Marketing (gag)

It’s the biggest hurdle facing indie authors (and trad published authors, to some degree). How do I market my book?!

There are a lot of people out there who will tell you what to do. There are a lot of people out there who you can pay to do marketing. What I’ve found is that most of the advice out there is highly nuanced, with lots of asterisks.

When I started my publishing journey, I thought that social media would be my secret weapon. I think a lot of authors believe this. Thanks to these platforms, we can directly interact with readers! Surely, that’s an advantage. Right?

I don’t think it is. I think algorithms prevent readers from seeing most efforts by authors to get their work out in the world. I started thinking about this when I stopped and looked at some of the larger accounts I follow. People with a lot of followers who get almost no reach on their posts about their books. People with few followers who have sold a bunch of books. People with a decent following who sell a ton of books but get no engagement on their posts.

Clearly, social media ain’t moving books.

The one caveat to that is if a big reviewer talks about your book. You can cold message them and try to get them to review your work, but it seems like it’s kind of just luck. And luck isn’t a marketing strategy.

Anyway.

What about ads? I’ve heard varying things about ads. I’m currently in the middle of my first ad campaign on Amazon, and I’ll let y’all know how that works out. I’m guessing that this strategy really only works well if you have the money to scale it. If you can afford a big campaign, it’s probably a decent ROI. The problem is that a lot of indies simply can’t spend hundreds of bucks on marketing every month.

At the end of the day, I think what sells books online is the same as what sells them in brick and mortar stores: a cool title, engaging artwork, and an intriguing synopsis. And a whole lot of time and patience.