Most writers post a few pins, see nothing happen, and decide Pinterest doesn’t work for them. The actual problem is usually that they were doing all of it manually, with no system for keywords, no schedule, and no idea which pins were even working. Pinterest rewards consistency more than almost anything else, and consistency is hard to keep up with on your own.
Pinterest marketing can eat up much of your time if you don’t have the right tools in place. Every writer needs as much time as they can get to focus on writing, and Pinterest marketing should not take that away. With the right tools, this becomes a whole lot easier.
The tools below cover the different parts of a Pinterest strategy: designing pins, scheduling them, finding keywords, checking what’s working, and keeping your ideas organized. Each one does a specific job, and together they cover what your Pinterest marketing actually needs.
A quick note: some of the links below are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.
1. Tailwind
Tailwind is built specifically for Pinterest, and it has been one of the most established tools in this space for years. It is designed specifically for Pinterest, though it allows you to schedule posts to Facebook and Instagram as well.
The core feature is scheduling. Tailwind helps you automate pinning, so you keep to a consistent posting schedule. SmartSchedule is a feature that looks at when your specific audience is most active and posts your pins at those times automatically. You batch a week or a month of pins in one sitting, and Tailwind spreads them out across the days and times your audience is actually online.
Tailwind Create is the design side of it. It turns your photos into pin-ready graphics using your own brand colors and fonts, without needing Canva open in a separate tab.
SmartPin is also another of Tailwind’s features, and it works alongside the keyword research tool. Once you’ve found keywords worth targeting, SmartPin uses them to generate ready-to-publish pins automatically on a regular basis. It pulls images from your site and writes the title and description itself, so instead of sitting down to design and write a new pin from scratch every time, you get a steady stream of new pins without doing that work manually each time.
A standout feature is Tailwind Communities. These are groups built around specific niches, like a community for romance writers or one for poetry, where members share each other’s pins to get seen. The Tailwind community system is Tailwind’s way of enabling people with the same ideas to promote one another’s pins. If you’re starting a brand new Pinterest account with no following, joining an active Community can get your pins in front of people much faster than trying to build that reach on your own.
2. Canva
We may not like this truth but: Ugly pins don’t get clicks. But you don’t need to be a designer to make Pinterest-worthy visuals.
Canva has thousands of Pinterest-sized templates already built in. You don’t have to figure out dimensions or start from a blank page. Drop in your book cover, a quote, or a headline, and you have a usable pin in a few minutes. Set up a brand kit once with your colors and fonts, and every pin you make after that matches without you doing anything extra.
It also has stock photos and videos built in. If you don’t have your own, you can search and pull from Canva’s library right there while you’re designing. No downloading from one place and uploading to another.
3. Pinterest Trends and Analytics
Pinterest for writers means more than just pinning pretty book covers. It’s about tapping into what readers are already searching for and meeting them where they’re at. It’s about pinning your content with the right, trending keywords. And this is where Pinterest Trends becomes a helpful tool.
This tool helps you find trending topics and keywords. Pinterest Trends shows what people are actually searching for, broken down by topic and by season, with a graph showing whether a search term is rising, falling, or steady. If you want to plan pins around things readers are already looking for, like seasonal poetry themes or specific writing topics, this is where to check before you design anything.
Pinterest’s analytics, available on any business account, shows exactly how your own pins are performing. Impressions, saves, outbound clicks to your site, and other details are all there, broken down by individual pin and by board. For most writers managing a single Pinterest account, this dashboard alone is enough to understand what’s working and what isn’t, before you ever consider paying for something separate.
Both of these live directly inside Pinterest, and both are completely free, which is exactly why they are often overlooked in favor of paid tools.
4. Buffer
Buffer is a social media scheduling app, and isn’t built only for Pinterest. It schedules pins alongside Instagram, X, and other platforms, all from one dashboard.
If Pinterest is the only place you post, a Pinterest-specific tool like Tailwind will likely serve you better. Tailwind can also work if you post on Instagram and you need basic scheduling for that (as it offers Instagram scheduling too). But if you’re trying to keep up with Pinterest and a couple of other platforms at the same time, Buffer is useful for planning content once instead of logging into three or four separate apps and repeating the same process for each one.
If you’re posting on multiple platforms, Buffer helps you keep it all together. While not Pinterest-exclusive, it supports pin scheduling too, and that makes it very handy. For authors who promote their work on a variety of social media sites, Buffer is very helpful and simplifies Pinterest management along with other accounts.
5. Pin Generator
Designing every single pin in Canva could take time, and some weeks you don’t have time. Pin Generator helps here. Give it your website link, and it scans the page, pulls the images, titles, and descriptions, and generates a batch of pin designs from it in seconds.
The AutoPin feature is a time saver. You set a rule, say, three pins a day or ten a week, and Pin Generator keeps generating and scheduling fresh pins from your content on its own, on a rolling basis, without you going back in to start a new batch each time. Connect your blog’s RSS feed on top of that, and it picks up new posts the moment you publish them and starts making pins from those too. Once it’s set up, you’re mostly just checking in and approving what it makes rather than building each pin yourself.
You can also build your own templates so what it generates still looks like your brand instead of something generic, and it has its own keyword research tool and trend alerts built in for choosing what to target in the first place.
If you’ve got a year’s worth of blog posts that never made it to Pinterest, this is the fastest way to actually get them there.
6. Pexels
If you don’t have your own photography or video footage, you’ll need stock photos and videos, and Pexels is one of the best free resources for that. The library is large enough that you’ll usually find something close to what you need.
As a writer, you’ll likely need stock photos and videos for more than just blog post graphics. You can use Pexels for book promotion pins, mood-based pins built around a genre or theme, or visuals for freebies and writing prompts, basically anywhere you need an image but don’t have one of your own. Pexels also connects directly inside Canva, so you can search and pull images while you’re already designing instead of downloading them separately and uploading them again.
7. Notion
This one isn’t Pinterest-specific, but planning is genuinely half the work of a Pinterest strategy, and Notion is where a lot of writers end up doing that planning.
If you’ve never used it, Notion is hard to describe in one word. It’s not just a note-taking app, even though that’s where a lot of people start with it. You could use it to write, plan, keep a calendar, or track things, all inside the same app, on pages you design yourself.
For Pinterest specifically, here is what that looks like in practice. You can use Notion to plan your content before you even start making pins. That might mean a page where you brainstorm pin ideas, group them by topic or season, and jot down the keywords you want to target for each one. It’s a place to think through your Pinterest strategy without losing ideas in a notes app somewhere or on a piece of paper you’ll misplace.
From there you can turn that same page into a tracker. List every blog post you’ve written, and next to each one keep a note on whether you’ve made a pin for it yet, which board it went on, and what keyword you were targeting. You can lay that out as a simple list, or set it up as a board with columns like “To Pin,” “Scheduled,” and “Posted,” where you move each blog post from one column to the next as you work through it.
The note-taking side of it is useful too. Click into any post on that list and it opens into its own page where you can write down ideas for pin angles, paste in the link to the pin design, or note what worked and what didn’t after you’ve seen the analytics. Everything stays in one place instead of being spread across a notebook, a separate doc, and your memory.
I’ll be honest, Notion has a real learning curve when you first open it. It can feel like an empty room with no furniture at first. But once you’ve put together even one simple page for tracking your pins, it holds your whole Pinterest plan in one place instead of scattered everywhere else.
8. Save To Pinterest Chrome Extension
The Save to Pinterest Chrome Extension lets you pin anything from the web in just a couple of clicks. Found a blog post you want to share later? Spotted an image that fits your book’s vibe? Just click the extension and pin it to the right board. With this extension, you wouldn’t need to open Pinterest separately whenever you discover any idea related to your writing projects.
Pinterest tends to favour accounts that stay active and keep adding fresh content, including content that isn’t necessarily your own. Pinning consistently from other sources, alongside your own pins, is a low-effort way to keep your boards active without setting aside dedicated time to do it.
The chrome extension is helpful for saving any source of inspiration for later, and for creating mood boards or research related ideas.
9. Tasty Pins WordPress Plugin
If you’re a writer who blogs (using WordPress), whether to share your writing process, attract readers, or talk about your work, there’s a good chance people visiting your blog will want to save your posts to Pinterest for later. What Tasty Pins does is make sure that when they do, the right image gets pinned with the right description.
Without a plugin like this, Pinterest just grabs whatever image it finds first on your page, which is often your featured image or a random graphic that wasn’t designed for Pinterest at all. Tasty Pins gives you control over that. You can set a specific Pinterest-optimised image for each post, write a custom pin description with the right keywords, and even hide that image from your actual blog page so it doesn’t disrupt your layout. Your readers only see your post as normal, but when they hit the save button, Pinterest gets exactly what you want it to get.
It also solves a problem most WordPress bloggers don’t realise they have. The alt text on your images is supposed to describe the image for Google and for accessibility purposes. It’s not meant to be a Pinterest description. Tasty Pins lets you separate the two, so you’re not forcing one piece of text to do two very different jobs.
10. Pingroupie
Group boards used to be one of the main ways to get pins seen on Pinterest. Their influence has faded compared to a few years ago, since Pinterest’s algorithm now favors fresh, individual pins more than shared boards. But they’re still worth using. Group boards are useful for writers who want to collaborate with other writers. And to find the right group boards, Pingroupie is a handy tool.
You search for boards specific to your genre, like poetry, fiction writing, or self-publishing, and Pingroupie shows you details like how many collaborators a board has, how many followers it has, and how recently pins were added to it. That last detail is very important. A board with thousands of followers but no recent activity is not worth your time. A smaller, more active board will usually do more for you.
Pingroupie also has a section showing top-performing pins related to writing and books specifically, pulled from across the boards in its directory. This is a useful way to see what’s actually getting engagement in your niche right now.
Don’t Just Pin. Pin Smart.
With these tools, Pinterest can become a major helper in your marketing strategy as a writer.
You can focus on writing and spend less time on Pinterest promotion while getting great results on your marketing. These tools will help you create beautiful pins, analyze how your pins are performing, and schedule posts so it is easier to be consistent on Pinterest. And consistency attracts and retains followers who are genuinely interested in a your work.
