Don’t fall for the scams. No one sells books without a marketing plan.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And right now on every social media platform you can think of are all kinds of ads by hucksters, both young and old, men and women, hocking some “fool-proof system” you can use to “sell 10,000 books in 30 days” or even 7 days, or whatever.
Some of these scammers are only asking for you to plop-down $27, which seems to be the price point of least resistance. Others, are offering you a “free webinar” which is just a sales funnel designed to suck you in and get you excited about their online book resources site that you can get access to for $1,500! But if you act now, you can save $500! They will even finance the [still outrageous] price!
It’s all bullshit. Don’t fall for any of it. You’ll be wasting your money and especially your time.
The real way real (meaning professional) authors market their books profitably is the way any small business that wants to be successful does, and that is with a solid business plan, and in our case as authors, a solid marketing plan as well.
So let’s cut through the bullshit and just get down to the reality of what it takes to successfully market your books professionally.
1. You Need To Write More Than One Book
You’re not going to be a successful author writing and selling just one book. A successful business doesn’t make money month after month selling just one widget to one customer.
You’re going to need 1) an audience of tens of thousands of repeat customers; and 2) you’re going to need need to build a catalog of books before you’re going to see some real profits, preferably 3 to 5 full-length novels, and many more after you write these handful.
If you don’t have that audience or that many books under your belt yet—chill. You’ll get there. This business of self-publishing isn’t going to happen overnight.
The other thing you need to do is—don’t despair! ALL of us started out as unknown authors and with just one or two novels at some point in our writing careers.
It takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. And you are going to be building your own version of Rome.
Too many of us as new authors think that by writing a new novel and uploading it to Amazon, we’ll immediately be seen by millions and become the next J. K. Rowling, Susan Stoker, or Dan Brown. And when that doesn’t magically happen we get discouraged, depressed. We start writing articles about what a failure we are.
Stop. You’re not a failure.
Don’t set unreasonable expectations and don’t allow yourself to get discouraged. You need to plan for success. And to start to achieve success and make that dream a reality…
2. You Need to be a Damn Good Writer
Part of the reason you need more than one book is that as authors we get better with age and experience. Your fifth novel is going to be a damn sight better than your first.
My first novel, looking back, was good, I got great reviews. But my second and third novels were really good. Yours will be too. But you need those organic reviews to judge whether or not you’re on track to building a self-publishing business with books people love and want to buy; or if you’ll just be spinning your wheels as just another ho-hum hobby author.
Are you really that good?
If not, you can and will get better. All of us do. When you see that your work is garnering 4 and 5-star reviews on Amazon, you will know that you’re ready to start building a catalog of your books that people will want to buy.
Keep going. Keep writing. Keep honing your skills. As your catalog of books grows, there is always the temptation for you to want to start marketing, but…
3. Do Not Run Ads — Yet
Most new authors just starting out with one book want to start running ads on Amazon and Facebook or other social media to churn up “buzz” and interest in their new book. We’re all excited about the new novel and we want people to read it!
So we’ll do whatever it takes to get our new book into as many hands as possible, even if just for the reviews. So we start running ads. Buying into promotional sites. Even dropping $27 on a scammer just to see what they offer.
Don’t. You’ll be wasting your money.
Selling just one book is not cost-effective advertising, unless you’re just trying to get some organic reviews. Just keep in mind that you’ll be spending $10 to $20 to make $3 and that is a rude waste of marketing dollars that you really will not have any kind of return for spending.
And selling a book does not guarantee a review. I know, it sucks. Just don’t run ads right now and waste your money.
This includes NOT running ads on free book sites like BookBub and FreeBooksy and other similar sites. You will get lots of traffic from these sites and exactly ZERO sales. No one is selling books to people who only want to read free books. Avoid these free book list sites like the plague. They are a scam and a waste of your time and money.
However, if you want to spend some of your marketing dollars, the first thing you do need to do as an author is…
4. Get a Website
An author website is the one marketing tool you will need out of the gate to begin showing off your growing catalog of work, do some blogging, and building a mailing list of people who love reading what you write.
This website is crucial for ad landing pages in displaying your books and offering a free book to people in exchange for their name and email address.
Most hobby and professional indie authors who are self-publishing have their own website using their own unique domain name with your author or publishing name. Your author or pen name is preferable with a .com TLD (top-level domain). The shorter the better, but don’t abbreviate. Avoid using things like hyphens or myAuthorName.com or SomeName-Author.com. If the .com TLD is not available, there are a bunch of new TLD’s to check out. The goal is to keep your domain short and memorable.
The vast majority of websites on the internet today are built using WordPress as their CMS (content management system). But you can use Wix, SquareSpace, or whomever. WordPress is usually free on most hosting plans.
For WordPress sites, you can use tools like Mailster or MailPoet to easily create forms to collect email addresses like I do. Here’s an example from my own website. Click the “Get Your Free Book Now” button to see how I handle this. I use a bit of JavaScript to automagically pop the subscribe window using a link like HarleyAustin.com/?subscribe, which allows me to use the main home page as my ad landing page.
Using this form, Mailster generates an email with a link where the new subscriber can download either a PDF or EPUB version of the book file for reading on their desktop, Kindle app or device.
Also, about your website, you can do the work yourself, but unless you’re a skilled web and graphic designer, it will look like crap. I hired a skilled professional to do my site and it’s pretty good for the kind of paranormal sci-fi mystery thriller romance novels I write.
WordPress allows you to install all kinds of “themes” that give your site a professional look and feel out of the gate. I recommend buying a professional theme from a marketplace like ThemeForest.net since they often offer better quality themes and come with support if something breaks. But even with the theme, I still hired a designer to make the theme come to life for me.
Once you have your catalog of novels and a functioning website, NOW you can begin marketing and…
5. Building Your Mailing List
But understand, even at this point, you’re not marketing to sell books. NO. What your marketing goal will be is to build your mailing list. Yes, you will sell some books and collect some organic reviews with your ads, that’s cool, but that’s not really the focus of your advertising.
Collecting email addresses is!
Start small with Facebook and other social media ads that pull. You’re going to need to become a social media ads guru at this point. We all learn by doing and making small mistakes early on. It’s okay. Learn. Make the mistakes. Learn by doing, or learn by failing.
What your marketing goal will be is to build your mailing list.
Do not spend $1,000 on a new untested social media campaign. TEST first. Use $50 to $100 to see which of your ads pull better than others. In the industry this is called “A/B testing.” You’re looking to see which ads, A or B, pull better.
Again, you will be using your ads NOT so much to sell books, but to collect email addresses of people who are either interested in your work or want to buy it. Either is fine. But the goal is to collect their email address, not sell them a book.
As I’ve already mentioned in the previous website section, authors typically get readers to cough-up their name and email by offering them a free download copy of a book within a series. If there are 5 books in your series, offer the reader the first book for free in exchange for their name and email address. Even offer them the first two books. It doesn’t matter, your books aren’t selling yet anyway so that’s okay.
But you NEED that email!
Readers expect this kind of deal these days and resistance to the bargain is usually not that big of deal. Just keep in mind that this list building is typically not going to happen in 30 days, or 90 days or even a year…
6. List Building Takes Time & Money
Here is where many authors trying to become business people get bogged down. You’re spending (investing) money into your work, but not making that many sales. That’s okay. As long as your mailing list is growing, even if by just a handful of emails per week, you’re doing fine.
Chances are, you will spend about $2 to $15 in advertising to collect 1 email address. The reason for the range is how well you target, how well you write, and your genre(s).
If your stories are good, well-written, and all “write to market” for your genre, well, it should be pretty easy to collect the emails of people who like reading what you write. But if you’re like me, writing cross-genre paranormal mystery thriller sci-fi romance where not all of the “ships” are straight, targeting that reader is a bit more complex—and costly to find.
But I do it. It’s initially expensive zeroing in on a target market, but you will learn who likes to read your work and who wants to buy it.
This list building takes a lot of time and a lot of money. But it is worth every hour and ever cent you put into it.
Why? Do we focus so heavily on list building?
Because once you have your reader, you can market other books you write to that reader for free! You will no longer have to pay Amazon or Facebook or whatever social media platform for the privilege of advertising to what is now YOUR customer!
You will have a DIRECT connection to your audience of readers.
Your mailing list is now PURE GOLD just sitting in your pocket, waiting for you to write another book your fans will know and love and want to buy.
And it costs you exactly ZERO dollars to send out that email to them. But it gets even better, because once you have your list in hand you will be…
7. Using Amazon to Amplify Your Marketing
Much of the information I’m discussing here comes from publishing consultant, Beau Beauchamp, whose latest book, The 6-Figure Author, dives much more deeply into this business planning. Other books on the topic that I have read also say pretty much the same things Beauchamp is affirming.
Once you have your mailing list in place, at least 5,000 email addresses and preferably 10,000, you’re ready to make your move and get Amazon working for you instead of against you. And you can start smaller, with even just 500 people on your mailing list. If your list works with small numbers, it will work with bigger numbers too!
The 6-Figure Author: Business Plan
What Beauchamp recommends is setting up a new novel your readers will want to buy, perhaps the next book in the series that already has a handful of organic reviews from your beta reader or pre-release group. These initial 4 and 5-star organic reviews are important.
Once your book is up and available for sale, you start emailing your readers with the news of the new release. Over the next week or so, you will start selling copies on Amazon.
But now here is where the magic happens: Amazon, seeing that you are selling books organically (they don’t know you have a list, all they see are sales, rapid sales), Amazon will start advertising for you! Amazon’s recommender engine will start placing your book in front others that Amazon alone knows about and thinks might be interested in buying your book.
These will be people you don’t know, and are not on your mailing list. Suddenly your mailing list of 5,000 to 10,000 becomes something closer to double or ever triple the number of eyeballs now on your new book!
This is where the real sales magic happens. But it does take time and money and patience building your business to get it to this point.
Success Stories
One of the more successful authors that I know of using this method is M. L. Buchman. Matt is a damn good author who has spent a lifetime writing and honing his craft and his audience.
I get emails from Matt about once a month telling me about new short stories and new books he’s written. I don’t know how big Matt’s mailing list is, but I’m guessing that after decades of writing and publishing, it’s huge, maybe 50,000, maybe 100,000 readers? It could be more, who knows? But Matt does a good job of mining his mailing list about once a month.
Let’s say Matt offers just two new books for sale to a mailing list of 50,000 readers. According to Beauchamp, between 25% to 50% of readers will buy this new book from a mailing. Matt should expect to sell about 15,000 units within a week or two of the email’s delivery. At $3 in profit, that’s about $45,000 in sales for the month. Boom! Wow.
And this doesn’t include sales from Amazon’s recommendations to other readers not on Matt’s mailing list! Just this week I received an email from Matt for two new books he’s written, THEN a few days later, Amazon sent me an email as well advertising the same new book! Amazon wants to sell books and they will market for you if you have purchased books from an author in the past.
Do keep in mind that a mailing list of this size didn’t just show up overnight, it took literally years to build, and tens of thousands of dollars in marketing to get it to this point over that time. Matt has a catalog of over a hundred novels and short stories to sell to new readers as well.
This is also the magic of being a indie author self-publishing, our books never go “out of print”. Our books are “evergreen”. Every book is new to a reader who hasn’t read it yet! Even if the book was written 20 years ago!
Yes, it takes time and money to get to this point. But building this mailing list of your audience is a rock-solid investment!
Everyone Starts At the Bottom—Get Going!
Becoming a successful author making a 5-figure, 6-figure, or even 7-figure income is not difficult to do from a business perspective. This is not rocket science; it’s not some super-secret formula either. You don’t need to pay some scammer $27 to over $1,000 either for their useless systems.
It’s just common business sense. But it DOES take time, money (investment capital), and a good deal of patience building your catalog and mailing list to get to this point.
And it all start with you writing that next book. Better get going…
Harley Austin is an indie-author of over 25 published novels and serials on Amazon. He can be reached online at HarleyAustin.com.
How Real Successful Authors Market was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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