I recently self-published my first novel and have spent a lot of time reading and listening to podcasts about marketing. It’s very overwhelming trying to take in all the activities I ‘should’ be doing to promote my book.
But when I stepped back and really thought about it, the people I was listening to have been in the writing business for a long time, with multiple books and established writing careers. For me, right at the start of my writing career, activities such as paid-for a
dvertising just aren’t possible and I was beginning to get quite disillusioned with it all.
When you’re in a difficult situation the best way to get out of it is to get the ear of someone who knows and ask them the right question. I’m a Patreon supporter of The Creative Penn, and rely a lot on Joanna’s good sense and industry knowledge. As a sponsor of her podcast, I can access monthly subscriber-only Q&A audio and ask my own questions. So, I explained that I’m a brand-new author with one book, who has a full-time day job so very little time or budget to play with – what is the one thing that I should focus on.
I was lucky that Joanna was able to fit in my question this month and gave me a great answer.
By putting my book into KDP Select I was already on the right track. The second thing I needed to do was to start to build my audience and grow the number of reviews on my book. Neither of these are easy and won’t happen overnight, but I’ve already made a start. I have a sign-up form on my blog so that readers can sign up to my newsletter. It’s a pop-up (which hopefully isn’t too annoying) and I don’t know how effective it is. But I’ve also discovered that MailChimp will create a sign-up form which exists as a website link where people can go to sign up – try it – mailing list. I had seen other authors do this, but hadn’t worked out how they did it.
Her other suggestion was to make use of KDP’s five free days for promotion. It’s as simple as it sounds in that it’s five days when you can offer your book as a freebie to attract more traffic. And let’s face it, what reader in the world wouldn’t want to take advantage of a free book.
This has basically been a really good lesson in following the old adage ‘don’t try to run before you can walk’. I could try to do all the flashy stuff, and spend lots of money doing it, but I think I’d end up running myself into the ground and potentially seeing very little return on investment. Instead, I feel fairly confident that I’m doing ‘something’ towards my book marketing in the short term and hopefully this will result in more sales.
In the meantime, I’m left with the guilt-free head space to get on with editing my second book without worrying that I should be doing something else. Once book two is finished then I can look back at marketing activities and see what else I can do that’s quick and easy.
Do you have any recommendations for easy-to-do marketing activities and how effective are they?