Marketing Indie Authors …
I completely understand why some people may be hesitant to read indie author material. I could take this blog post and put it on Amazon as a short story if I wanted to. But … If the author has put even a modicum of thought into the product they are distributing. Let’s not play around fellow authors, we are distributing a product. Then we have thought about product quality, how we want our names to be synonymous with our product and hopefully, if we have had a really good day, marketing.
Marketing appears to be the pitfall I have heard a lot in message boards and other places. I assume because its self marketing and who wants to put their hand up in the middle of a crowded room and say loudly, “over here, hey all of you, over here. I wrote a book, here’s what its about. Buy it please on Amazon (yes I did just link my book there) because I need their analytics to see that people are buying it.” What, you don’t do that? I’m shocked I really am. Marketing also detracts from what we want to be doing, which is actual writing. Marketing is hard, there is a reason there are entire Bachelors degrees dedicated to it.
You HAVE to do it, like all the time, constantly without fail, do it. You have to be out there, in every single social media platform there is, I’m doing B roll right now to start a youtube channel (gulp).
This may seem like rambling, and its 5 am so cut me some slack. Marketing is important. If the budget for your book is let’s use an honest figure $1200. That’s not a great, editor but it’s a decent one. That’s doing the copywriting and type setting yourself, You’ll should spend at least a quarter of that, $300 on marketing. I have not found the countdown deals on Amazon to be very effective, it appears as though the same number of people buy my book at the lower price as they do at the higher one. I have promoted the book through Facebook ads, difficult to tell how much direct impact there is, but there does appear to be some. I have read, although not tested that goodreads ads are not incredibly effective. I do plan to do a book tour with a promotion site that I have heard good things about as the second book comes out. I’m going to go with their recommendation, however my hope is that if I promote the second book through them, and lower the price on the first, the first book will come to their attention more organically and they’ll be willing to purchase it due to the price. I have considered doing a bookbub add, however the price is upwards of $500. I have read however that the results are amazing, and not just from their site. We’ll see if I ever get there. My marketing budget is shoe string, its word of mouth. I’m promoting an event I’m having in Worcester, MA this weekend with a fb add, wait for it, $1 a day. Yes, thank you. BUT, it’s been put in front of 500 people and I’ve got 8 interested, which doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s about 5 more interested than I was going to pull on my own. If only two of them show up, and they happen to tell two friends each about me that’s 12 people. 12 people that I was not going to reach on my own, so is $4 worth 12 people? I think so.
New Video from Murphy Napier, voice of the audio book, My Only Sunshine, avid supporter with 50k youtube subscribers.
My relationship with her was pure luck, and has turned out to be the best thing I could have done for my book. She auditioned to be the voice of My Only Sunshine, she did an amazing job and what was most important was that her timeline of availability matched up with what I needed. So that was it, that was the decision, made. I later figured out that she had a youtube channel where she reviewed books and had a pretty decent following. That was six months ago, her following has grown since then and so has her channel. I am so happy she is finding success in both her audio book career and her youtube channel. It is also super nice, when I see my book in her pile of recommendations! This is 100% a population of people that I could never reach on my own. If you are even considering doing an audio book, I would strongly encourage it. Performance wise it appears as though my audio book will pay for itself inside of six months. The paperback and ebook look like it will take 15 months.
The last nugget of advice I have, if it means anything is post regularly and don’t be afraid. You wrote a book and published it, WOW, tell people, tell everyone. Find an angle you can work it into the conversation until everyone who knows you knows that you wrote a book and their friends know you wrote a book, their mothers, aunts, fathers, children. Your span of influence is larger than you think. Good luck and happy writing.
