Writing Advice: Authors Share 6 Ways to Market Your Books

Any self-published author will tell you that writing a good book is just the start of the hard work. Once you’ve published your carefully crafted and edited tale via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), you need to get the word out. Best-selling indie authors Violet Duke, Scott Pratt, and Stephanie Bond offer seven road-tested tips for driving readers to your work, building a fan base, and achieving commercial success.

1. Write a lot of books.
“Frankly, the single most effective action I or anyone can take to promote a book is to write another book,” says romance/thriller/mystery author Stephanie Bond (Body Movers mysteries, Southern Roads trilogy). If you’ve written one book and it isn’t performing as well as you’d hoped, it sounds counterintuitive to write another book. But, the more inventory you have on the market, the greater the chance of someone finding one of your projects, reading it, and looking for other things you’ve written. Bond knows what she’s talking about. Her 70 novellas, published traditionally and independently, have sold millions of copies. In June, The Hallmark Channel aired a TV-movie based on her self-published romantic comedy Stop the Wedding!

2. Put sympathetic, likeable characters at the heart of a series.
Creating characters and plot sounds like creative writing 101 but legal thriller author Scott Pratt (author of the popular 8-book Joe Dillard Series) says it’s more than that. It’s basically a marketing strategy, and something he thought through back at the beginning. When he created series hero Joe Dillard, Pratt made a deliberate decision to eschew an unchanging action hero and instead build his franchise around a world-weary Tennessee lawyer with a family who evolves over time. It worked.

“Readers have latched onto this protagonist,” he says. “And they are deeply, deeply invested in this guy’s family. His wife has breast cancer and he has two kids. Readers want to know, ‘When’s the next book coming out? You’re not going to kill this character off are you?’ Some of them are even concerned about Dillard’s religious convictions. They pray for his soul. And this is a fictional character.”

3. Set aside adequate time for promoting your work.
If your dream involves writing in a garret disconnected from the business of promoting your work, indie publishing probably isn’t for you. Successful KDP authors invest substantial time and money in promotion. Stephanie Bond generally splits her time 60/40 between writing and marketing. Fellow best-selling contemporary romance writer Violet Duke (with three indie series, Can’t Resist, Cactus Creek, and Unfinished Love) also dedicates several hours a day to social media and ad planning. Duke recently pulled back on book writing during a medical leave, but she kept up her efforts to market and advertise her backlist and had her best sales year yet. (More about that below in “Mine your backlist.”)  

4. Mine your backlist; there’s gold in there.
With three indie romance series and the recently published (by Random House) first book in her new Fourth Down series, Duke has written a lot books. Known as a backlist, all these published works are a serious asset for the savvy author.

“You can kill with your backlist,” Duke says. “It’s an evergreen. You can’t stop marketing. Because every day there are new readers.” So rather than simply pushing out and promoting new works, Duke is inventive about repackaging and repositioning older novels. She’ll change the covers, rewrite new book blurbs, and create new advertising campaigns (for example, based on the changing seasons) to attract new readers.

5. Talk to your fans.
Prosperous indie writers have direct relationships with their readers. It’s central to their success. Pratt reads and answers every reader email himself. He won’t farm that out because he believes if one of his readers cares enough to write to him, they deserve an answer back. It’s been worth it as far as he’s concerned because he’s developed a lot of loyalty with those readers.

Duke, like Pratt, reads and responds to all reader messages. She says for a lot of her social media fans, one of her books may have initially brought them to her page, but it’s her interaction with them that has them returning as fans. In addition to direct correspondence, a website, and her Facebook page, Duke has created a Super Fan group on Facebook. This isn’t a place for giveaways or special deals, this is where she takes deep dives into the writing of her books, giving avid readers a behind the scenes look at her creative process.

Bond also responds to readers and in addition, she has a mailing list—something she believes authors do better than any publisher—to which she sends semi-regular newsletters with alerts about deals and upcoming projects. After she realized the majority of her reader email asked if and when she would be releasing future books in series, she also installed on her website a writing ticker/progress meter, which shows the status of her works in progress.

6. Stay ahead of the curve.
Nimble marketing isn’t the only way to capture more readers—sometimes a little experimentation on the writing side is in order. “I believe the future of storytelling lies in short-form delivery,” Bond says. So she has started experimenting with length and format. This summer she launched a daily serial called Coma Girl about a young woman in a coma who can hear everything happening around her, especially friends and family who don’t think she’s listening. Some readers keep up with the daily episodes on her website, others order the month’s novella for the binge-read option.

“I’m trying to figure out how I can best fit into their reading time,” Bond says. “Considering how much the book industry has changed in the past few years, I believe the most valuable thing a writer can do is to be willing to change as reader habits change.”

– The Story Staff

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