Getting The Word Out
When you ask a writer what their least favorite part of the job is, nine times out of ten, the answer isn’t taking criticism, or writer’s block. It’s having to market yourself. Now, if you’re strictly a hobby writer and don’t care if anyone reads your stuff, that’s one thing. But if you want people to know your book exists, and pay money for it, then you have to market yourself. I touched on this subject a bit in my last post, so I thought I’d expand on that this time. These are the four pieces of marketing that, in my humble opinion, are non-negotiable for authors today.
ARCs
ARC stands for “Advance Reader Copy” and this is crucial for getting your book reviews. Have you ever been browsing Amazon, and seen a book with no reviews, or only one or two? It doesn’t instill confidence that the book is good, does it? By giving out some free (I stress, free) copies of your book before release, to people who promise to leave an honest (I stress, honest) review of it, you can have a decent chunk of reviews for the book right away on release day. You can use sites like NetGalley, BookSirens, Nerdfam or BookSprout to curate ARC readers for you. Different ARC services cater to different genres. BookSirens is more for romance, while Nerdfam caters to Fantasy and Sci-Fi.
Social Media
I hate it, but I have social media accounts under my pen name. This isn’t necessarily going to garner you sales, but it gets people interested in YOU. The question people always ask when they’re unpublished is, “But what do I talk about on socials, I’m not published?” I wondered the same thing. The fact is, even if you are published, not every post should be, “Buy my book!” In fact, most of your posts shouldn’t be trying to sell something. But you can share memes, show a picture of a pet, talk about your journey to get published, etc. If you’d like people to buy your work, you need them invested in you as a person. That’s what sets you apart from everyone else out there.
A Newsletter
Believe it or not, this is great way to market yourself, because now people are getting email updates from you and you have their undivided attention. You’re just going to need to remember to send regular updates – I send out a newsletter twice a month. There’s an amazing book called Newsletter Ninja that is pretty much the bible on this, but essentially you’ll want to offer a short story or novella, for free, in exchange for signups. This is your “reader magnet”. I use BookFunnel to host it, and you can set it so people have to sign up for the newsletter to get access to the story. BookFunnel also lets you do group promos with other authors to get eyes on your story. I did one and added some 30 subscribers to my mailing list.
Paid Ads
This is something you’ll need to do – eventually. However, I would not worry about this until you have published multiple books, or have a completed series. The ROI will not be high enough on a standalone or unfinished series (many readers are leery of starting an unfinished series because the author may abandon it.) Once you have many books available to read, though, getting a reader to look at one of yours will likely lead them to get everything you’ve got available, should they like the first offering they come across.
There are plenty of other marketing tools out there as well, but these are the ones basically all authors of note currently employ in some way. And, if a traditional publishing house reaches out to you about a manuscript you’ve submitted, they’re going to want to know that you do these things.
