How do you use Trigger Warnings to promote your book?

One person's TW List is another person's shopping list

Dark romance writers use trigger warnings to promote their books quite often.

As I talked about in the previous post, there are a lot of things that we authors cannot put into our books without being dinged by retailers in the algorithms, so I'm always thrilled when I see someone put it into a review, even if it's a one-star review.

I'm like, thank you, because the readers who want that are going to see that one-star review and come running. Same thing with trigger warnings.

One of my friends did the most brilliant thing ever. She's in this dark romance group, and it's always making her second guess herself, because she's like, I don't know if I'm actually dark enough. And so I always tell her to stay out of the group. So then one day, I see that she's posted in the group the list of trigger warnings for her upcoming book, and she's asking, like, oh, do you guys think this is okay? Is this too many triggers?

At first I was like - what are you doing? I thought you were staying out of that group!

And she said - no, no, no, no. This is how I'm promoting the book, because it’s a dark romance group.

So what happened when she posted her trigger warnings in the dark romance group is everyone in that group went, oh, I need this book. I need to read this book. And that book did amazing.

I think sometimes people worry that warnings are going to spoil the book, or people aren't going to want to read the book if I tell them too much about the book, but that’s just not true.

Often on social media, even if a spoiler for the book is shown, the response is: I need to know. I need to know how that happened. I need to know how they got there. I need to know what happens next.

And that's something that can be the case for trigger warnings, too. Readers know what they like. There are a lot of readers that are going to want the things that are listed in the trigger warnings.

All it does is warn away the people who are going to be psychologically harmed by it. For the people who like that content, it's basically a beacon call.

So put those warnings out and let them know what you’ve got for them!