You’ve written a book. Yay you, writer human. But now you’ve got to sell it. You’ve got to market the heck out of it. Those two things may well seem mutually exclusive. You wrote a book because you’re at heart a quiet, contemplative sort of fellow. A person who thinks a lot about words. But to market, you must now assume the persona of a dude striding down the street in full marching band dress, pounding a drum. There’s an irreconcilable disconnect at the heart of your endeavor. Which are you—a mousy writer dude, or an attention-seeking whack job?
Well, you’re both. You’re not Jane Austen. You’re not Emily Dickinson. They didn’t have to do such things. But you? You’re a writer living in 2023. You’re living in a world where most people don’t think much about words on a printed page. A world in which most people have never entered a bookstore.
I’m not the first author to grapple with this divide. Book marketings is a rite of passage for any author, and it’s quite humbling. Humiliating, even.
Time to step out of the shadows, writer human!
But I’ve actually done pretty well at this sort of thing, despite my natural shyness. And I’ve gotten quite good at understanding the publishing landscape since my first book came out in 2009 or so. So much so that we’ve managed to assemble a mailing list of about 5,000 emails. In the vast scheme of things, that’s not huge at all. I know some writers who started long after us who have newsletter lists rising to 10,000 and beyond. It’s how the game is played in indie publishing, definitely.
But 5,000 is respectable, and most of them were collected in person, sitting at a table in a store, just chatting with people and asking them to do two things: buy a book and sign up for the list.
When a new author asks us for advice, there’s a ton of things my wife and I tell them that is simple, but quite necessary.
Do you have a website up yet?
Are you collecting emails for your newsletter?
Do you have a list of newsletter topics handy?
Have you created your Amazon, Goodreads, and Bookbub profiles yet?
Have you introduced yourself to the booksellers at your local bookstore?
Have you asked them if they’ll permit you to refer people to their store for signed copies?
Have you approached any local arts weeklies in your area about doing an article about you and your book?
Are you good with film? Could you put together a book trailer and send it around to a few places that accept and run such things?
Are you setting up a book tour of any kind, whether virtual or in person?
That’s just the beginning of the list. There’s plenty more, including some weird questions. Here’s possibly one of the weirdest:
Have you contacted any non-bookstores about carrying your book?
Yes—you heard heard me. Non-bookstores. Stores that are not bookstores. Not every book qualifies to be sold in such a shop, but many nonfiction ones do. And some fiction. It depends.
I’ve written about this topic twice, once about a decade ago. And I recently revisited that story for SleuthSayers in a post entitled:
Thinking Outside the Book Signing Box!
Here’s a quote from the piece that I think sells it pretty well:
…about a year after the first book pubbed, our small publisher contacted my wife and me, asking if we would speak to the heads of their marketing and sales departments. They had noticed that in the last year or so, they had accrued an impressive number of new accounts. All of them were gift shops at museums and historic sites, and all of them were ordering the same book—ours and ours alone.
“What are you doing to sell these books?” they wanted to know.
If you’re a writer, please go check it out. If you know a writer, please share it with them. But do me this favor: please don’t dismiss its lessons too hastily. Think carefully about how the case study might apply to your work.
Then go forth and become the badass author you were always meant to be!
All photos by me.