Tope 10 Tips On Marketing For Indie Authors

13/1/2024

Books don’t sell themselves. They have to be marketed and learning how to market a book effectively can be time consuming.

It can also be expensive, especially as there are so many sharks out there who would like to take your money but not give you very much in return.

But you can kick start your marketing efforts by following our top 10 marketing tips for self-published authors.

1. Make time for marketing

The one thing every successful indie author can tell you is that marketing takes up a lot of time.

But the same authors will also tell you that if you don’t put enough time into marketing, you will never sell any books. Or at least, you won’t sell many.

If your dream is to become a best-selling author, you also have to become a good book marketer.

But marketing doesn’t stop when your book has started selling. If you stop marketing, the sales will stop too.

This is pretty much a lifetime commitment.

You need to spend a minimum of an hour a day marketing your books. That can be more than doubled in the early days or when you have a new book coming out.

Yes, it’s a lot. There is no tip in this list that makes marketing any less time consuming.

No indie author, even ones who are good at marketing, became an “overnight success”, so you also have to learn to be patient.

Patience isn’t just a virtue – it is an essential.

That isn’t something people want to hear in today’s “instant gratification” world. But if you try marketing for a week, get no results and stop because you think it isn’t working – well it won’t work.

It wasn’t the marketing that failed, it was the lack of patience that caused the failure.

It is said in the marketing industry that buyers have to have 7 “touches” of a product before they buy it. A touch is any sort of exposure to the product and includes seeing marketing messages on-line

It takes time for those 7 “touches” to happen. You could be lucky and get them within a few days, or it could take weeks, months or even years. But the more marketing you do, the more “touches” the readers will get and the quicker it will be for you to make sales.

2. Use multiple approaches to marketing.

Using one approach to marketing may bring you some results, but using several different approaches will produce even better results (which is why marketing is so time consuming).

People respond to marketing in different ways. Some will respond to direct advertising, but others would rather die than click on an ad. Which is why you need to use multiple approaches to reach different people.

By using all the different approaches listed below, in combination and at different times, you will tap into several of the different ways that people respond to marketing.

We promoted this blog as the “top 10 tips”, but that doesn’t mean that there are only 10, so be prepared to research some of the ones we haven’t mentioned. Our past blogs are full of other approaches, and they can be found in our blog archive.

3. Cover

The book cover is the first thing the reader sees and it does quite a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to marketing. It has to attract the reader’s attention at the same time as it tells them about the genre of the book.

Spend some time looking at other authors’ book covers, especially the best sellers in your genre. What have they got in common?

But most of all a book cover has to look professional – even if it was created by an amateur.

If you can design your own covers using Canva or BookBrush (other graphics packages are available) and make them look professional, then that ‘s great. But if you can’t it is worth spending a little bit of money to get the right cover for your book.

But beware.

There are lots of “designers” out there and they don’t all do a good job. Also, the book covers they show on their profiles may not actually be their work. Seek recommendations from other authors, because they have trodden this path before and may be able to point you in the right direction.

4. Blurb

This is the other bit of marketing that does a lot of heavy lifting. So many books don’t sell because their blurbs are just snores-ville.

Don’t try to describe your book in your blurb. You’ll never do it justice.

Instead describe how exciting/entertaining/dramatic/thrilling/romantic/funny your book is.

The first sentence has to hook the reader.

It doesn’t matter how good sentences 2, 3 and 4 are. If the reader isn’t hooked by the time they get to the first full stop, those other sentences won’t even be read.

We have covered blurb writing in previous blogs and there are lots of other blogs out there on the subject.

READ THEM.

5. Metadata

Meta data is all the stuff that you enter on the first page of whatever publishing platform you use for your book. Author name, title, subtitle, description, category (or categories), keywords etc.

All this information is important because it is the way your book will be found when readers do searches for books to buy. Your metadata has to include words that will match up with their search terms.

Pay particular attention to the category in which you place your book, because if you put your book in the wrong one, you may as well hide it at the back of a cupboard because it will never be found by the readers who read books like yours.

On social media we see a lot of authors saying “you can’t fit my book into any category, it’s a cross between X, Y, Z and something new and original I created.”

This is wrong. Their book has a central theme, and that central theme is the category it belongs in. If ever there was a time to “pick a team”, this is it. One “team” will always be better for your book than the others and you have to work out which it is.

Do some research! Do searches on etailing sites to find the categories that other authors in your genre are using. You will find the information in the “product description” section on Amazon.

Who are the big-name authors in your genre? Take a look at the categories where their books are listed because that is probably where yours should be listed too.

If you get your metadata wrong your book won’t show up in search results. If you get it right it will. Maybe not on the first page, or the second page or even the third but it will be in the results somewhere. The better the match between the search terms and the metadata, the higher it will be.

When it comes to keywords, do more research. Don’t just try to guess them, try them out to see what sort of search results you get. Use incognito browsing so you don’t get offered your own books or books like the ones you have bought in the past. If you don’t get books like the one you’ve written, then the keywords aren’t the right ones to use for your book.

6. Social media presence

The important thing about social media is that it is social!

In years gone by, being on social media was a great place to promote your books for free. However, so many authors are now using it for that purpose that readers now tend to just scroll past book promotions.

That doesn’t mean you don’t have to bother with social media. But it does mean that you should use it more to build relationships than you do for promotion.

And we do mean real relationships, ones that involve conversations. Asking random questions in order to get lots of responses is not a relationship and it isn’t a conversation.

Finally, don’t focus on attracting writers, focus on attracting readers. Yes, writers will support you and give you “likes”, but they aren’t the people you need to be talking to if you want to sell books. Readers, on the other hand, are always looking for new books to read. (yes, we know that writers also read books, but there are many more readers than there are writers).

How do you identify readers? By starting conversations with people.

We recommend Facebook, X and Pinterest. We don’t recommend Instagram, TikTok or similar. But we may be wrong so if you think you can make them work for you, then give them a whirl.

7. Advertise

It pays to advertise, that’s why big corporations spend so much money on it. And it can pay back for indie authors too if they do it the right way.

The wrong way is to pay on-line book promotion sites to blast out X or Facebook posts and to “feature” your books on their websites. The posts are ignored and the website entries get lost in the crowd.

Use the outlets that have been proven to work for other authors. For us this is Amazon and Pinterest.

Both platforms are used by people who want to buy something, so the battle is half won before you start. All you have to do after that is to learn to use them effectively.

We have sold books using Facebook advertising, but Amazon Ads and Pinterest have both been more successful for us.

I have provided some links to resources at the end of this blog. For Amazon, once you have seen their videos, I would recommend undertaking Bryan Cohen’s “5 Day Author Ads Challenge” where he teaches authors how to use Amazon’s algorithms to get better results for less money.

8. Your own website

Having your own website isn’t for everyone and if you don’t think it is going to be your thing, that’s fine.

However, if you do decide to get a website, or you have one already, it is useless if you can’t get people to go to it to look at your books.

You need what are called “reader magnets”.

There are two things you can put on your website to attract readers.

One is complete short stories that can be downloaded for free.

The second is free extracts of your books, with links embedded to take the reader to the complete book so they can buy it when they have finished the extract – assuming they liked the extract, of course.

Blogs can be a reader magnet – if you are reading this it is because we drew you in with our magnet – but they take a lot of time to write, especially as you need to post new blogs regularly.

If you are considering getting your own website, wait until you have at least 3 books published. The cost can’t be justified if you only have one book to sell.

But remember, your website is like your book. Nobody is going to trip over it by accident. Use the other marketing tips in this blog to get people to visit your website or you may as well not bother having it.

If you don’t want a website, at least have a Facebook page dedicated to you as an author. Keep it separate from your personal page and use it like you would a website.

9. Price Promotions

Price promotions are a great way to kick start sales of a new book, by reducing the price of a previous book.

Putting your book on sale for a low price can attract sales, boost you up the sales rankings and get you reviews. However, they won't earn you much in the way of royalties, so you have to strike the right balance.

Where price promotions really work is by reducing the price of an existing book and using it to promote the new book. Make sure that you include an extract of the new book in the reduced price book to entice people to buy it. This may mean having to change your ebook’s MS and re-publishing, but that doesn’t take too long.

This tactic works very well if you put the new book on “pre-order”, which allows you to generate interest before the actual release date. Your pre-order sales all show up in the sales rankings on the day the new book launches, and they catapult you upwards.

We do give away free books from time to time, but we don’t recommend it as a major marketing tool. Free books tend to be downloaded by people who only want a free book. They often don’t result in subsequent sales. Free books don’t feature in sales rankings, so they have no impact in those terms, though they may provide you with a few more reviews.

It is better to discount the price of the book for a period. Amazon allows you to do this for 5 days at a time if your book is enrolled in KDP Select, but even if it isn’t, you can reduce the price on the book’s set-up pages on KDP as long as you don’t go below the minimum price that Amazon sets.

Draft to Digital allows you to generate Smashwords coupons for discounts up to 100% and you can publicise these through your social media.

But special offers are only special if they are for a limited time. Keeping books listed at a discounted price for a long period reduces the impact they have.

10. Learn how to market effectively.

We should probably have made this the No 1 tip, but if we’d done that you wouldn’t have read the rest of the blog.

There is no substitute for learning the skills necessary to do any job. Exactly the same applies to learning how to market your books.

The biggest selling indie authors aren’t the ones who have published the best books. They are the authors who have learnt how to become good at marketing. You can write a mediocre book (we've read some of them) and still become a best-selling author by learning how to market. You can also write the best book ever written and it will never sell because you didn’t learn to do your own marketing.

Your book, your rules. All we can say is that we sell books because we market relentlessly, and we are always trying to learn new marketing skills.

We have included a link below to direct you to a website where you can get some training for free to get you started.

Resources

One blog won’t make you a marketing expert, so here we list some resources you can tap into to help you with your marketing.

Marketing training. FutureLearn offers free training wherever you are in the world. Search their site for a wide range of marketing courses. You can complete one in a day if you put your mind to it.

Using Pinterest for marketing: Beginners use this link, more advanced users should use this link to find out how to use it for business (and selling your book is a business)

Amazon advertising: watch their videos to learn how to use their ads platform.

To learn to use Amazon Ads more cheaply and effectively, try Bryan Cohen’s 5 Day Author Ads Challenge. This is the Facebook page to find out when the next challenge starts. They usually run once every 3 to 4 months.

What to take away from this blog

There are two key messages that we hope you will take away from this blog:

1. Marketing is the only way an indie author can ever sell more than a handful of copies of their books.
2. Learning how to market is the only way to make marketing work for you.

If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.

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Tope 10 Tips On Marketing For Indie Authors

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