In 2020, I started a web page of self-publishing tips. I’ve been adding to it over time, but it’s become very unwieldy, and so I am making a new overflow page. The original tips page contained a lot of detail, but this second post offers general thoughts about promotion strategies.
Compared to others, I am not a particularly fast or prolific writer and I don’t write books for a series. With regard to social media, I post occasionally–but not often–and I certainly do not spend time making multimedia content unless I have carefully planned it in advance. I know some people publish commercially once every year and are regularly posting things on social media (and gaining followers, etc). There is value in doing that, but it’s not for everybody — especially for slowpokes like myself.
The key challenge in self-publishing is deciding what to spend money on and what to forgo or do yourself. You will certainly make mistakes on these decisions. No-budget methods can work occasionally, but they can also be major time sucks with little payoff.
Make your ebook so that readers will be comfortable spending $2.99 or more on it. A low price point may make a book seem more competitive against the majors, but the jump from 70% to 35% earnings on Amazon makes it difficult and maybe even impossible to break even on what you spend for marketing.
The first year of your book’s publication doesn’t matter. Unless you already have a track record and an army of followers or subscribers, chances are that you are going to lose money on it. (I’m almost inclined to say the same for the second year as well).
In-person events are fun — and great way to spend your time occasionally, but they almost never bring in enough sales to make them worthwhile.
If you publish often, I would go for cheap pre-made covers (and save money). But for occasional one-off books, I would spend a lot of time and money making sure that the cover properly conveys the book’s vibe.
I hope this doesn’t comes off sounding too cynical, but writing and publishing books are practically exercises in futility and masochism. The writing process may be rewarding on a psychic level, but the production and promotion can be soul-crushing and wallet-crushing for an indie author. In a way you are investing in an idea or fantasy which is totally anti-commercial.
Reviews are helpful to a point. But having only 2-5 of them is not terrible — as long as they are semi-literate and perceptive. Book description is just as important, if not more. It’s much more important to devise ways to get the ebook in front of people.
If you write in a genre that is not particularly popular or accessible, it can be perfectly acceptable to pay for a trustworthy person or organization to write a review of it. (Midwest Book Review, Self-Publishing Review are my current picks).
Many authors think that dropping your book into an ARC pool will result in more reviews, especially if the site running these ARCs have some mechanisms to penalize freeloaders who don’t post reviews promptly. The problem is that those who are prodded to write reviews often write superficial and worthless reviews and may not even be well-versed in the genre. I’d much rather have a single thoughtful review than ten reviews which are 1-2 sentences long by people who are just phoning it in to improve their score for the ARC pool.
Institutions will simply not purchase ebooks if it hasn’t been reviewed in Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly or Kirkus (or NYTBR). Exceptions are possible if the publisher has previously established itself as a reliable provider of quality books or if the book has won a prize. But to even to be considered for institutional sales, you’re going to have to spend $1500 or more per ebook.
I am generally bullish about videos for marketing. Video interviews especially. Videos are forever! I like short talking head videos, not some pretty graphics and animation. For Personville ebooks, I created a series of 3 minute vids about each ebook which I call “Literary Elevator Pitches” (Here they are on YouTube). Right now, the bookstores don’t let you link to videos, but I think that will change soon.
Exposure is much more important for sales than reviews. That is by far the biggest challenge.
Exposure can be bought, but it often is expensive and can often cost more than the increased sales it earns. Occasionally it is okay to throw money away for extra exposure, but in general you should stick to marketing techniques that pay for themselves and last for a longer period than the short term.
The reason why so many people are writing series are that 1)marketing efforts will accumulate with time, and 2)you can discount the first volume to cheap or free in order to hook readers into buying later volumes. This doesn’t always work out because 1)some stories don’t benefit from sequels and 2)a number of people will never read the first volume or even if they do, won’t be inclined to read volume 2.
A cheap way to get exposure is to have a byline and author bio for an article, but frankly very few websites or Substacks attract enough eyeballs to make it worth it.
Writing reviews is a thankless job, but don’t dismiss the value of doing it as a way to gain extra exposure. This is true especially if 1)your review is one of the only reviews on a book or 2) the website running it gets a lot of eyeballs.
Chasing down reviews or “shares” from individuals is a major time suck. I just spent a day and a half making a list of individuals who are 1)reviewers and 2)run book blogs. I had planned to send them press releases and offers to forward review copies to them. After a day and a half of note-taking, I concluded that 1)most of them wrote superficial reviews on genres I didn’t care about and 2)almost none of them could bring enough eyeballs to make it worth it and 3)it was hard to imagine any of them “liking” this ebook — and it wasn’t my lack of self-confidence fueling this perception; it was a fact. Another idea — to target established critics or bloggers who weren’t reviewers per se — seemed equally futile. But at least I could conceive of these people actually liking my book. Ultimately I decided to compile a much shorter list of 15-20 names of bookish people or artistic people I knew and send them the announcement. That hardly will produce an onslaught of attention and sales.
Netgalley and Booksirens. These are services that you pay to list your advance review copy (ARC) in the hopes that some of them will write reviews. The cost of Netgalley used to put it out of reach for most indie authors, but in the last decade co-ops have formed to share the costs. I used Victory Editing Co-op ($65 per month), making it affordable. Here are my thoughts after listing an ebook for two days:
- Publishers can see a reviewer’s history and stats to make a decision about whether to approve the ARC. This is helpful, but it makes it easy for publishers just to approve the ARC to those who give gushing praise for every book they read.
- Frequent reviewers know how to play the game. So they write fast glib and mostly positive reviews in order to keep their feedback score high enough to garner future ARCs.
- Netgalley is helpful for identifying individuals associated with libraries and schools.
Booksirens is both similar and different. Booksirens lets you pay by the download. It also gives you great access to reviewers. Theoretically speaking, you can browse through the reviewer list and send emails to these people without ever paying a dime for it. I never understood why Booksirens let you do that — with Booksirens link — for free. Only after I tried it myself did I realize that it’s a major time-suck browsing through the reviewer list. I recently spent a few hours browsing through the list of potential reviewers for a particular title and found it nearly impossible to find even one person who might be remotely interested in the title in question.
About these review services, I have heard that some of the reviews can be overly negative. A publisher can screen these reviewers to some extent, but I’m not sure that doing so a good idea or even helpful.
Organic reviews (that is, reviews posted voluntarily and not through a review service) tend to be the most interesting and useful and positive. But how do you get organic reviews? By increasing sales! But can you increase sales if a ebook has no reviews? I’ve found out the hard way that no matter how good the book description and content and price may be, you still need reviews of some kind to make advertising work optimally.
I say this as a longtime blogger and enthusiast, but writing things on your blog rarely increases your exposure. Google used to feature blogposts prominently in search results, but that ended in the late 2010s. Now AI just paraphases a lot of things without really bringing a lot of eyeballs.
Even though author websites don’t matter all that much for book sales, there is value is keeping the same domain — and not letting it expire. It is really reassuring (and a sign of quality and commitment) when a domain is still around 10 years later. A writer doesn’t need to blog often on their own website, but it should be at least once or twice a year — to convince readers that yes, you are still there and alive.
It is believed that many who market books are scammers. More often, they are simply people acting in good faith who overvalue the services they provide. You should still be skeptical of what they promise.
Literary contests are expensive gambles. With some exceptions, it is very rare for a major literary prize to award a prize to an indie author.
Success getting a teaching gig in creative writing depends on 1)getting a Phd, 2)getting signed to a major press or university press and/or 3)regularly publishing in small literary journals. Winning a grant with a significant cash award can also make the difference (if you are courageous/foolish enough to spend the time filling out all those application forms).
Online forums are extremely restrictive about what kind of self-promotion you can do. If you try, be prepared for rejection and rudeness from the Barney Fifes running each forum or subreddit.
Be mindful of your authorial persona and biography. Some details might alienate certain readers, but more than likely will become part of the overall book brand.
I know this sounds crass, but many first-time authors signed by the Big 5 are signed not so much for book quality but their credentials and charisma more than writing talent. Big 5 pay a lot of attention to how this person might come across on podcasts and video interviews and personal appearances. That has always mattered, but now more so than ever. You may not be as exuberant or as hot as the new literary flavor being touted on the talk shows, but don’t be afraid of improving what image of you gets projected to the public.
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Pinning your hopes on Amazon’s algorithm somehow discovering your book and increasing its visibility to readers is unrealistic. Gaming the Amazon algorithms is indeed a thing, but ultimately the problem of exposure has nothing to do with Amazon. It has to do with promotional efforts on the part of you and your publisher to reach consumers. That part often requires a lot of time and money– and frankly many such efforts don’t work as intended for a particular book.
I used to think that getting good reviews is the key to increasing visibility. It is not. If I had a great book page on Amazon (with a stellar cover, great book description and 100 5 star ratings/reviews on Amazon) that would still not solve the problem of increasing exposure (even though it would probably help later).
Amazon provides a lot of (paid) methods for increasing exposure, but I think it is dangerous to rely too much on Amazon’s methods because they literally hold all the cards. (They are practically a monopoly, etc.)
I realize that I have not provided much useful information here. Here’s one tip learned the hard way. Keeping the price very low is not a very effective marketing method for raising visibility. Maybe 5-10 years ago competing on price was a viable strategy, but nowadays, there’s so many low-cost titles even from the majors that it won’t lead to sales except in certain limited circumstances.
