reading beside.
It lets readers spend a little more time in your world without you just posting, “Here’s my book. Buy it.”
4. Think About How Readers Search
Social media is a search engine now (move over, Google). Readers aren’t only scrolling their feeds anymore. They’re actively searching Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Google, and even AI tools like ChatGPT when they want recommendations.
That means the words you use matter more than ever. (These are called search engine optimization keywords, aka SEO keywords.)
Think about what a reader might search when looking for a book like yours.
Maybe it’s “psychological thrillers with shocking endings,” “small-town romance books,” “romantasy with enemies to lovers,” “historical fiction set during World War II,” “fantasy books with found family,” or “cozy mysteries set in fall.”
Those phrases can show up naturally in your captions, on-screen text, video titles, website copy, and even the words you say in a Reel or TikTok video.
Make it easy for both readers and search platforms to understand exactly what kind of book you’ve written and who might enjoy it.
5. Don’t Forget the Rest of Fall
Seasonal marketing doesn’t have to end on October 31.
November gives you an entirely new set of conversations: cozy reading, gratitude, family dynamics, writing challenges, holiday gift shopping, end-of-year reading goals, favorite books of the year, and what’s coming next.
And once readers start thinking about gifts, authors across genres have an obvious opportunity. Instead of saying “buy my book for the holidays,” think about who your book is for:
“For the friend who reads every enemies-to-lovers romance”
“For the person who can solve the murder before chapter 10”
“For the reader who would happily abandon reality for a 600-page fantasy”
That’s much more interesting than another picture of your book with a bow on it.
Final Thought
Seasonal content works because it gives you something timely to talk about. Take the parts of the season that fit your genre, your books, and your personality. Ignore the ones that don’t.
You want to give readers more ways to discover you, interact with you, and remember your books, and if that occasionally involves deciding which of your characters would survive a haunted house, even better.
One More Thing: Let’s Talk Social Media
If you’d like to go a little deeper than what we can cover in this column, I’ll be teaching Effective Social Media for Authors for Mystery Writers of America’s MWA-U on Wednesday, October 28 at 7 pm CT/8 pm ET via Zoom.
We’ll talk about building a social media presence that supports your work without taking time away from writing. I’ll cover choosing the right platforms, figuring out what to post, creating content readers actually want to engage with, and building genuine connections with your audience.
Whether you’re starting from scratch, trying to revive an account you’ve neglected, or simply wondering if what you’re doing is actually working, this session is for you.
Registration opens October 13. It’s free for MWA members and $20 for non-members.
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