Developing Your Own Best Marketing Practices

There is no single “right way” to market your books. As with most things in the writing realm, marketing differs from author to author–and sometimes even from book to book. All the same, there is a lot of advice out there claiming to be “necessary” for your marketing to succeed, and it can be hard to know which tips are actually going to be useful. It’s overwhelming sometimes!

My intention with this post is twofold: First, I want to assure you that you can market the way you want to; marketing doesn’t have to be high-pressure if you don’t want it to be, and it doesn’t have to look a certain way. Secondly, I want to help you figure out the foundations of your marketing “personality,” as it were, so that you can filter marketing advice accordingly–keeping what fits your purposes and ignoring the rest.

Ready? Let’s get into it.

This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk. Purchases made through these links earn me a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Determine Your Priorities

The first thing to know is your marketing goal. Are you aiming to make a certain number of sales per month? Just to connect with readers? Do you want to prompt discussion about your book? Different priorities will lead to different practices. If you’re looking for sales, you’ll need to focus on platforms and practices that are likely to drive those sales, and you’ll need to have a heavier emphasis on talking about the books (or services) you’re trying to sell. If you’re seeking connection with readers, you’ll need to focus on platforms that foster community among readers, and your posts will probably need to lean more toward discussion of reading as a hobby and of other people’s books in order to connect with readers who haven’t necessarily read your book yet.

These priorities don’t have to be exclusive, of course! If you want connection first but a secondary emphasis on sales, it’s totally fine to balance content about your own books more evenly with content about others’ books and the reading experience as a whole. But knowing how your priorities stack will enable you to emphasize those purposes appropriately in your marketing.

If you have more than one book out, you may also want to prioritize which projects you talk about most–especially if you have “outlier” books that don’t fit the majority of what you write, or you have series and it makes the most sense to promote the first books more than the sequels. Sometimes, this may be totally irrelevant! Maybe all of your books are connected, or they’re all equally representative of your work; then it may be a better idea to balance them more evenly. In my case, I started out publishing what were essentially experimental fairytale retellings. Do I like them? Yes. Do readers like them? Also yes. Am I happy to sell them to readers who will enjoy them? Absolutely. But they’re not representative of the other things I write, so now that I have books out that are more representative, I’ve put those retellings on a back seat in terms of promotion so that readers don’t come to expect that style of fairytale retellings from me in the future.

If you are one of those readers who enjoys fairytale retellings, Lost Girl is a romance retelling and The Mirror-Hunter Chronicles are in a similar tone to A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Determine Your Boundaries

It is perfectly okay to have certain marketing tactics you just won’t use. People tend to advise having a TikTok presence, these days; I personally won’t go near a TikTok account with a ten-foot pole. I also hate false scarcity (putting something on a deadline that has no need to be on a deadline–like a discount that’s not for any particular occasion, or a membership that closes just to force people to join within a certain window instead of due to genuine limitations, etc.) and refuse to use it. Once this baby is born, there will be boundaries around how much I share about him (and future children) on my author pages. Some people share pictures of their spouses; some don’t. Some don’t post about their personal lives at all. These, too, are boundaries to draw (or not) as you see fit.

Boundaries are not an excuse to never leave your comfort zone–marketing will likely push you out of your comfort zone, especially if you’re just plain uncomfortable with selling when you get started (believe it or not, you can grow past that)–but you are allowed to draw lines, and you are allowed to take baby steps out of your comfort zone; you don’t have to leap ten feet past the bubble all in one day. I’m not especially comfortable with video; for a while, I just didn’t do anything video-based, or stuck to slides with voice-over. Over time, I’ve come to do more with video and be more comfortable on camera, even though it’s still not a primary medium for me (more on that in the next section), but I did so through just one video every couple of years. Your comfort zone and your boundaries are allowed to expand slowly–or to never budge, on matters like (for me) false scarcity that are more than just uncomfortable, or boundaries between what is professional and what is personal. Again, boundaries are okay–and, in fact, helpful for enabling you to sift through marketing options.

Know What You Like (and Dislike)

Over the years, I’ve expanded my comfort zone around video. But you know what? I just don’t like it that much. It takes a lot of work to set up, record, and edit, and most of the time I just don’t care about the medium enough to bother. There are some things that video is good for, so I use it when it seems appropriate, but part of learning not to hate marketing is not forcing yourself to market in ways you hate. If you focus on marketing in ways you like, it’s a lot easier to like marketing!

So ask yourself what you like–both from a creative standpoint and when you’re on the receiving end of marketing. Do you really like those content-at-a-glance graphics for books? Do you love graphic design? Are you really into backing up your worldbuilding with historical research? Do you review books all the time? Do you have a loooong list of book recommendations?

On the flip side, think about what you don’t like. Maybe you don’t like editing reels (maybe you don’t even like watching reels). Maybe those content-at-a-glance graphics feel reductive to you and you want to get into more of the nitty-gritty heart of your books. Maybe you find graphic design time-consuming, or just don’t feel like you’re good at it (note: design is a learned skill).

If it helps, make lists of your likes and dislikes, and think about how you can emphasize the things you like and spend less time on the things you don’t like. You won’t always be able to avoid the things you dislike–sometimes what we dislike is what really connects with other readers, and sometimes a given medium or tactic is just most appropriate in a situation even if we don’t like it–but you can heavily tip the scales in your favor. And guess what? You’ll connect most with the readers who have similar interests and resonate with similar things as you!

Make a plan

Once you know your priorities, boundaries, and likes and dislikes, you can start to form a marketing plan that makes sense with your goals, feels meaningful, and might even be fun! As with everything else, the structure of this marketing plan is up to you; you might decide to plan out every week’s content, create general categories of topics to cover within each month, brainstorm a list of content ideas to execute at will, etc. Whatever works.

What platforms you focus on will depend on all of the factors we just talked about. An email list is a good idea (even if you only send emails rarely), because you own the list and your emails won’t get lost in algorithms like your social media posts will; it’s especially suitable if you’re looking to share long-form content, make more sales, build trust with readers, etc. Mailerlite* is the platform I recommend if you don’t have a list yet, as it’s easy to set up and affordable for small (<1,000-subscriber) lists, and has plenty of capability that’s not stuck behind a paywall.

If you like photography and/or graphic design, Instagram is a good place to be. That’s also one of the two social media platforms where I’ve personally had the most success in connecting with readers and fellow authors (the other being Twiter/X), if that’s one of your priorities as well.

Facebook, I’ve learned, is pretty much only good for groups. You can get some interaction on posts from a page, but not a whole lot, in my experience. If you want to build your own community of readers, this might be a good fit (or you may prefer Discord)–and it may be worthwhile to create an author page with which to interact within that group if you write under a pen name or just want to keep your personal page separate.

If you’re not sure what to post/send, I would recommend looking at the following:

What other, similar authors are posting/sending
What you’ve been thinking about lately in relation to writing, reading, life, etc.
What you’re already naturally doing (e.g. Are you already interacting in TwiX conversations? Are you already reviewing the books you read? Are you already taking photos for Instagram?)
What you think would just be fun to do

From there, you can think about how these things could be used toward your goals. What thoughts could you write up and share with your email list? What TwiX conversations lend themselves well to talking about your book? How could you share your reviews more intentionally with readers? What fun post ideas could you throw in (not all marketing has to be serious)!

Example

Like I said, your marketing approach doesn’t have to (and usually shouldn’t) look like anyone else’s, but sometimes it can be useful to see concrete examples, so here’s a bit of how I’ve approached marketing recently.

First, I paid attention to what platforms I’m using and which are returning on the investment in some way. I have a mailing list, this blog, Facebook, Instagram, and TwiX. Facebook doesn’t do a whole lot for me, but since it’s connected to Instagram and Instagram does do all right for me, I can put minimal effort into Facebook beyond what shares to both and it’s not a big deal.

After that, I determined my purpose for each platform. I teach and talk about reading through my blog and email list; I try to connect with others and raise awareness of what I do through social media.

Once I had purposes in mind, I figured out different types of posts/topics to cycle through on a monthly basis for each month.

I’m aiming for my blog posts to include a teaching post, a seasonal post, a collaborative post, and a post containing an affiliate link or product promo (even if only in passing) each month.
My emails focus on lessons I’m learning, product awareness, connection/engagement with readers, and time-sensitive sales or other opportunities.
My social media posts (on Facebook and Instagram) will ideally cover some personal point of connection, information about my work, posts about resources available through my list, and posts that promote others each month.

(TwiX is… its own thing; I interact there when I feel like it and post whatever seems relevant. Sometimes that’s a book promo post, sometimes it’s a post about some piece of media, sometimes I don’t post anything but replies, and sometimes I’m posting about kitchen gadgetry. It depends on the day. But the point there is conversation, engagement, and just being human, so it’s filling its role without a plan.)

My monthly post types are not tied to specific weeks of the month (I can post them in any order I want), I’m allowed to add whatever other posts/emails I want, and if I don’t check all the boxes in a given month it’s not the end of the world; but having that framework helps me know what to post/send and helps me easily keep track of which categories are out-of-balance. If I’m selling too much and not posting enough just to connect, I can see that and fix it. Or if I’m not letting people know about my work enough, that’s also visible as I keep track. (For anyone curious, I’m keeping track in a OneNote file with check-boxes set up for each month.)

This is my “everyday” marketing plan, anyway. My marketing plan when I’m releasing a book looks different–what I did for Calligraphy Guild being the model because that worked really well for me (in short: weekly posts sharing more about the book and the heart behind it, a content-at-a-glance graphic, a couple of reels thanks to my then-VA Kristianne (I would not have made those by myself, lol, but they were great!), regularly posted quote graphics, and a pre-order goodie box).

As a final note, keep in mind that marketing is really about connection–even when a given post or email is focused on sales. Readers don’t buy books they don’t feel like they’ll connect with (or services they don’t feel like will suit them)–and they don’t buy from people who are always only selling, either. At the same time, there is a bit of a balancing act involved, because you want for people to connect with you and know that you have books they might like! But connect first, sell second.

If you have questions, please comment below (or send me an email)! I’m happy to answer what I can. Have a favorite marketing technique? Feel free to share that, too! I’d love to know how you’ve made marketing feel doable (and/or fun!) for yourself!

Scribes & Archers

Building worlds with impact