Marketing for Indie Books

If you’ve ever written anything, you’ve also read flaky articles and seen useless videos giving you advice about how to market your writing. This ‘might-as-well-be-AI-generated’ advice always includes the phrases: tell all your friends, use your network etc…Let’s get real. As writers, our hope and dream is that a person, somewhere on the other side of the globe, somehow picks up our writing and resonates with it. We want to touch people that we wouldn’t have otherwise reached. We aren’t writing for the purpose of harassing everyone we know to buy our book, whether it is relevant to them or not.

On that note, all the below advertising methods are hands-on and I have personally used all of them to advertise my first two books and sell them to strangers (NOT to my “network”).

My books were hybrid published, meaning that I used a professional publisher that provided editing, all interior and exterior design and made the book available to all major retailers. However, because I had no agent, all advertising was in my hands. The publisher did nothing and if I had also done nothing, then the only person that would have read my book would have been my mom.

On that note though, my books look and read like professionally published books and have overall good reviews. If the only person that has edited your writing is you and your book is therefore a compilation of grammatical errors and plot holes then the below may help you sell some initial copies but the terrible reviews you will receive will prevent any future advertising from working. So, before you rush out to get your book on the shelves, make sure it looks and reads like a book that you would want to read.

Both of the books I self-advertised are YA/NA dark fantasy fiction. This is a brutally difficult genre to self-advertise because as an adult I do not have a YA following on social media etc…I have found that non-fiction, how-to and self-improvement books, as well as adult romance and horror have an audience pool that is much easier to reach for indie authors. So, whatever worked for me, will definitely work even better for you, if you have an adult genre book.

INSTAGRAM AND FACEBOOK

I have tried both, and with one week of about $30 worth of advertising on Facebook I generally sell between 100–300 hundred copies of my book (depending on time of the year and book price). On the other hand, regardless of how much I spend on Instagram advertising and how I play around with my ads, I sell little to nothing.

I found this phenomenon interesting, since you would think that IG is a lot more active than Facebook these days and thus would be more useful for book sales. However, I think it comes down to how people use each platform. Facebook users tend to watch longer reels and interact longer with content. On the other hand, IG users scroll at road runner speed — they don’t take the time to actually look at things in depth. And, let’s get real, how many ads on IG have YOU clicked on? Me personally, maybe one per year.

So, let’s start with Facebook.

You can sell VERY well via Facebook. However, there is a learning curve. For starters, Facebook tries to practically bully you into accepting all their pre-sets and auto-settings, with constant pop ups as you create your ad about how their ‘suggestions’ will help your ad do better. They’ll even throw in statistics about how much of an audience you may be losing by not following their suggestions. I’m going to be blunt here: if you use any of Facebook’s suggestions, your ad will flop. It will crash and burn.

I am not sure why Facebook’s suggestions stink so much, but they do. I’m also not sure why Facebook pushes so hard for you to use their crappy suggestions — most likely because those suggestions help Facebook make more money.

I have gotten great return-on-investment from Facebook ads, after I learned how to make them myself, unclicking all of Facebook’s auto-settings and ignoring their suggestions. I’m linking this amazing tutorial I initially used, by David Gaughran. It shows step-by-step how to make Facebook ads specifically for Indie authors. Yes, the tutorial is over an hour long. That’s because he literally goes through every setting to use, and every Facebook ‘hidden’ setting to unclick. He makes a book ad as he is doing the tutorial, so you can actually follow along and make your own ad as you watch him. He also explains precisely how to set up your targeting. IF you do things this way (and NOT Facebook’s way), you will sell.

HOW TO CREATE FACEBOOK ADS FOR AUTHORS

Now, onto IG.

Don’t waste your money on IG ads. Plain and simple.

What you can do is start a free author IG account and promote yourself that way. However, you need to realize that it takes months, or potentially years to gain a significant following that truly interacts with your content on social media. Additionally, you can NOT just post ads for your book on your IG account. Trust me, I have seen those types of author accounts: they are boring, they feel pushy, and no one follows them. Think about it: do you want to follow accounts that do nothing except advertise the same product in circles?

You need to find a niche that people who might enjoy your book can resonate with. For example, many authors do book reviews for books in genres similar to what they write in. This way, they gain a following that is interested in what they write about. Then, once they have that following, they post (only every now and then) something about their own book. Again, keep self-advertising on your IG account low — in my opinion for every 5 posts you make, four of them should NOT be about your book. If you gain a following and then start pumping out ads for your book every morning, people will start to unfollow you.

BOOKBUB

If you haven’t heard of Bookbub, it’s a discovery service for books. They do this by offering free and discounted books through newsletters as well as on their site.

Authors can set up a Bookbub partner account and advertise their books via Bookbub.

DIRECT LINK TO BOOKBUB

David Gaughran also has a pretty good tutorial about how to create Bookbub ads and for him as well as some other authors these ads have worked well. Personally, I have followed every tutorial on Bookbub ads, (and even read a book about Bookbub!) and have found Bookbub very cost UN-effective.

To be more specific, Bookbub ads have a MUCH greater learning curve than Facebook ads and at a MUCH higher cost. That means that you will waste a lot of money before you finally create an ad that works on Bookbub. So, when this finally happened, I was thrilled. However, after using the ad twice (a week at a time, during different parts of the year) it stopped working. After this, no matter what I did and how I altered my ads, they never worked well again.

I personally believe that while Bookbub does have a huge reader base, this reader base is for specific genres. I have noticed that they are huge in the romance and horror categories — specifically very stereotypically arched romance and horror. However, for more serious fiction and for fiction that overlaps multiple genres, I do not see them as having a large audience base. In terms of non-fiction, I’m not sure. However, David Gaughran writes mainly non-fiction and really likes the results he gets with Bookbub. So, it might be worth giving a shot if romance, horror or non-fiction are your genres.

Bookbub also has something called Featured Deals. You have to apply to be a Featured Deal and apparently if your book is accepted you can sell thousands of copies from one Featured Deal. However, you need a minimum of 100 great reviews and some powerful accolades to even have a smidgeon of a chance at being accepted, as you will be competing literally against famous authors for these feature spots.

Personally, I don’t know any Indie author who has been accepted for a feature deal. But, give it a shot. You never know! You still have to pay if you are a Featured Deal, however, if you can truly sell thousands of copies then the payment would be worth it.

Written Word Media

Written Word Media is a book promotion platform. They offer to create and run Facebook ads and Amazon ads for you, as well as provide email and newsletter promos. I have tried them for all of the above and here’s my verdict:

Facebook ads: They work decently. I’ll generally sell 30–50 books for one of their week-long ads. However, once I learned how to create good Facebook ads and target them properly myself, my Facebook ads did far better than theirs. As I mentioned, I usually sell around 100–300 copies with my own week-long ad and I don’t spend much. But, if you are having trouble making your own Facebook ads, try going through Written Word Media.

Amazon ads: Because I was hybrid published, it’s a weird and oddly difficult process for me to get into Amazon and create my own Amazon ads. So, for me, Written Word media has been very useful for this. However, this year I am getting all my rights back for my books and republishing them fully myself, so I will be playing around with Amazon ads myself in the near future and will let you know what I learn.

I have personally not found Written Word media’s newsletter and email promos effective and I would not suggest spending money on them. However, they do have a thing called Freebooksy which I have heard works very well if you are able to give out free, ebooks to simply increase your reader base and exposure. Again, my publisher would not allow me to offer free ebooks so I was not able to give this a shot — I might in the coming year. If you have tried Freebooksy, let me know how it worked for you.

DIRECT LINK TO WRITTEN WORD MEDIA

Virtual Book Tours

The way virtual book tours work is that the ‘tour company’ locates tour participants (bloggers, vloggers, tiktockers, Instagrammers etc…) who might agree to any one of the following things:

1. Read, post an Amazon and Goodreads review of your book, and post about your book on their media channels, OR
2. Read and post about your book on their media channels, OR
3. Just make a promotional post about your book.

The price differs depending on what you want, but you may get more than what you paid for. For example, the tour participant may agree to just make a post about your book, but they may start reading your book, love it, and make multiple posts plus write a review.

There are a number of virtual book tour companies. I’ve tried three. Out of the three that I’ve tried this is the one I liked best:

R & R Book Tours

Their prices are reasonable and they have good communication as well as a good mix of types of tour participants.

You can choose to provide the tour participants with paper copies of your book (which is a bit more costly for you but often gets people more excited to read the book and they are more likely to make multiple posts about it). Or, you can just provide them with free e-copies or PDFs.

Often the tour company will offer to run a contest as part of the tour, with the contest winner receiving a free, hard copy of your book. I suggest taking the contest option as it creates much more interest in the posts and sending out one, free copy of your book won’t break the bank. With this option, you can specify that contest winners must be located in North America (or on whatever continent you are located) in order to keep your costs of shipping the book down.

WARNING: There are many Instagrammers and Tiktokers offering to post about books or provide social media book tours for sometimes up to $1,000. These people often do have over 100,000 followers. However, they are NEVER worth it. Most of these people have tons of fake and/or inactive followers. Additionally, while book tours are good for some things, they are not particularly good for book sales.

So, what are they good for?

Reviews: It’s brutally hard to get reviews. I’ve been lucky that my book tour participants generally enjoyed the book and even when it wasn’t part of the deal, they often read the book anyways and posted reviews.

Exposure and Contacts: I’ve kept in touch and have become friends with some of mybook tour participants. Some of them have even offered to promote any of my future books for free, because they really enjoyed my writing.

So, on that note, do a book tour or two for the exposure and reviews, but don’t spend much money on it.

Traditional — Radio and TV

Yes, you can still do traditional TV and radio and it will help you sell if you can promote yourself as a ‘local author’. Most cities/towns love to promote local and most people love to support local. Here’s what happened to me.

I contacted the local radio station of the city where my story was based. I told them that the characters specifically went to one of the local high schools and that a number of local spots were mentioned in the book. I then asked them if they would be interested in talking about this. What ended up happening is that one of the radio hosts, who had a significant local, social media following offered to post about my book if I sent her a copy. I did this and besides posting about it she also mentioned it to some people. Then I got a phone call from CTV and was asked to do an interview.

From this, I ended up selling a couple hundred copies. Sure, it wasn’t thousands, but it was something. It was also exposure and it was pretty much free.

Alright, that’s it for this time.

I hope the above helps some of you out there start to figure out the very vague world of indie book advertising. If you have any questions or have additional advertising suggestions, do comment! And as I mentioned up above, this isn't an exhaustive list. I'll do a follow-up article about this topic in the future.

ALSO PUBLISHED ON MEDIUM