As I type this, I'm sitting at 119 total sales for Relentless Blades. The book was released on October 21, 2024, so 11 weeks ago. As a debut, independent (indie) author, I'm thrilled with this number of sales! When I posted to social media my sales figures, I got several requests to provide my marketing tips. Well, the advice I have is far too lengthy to fit into a series of X/Bluesky posts so I'm putting them here in my blog.
The most important thing is that you must have a quality product for any promotion to work. We all want to believe our books are outstanding, and most of them probably are. Do your best to have an attractive cover, and make sure you've spent the time and effort ensuring it's edited and presented professionally.
I also think it's important to point out up front that we should never try to compare our sales to that of other authors. There are too many factors at play to ever make an accurate comparison. What genre of books does each author write? Is the author traditionally or indie published? Do they only have one book or multiple books? Have they built up a following already?
My 119 sales in 11 weeks may be considered outstanding by one author, but dreadful for another. There is an author I follow on X right now who just announced she received 260 PRE-ORDERS for her latest book!!! She has a much larger following then I have and has a large catalog of published books to her credit. It would be ridiculous for me to compare my sales to her.
I do only have one published book at the moment so take my advice with that perspective in mind. One thing I tried to do was start building my social media following well in advance of my book's release. I started this blog two years before the book was published and opened up my X account. I don't think I made much headway, but the point remains that it's never too early to start promoting and marketing your book.
With that in mind, one thing you need to figure out your short and long-term goals. Are you wanting to get your book to as many readers as fast as you can? Do you want to make as much money, as fast as you can? As I only have the one book so far, I cannot attest to this with personal experience, but most of the authors I follow all seem unified in stating that your sales grow the more books you publish. It seems to be that by the time you publish your third book, things really start to take off. So, the best thing you can do is to write your next book!
My strategy so far has leaned more towards wanting to get my book out to as many people as possible. I have a full-time job so don't rely on these sales for my living, so I can afford not to generate much revenue. Keep that in mind as you read my tips.
1) As mentioned above, start your marketing and outreach early. Get your website/blog going. Start generating buzz in social media.
2) Well before the book release, reach out to book review bloggers and websites. Try to get your book in front of as many of these people as you can. See if you can get some blogs to partner with you to do a book cover reveal. I think I did okay at this but could have been better. I got about three or four bloggers to review my book, and I got SFFInsiders to do a cover reveal. Ideally, you'll get even more.
3) Get your book out to as many "Advanced Reader Copy" (ARC) reviewers as you can before release so you can hopefully get some reviews ready to go as soon as your book is published. Send the book to as many ARC readers as you can get because many of them will never finish the book or leave a review.
4) Set your book release date and really start hyping it up. Post on X, Bluesky, Facebook, Goodreads, instagram, TikTok, etc.
5) Do not be afraid to approach friends/family/co-workers to help you promote and to buy your book. Out of the 119 sales I've made so far, at least 50 have been from this group. Of course, be mindful of any rules you have in your workplace, but if you're able, don't be shy about letting your co-workers know you published a book. I checked with my supervisor first and got the okay, so I blasted my book out to our TEAMS message group. The reception was overwhelmingly positive. In fact people were so interested that I scheduled a 30-minute presentation where I went over my book and my publishing journey.
6) I launched my book at my base prices and maintained those levels for the first month. As I headed into the holiday season (from Thanksgiving through now) I dropped the prices on all three formats to basically as low as Amazon would allow me to go. So, for me that was $.99 Kindle, $11.99 Paperback and $16.99 hardback. As I said, my goal was sales, not making money and trust me, I did not make much. In full transparency, a $.99 kindle sale netted me a whopping $.35, and that was the majority of my sales.
7) Look for promotional opportunities. A fellow author let me know about the annual Holiday MegaSale. The requirement for this 2-day sale was to price your book at $.99 or free. I made about 9 sales from this event. Again, if making money is your goal, this may not be a great benefit to you. Part of the participation requirement was to donate a minimum of $10 to the Mary Cariola Center. If you do the math, you'll see I "lost" money in the deal, although the money I donated was to a worthy cause, so I did not mind it one bit.
9) Interact with others besides just promoting yourself. Respond to other posters. Pose interesting questions for people. Share your likes and hobbies. You are more than just your book, so let people see that.
10) Look for those who are specifically requesting books in your genre. I spend a few minutes every day scanning Bluesky/X to see if I find posts from people looking for a fantasy book. When I find one, I'm sure to respond with my book.
11) On the subject of advertising. I've only tried a couple advertising approaches. The first is Amazon ads, and for me, they were not very helpful. The cost for click (at least in the fantasy genre) is usually fairly high and when you're only making $.35 from a $.99 kindle sale, and an ad click is usually more and it usually takes 10-20 clicks for a sale, you can see it's not a great money-maker. Some have phenomenal success with it, so feel free to try, but do not be surprised if it's not too helpful. I suspect those that are successful are those with a fairly large following already and at least several published books.
I tried RobinReads and BookBongo promotions. While they both helped generate some sales, again the cost was much more than the sales generated. I will likely start branching out to try other options in the future like Facebook ads.
12) TikTok - My understanding is that TikTok can be great for marketing. I dabble in it a bit, but not enough to give any advice. If you've found a lot of success, I'd love to hear about it.
13) Promote yourself relentlessly. You are your biggest cheerleader. If you don't believe in yourself and promote yourself, nobody else will. Try to vary your postings and vary the media but do it.
Be prepared for some potential backlash. Envy is a poisonous emotion. There will be those who are jealous of any success you achieve. Some people may gripe that you post too much promoting your book. Some may see your posting about your achievements, as boasting. Some may disparage your success as not that great. It's the nature of social media unfortunately. On the positive side, I've not experienced much of this...yet. So far, the community has been very positive, and I've been most thankful.
I'm taking my book off-sale today, so I suspect my sales figures will drop significantly. I'll have to adapt and evolve to keep making sales. I still have a lot to learn and there are many who do a far better job at promoting then I do. By no means should anything I've written be interpreted as the way you should promote and market your book. I'm only providing an account of what I've done so far. I hope you find some of it helpful.
Now, I need to get back to writing my sequel. I just hit the 50,000-word mark, so about halfway done. :)
