The Importance of Book Marketing

It’s been awhile – I’ve been busy.

I wanted to touch on book marketing. It is a bigger topic than publishing but (depending on the stats you read), most self-published authors sell less than 100 copies of their books. 33% of self-published authors make less than $500 per year.

Anyone wanting a get quick scheme from publishing should find another scheme. This is the reality.

When you publish a book, your site of preference will give your book a little push. Maybe for the first 30 days your book will appear on the first page of your chosen publishing website. If your genre has many books being published each day, then say good bye to this nice little boost.

Case study

We publish books by Jayne Thornber and K J Matthews. Jayne is a romance author but published a couple of smaller books in the “how to write” genre. K J has only ever published in Sci Fi.

Jayne’s first book – “Romance Writing Prompts” appeared on the first page of Amazon when you searched for Romance Writing prompts for five months. Jayne made sales without advertising.

K J’s books have never made it to the first page of her online selling platform of choice (Amazon). There are just too many books in that market being released all of the time. To our knowledge, K J has not made an organic sale from someone browsing Amazon. Every sale was to a friend, relative, or through some form of advertising.

As a beginning Indie publisher, we are also learning the art of book marketing. Periodically, we will share our successes and our failures.

Our first success (because we made a newbie error yesterday) is that K J Matthews is on track to make more than $500 in royalties this year, which puts her ahead of 33% of indie authors. (She wishes that was her profit, but alas, marketing costs money).

Jayne is focusing on getting her first romance book out. Thus she decided not to advertise much at this stage.

Both authors have a marketing strategy. We’ll be covering them in upcoming posts.

For now, you can find Jayne’s best seller at https://mybook.to/Romance_writing_prompts

K J’s Best seller at https://mybook.to/odysseyoftheseven_alone