Does this seem like the right way to go?

[Tara Woods Turner]

Writing quickly is great but be sure to write well. More solid advice will come in but just wanted to say this. Best of luck to you :)

[Riley, Viking Extraordinaire]

Well, what I do is just write whatever story comes to me. I have several series that I write from different genres, and I believe it has more to do with putting out quality content in a timely manner. (Or content that is so bad ass time doesn't matter. I.E. GRRM started writing GoT 20+ years ago.)

[Alexis]

I think right now, personally, I would focus on promoting the two books first. That way you can get feedback from readers and find out what worked for them and what didn't. That way you can be sure that book 3 will be well received and won't have the same mistakes (if there are any) as the first books.

(And yes chances are that yes, they can drop in the 1,000,000 rankings if you don't try to promote them a bit.)

[Christina]

I had two finished series and a total of twelve books out before I even considered marketing. Truth be told, I still don't really give it much consideration.

What I did was build up a slow following by offering free and discounted deals on a regular basis. Having a completed series was probably my biggest passive boost, but every so often, my freebies would catch the eye of the right marketer and suddenly I'd have a crazy boost. I'm talking a bigger boost than anything I've paid for, but it's a lot like winning the lottery. You just can't predict it.

At the moment, I'm focused on writing. There was a time when I wondered if I would take a break from writing to focus on marketing and I assumed this would happen after each series. Turns out, I'm an author, not a marketer, so I can't justify taking time away from what matters most. But you might find yourself in a different situation. After all, the mantra we here at SIA would like to drill into everyone's head is that there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution.

[Heidi]

Do both! Don't spend all your time promoting and not have time to write, but start building your fan base, collecting email addresses, getting reviews. I spend my work day half on promoting and half on writing. (If you have a full time gig, that might look like one hour a night writing and one hour a night working on promotion. I did that for years!) That is a pretty standard figure. Sure, you want to release more books, but I have seen authors with thirty books out who have no sales and very few reviews. I have seen authors who launched one book and spent all their time and energy promoting it and never released another. Neither win.

[Heidi]

I would say that if you are going to pay for promotion then you should have a solid tracking plan in place to make sure it is working. I wouldn't do social media advertising until you build up a decent following of readers on those sites (prefereably in your genre, but not necessarily those who've read your books) Once you have that established audience, it is easier to use the platforms targeting tools.

My rule of thumb is that I don't spend advertising dollars until I have the sales to do so. I made the mistake early on throwing money into advertising and my sales didn't increase at all because I didn't have a proper deep understanding of my audience or their behaviors. You can lose so much money that way. Social media and grass roots marketing teaches you to think like your audience and go where your audience goes, engaging with them on their level. That gives you the knowledge and experience you will need to be able to produce better paid-advertising results.

But that's my humble opinion.

[Christina]

Kelleen wrote: "We have talked this subject to death, look at the forums"

You'll see that here too because honestly, it *is* a subject that has been talked to death. That is why we pinned two of our longest standing posts regarding marketing to the top of this folder for easy access. The only thing that is going to work for you is what works when you try it. I've had free promos where I've given away as few as three books and as many as three thousand with no rhyme or reason as to why.

We can point you to various places to promote, we can talk about what has worked, and we can caution against scams, but in the end, we can't tell you definitively what will work for you.

[Nat]

My very small and limited experience:

Your best advertisement is more good books. So, I would work on fleshing out those series.

I've done different types of marketing. On one book I did paid ads and a big promo and price reduction and all that for a week, and got 7 sales. For another book I put it on one 'group' sales promo with other books like mine for two days that cost me nothing, and got 7 sales.

So, I have no idea what works, what doesn't, but finding events with other authors seems to work somewhat.

[J. Daniel, Lurking since 2015]

My two cents

Focus on finishing one of your trilogies before you start marketing. Check the forums for lists of good places to use for advertising and make the first in series free when you can to try and hook in some readers.

Stop checking your sales and reviews. I found them to be more of a distraction than anything else, and I did not care for the way they could make my mood swing so wildly.

Lastly, try not to rely on reviews to determine what works and what doesn't. The real and solid truth is that the majority of your readers will not leave a review, and what one person likes may be what another hates. Write what works for you.

Best of luck!

[Nat]

Heidi wrote: "I would say that if you are going to pay for promotion then you should have a solid tracking plan in place to make sure it is working. I wouldn't do social media advertising until you build up a de..."

Awesome tips! Thank you and I'll certainly follow this plan from now on. At times you just want to think 'I'll throw money at it and the readers will come' but from my experience, that isn't the way it works. You're wise.

[Dwayne, Head of Lettuce]

I'm another that does not do a lot of marketing or promoting. I don't do much for interviews, ask for reviews, any of the stuff I'm "supposed" to do. But, my sales are increasing... very slowly. I have built a solid collection of short stories. With those, I can offer free stuff often to get people to sample my works. Some will come back and buy more, some will not. But, it seems the longer I do this, the more often I see sales right after free promos and the more sales I see. Also, the rate reviews are coming in is increasing, too, and (again) I've never asked for one.

So, yeah, I would encourage you to keep working on your projects. Get them out (don't rush them) when you can. I don't really do the kind of series you're talking about, but from what I've heard others say, it's hard to get interest on book one until there are others out in the series.

[Justin]

I just read an email that stated people don't know what to do when phased by two tasks. The answer is do both. Find time to write and time to market, it doesn't matter in what order or how long you should do each the simple fact your doing both will be a good balance.

[Martin]

The best marketing you can do is make sure your story doesn't suck.

The story is what matters. First and foremost.

[Thomas]

My personal opinion is don't worry too much about that other one you've set aside for now. Market whatever you're actively working on. Even if the one you're leaving alone drops in rank, it can always be revived later. A good "Free Book" promotion with the right exposure can boost that right back up.

[Owen]

Kelleen wrote: "I've been reading a bunch on this forum and others and I've heard conflicting advice...."

On a subject as broad as this, and discussed there will be no end of conflicting advice, mainly for a two good reasons. First, genres are somewhat different, series and stand-alone books and rather different, and nonfiction and fiction are very different. Second, it is very difficult to tell what works.

The second reason is key. If I state that something worked, I need to be confident that it did in fact work, and the results were not driven by factors of which I am unaware and cannot account for. As an indie author, that is difficult to impossible for me, because (primarily) Amazon (our only outlet) does not supply the necessary data. But even if I did have the data and even if I could show that something worked, if that result is not repeatable, it is of little (or no) practical value.

The bottom line is that the question of how sell to books, or why some sell and others don't, is distorted be the fact that so few books sell in appreciable numbers. Not only does this make analysis of what data there are a dicey proposition, but it invites inappropriate rationalizations after the fact. These inappropriate rationalizations are the well-spring of many notions of the about what "works".

Finally, the landscape can change in the same timescale many books are written, so "lessons learned" about the last book may not apply to next book, as things may have changed in the meantime.

Therefore, the best advice is simply write more. The best marketing tool you have for your next book is your previous book.

For what it's worth, 2 conclusions I've reached by studying this issue since we started publishing are:
Don't worry about promotion or marketing until at least 3, and probably more, books are published. The cost and effort to promote 1 or 2 books is the same as 5 or 10, but in the latter the rewards will be much higher.

Don't invest resources in a book that didn't sell well on Amazon in its first 90 days. Amazon's new release scheme is the most powerful marketing a book can get, orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we authors can do. If a book does not sell well as a new release on Amazon, it is best to conclude it's simply not that book's time to sell, and move on to the next project.

The corollary to that is that if a book does gain traction in the first 90 days, there are opportunities out there that may bolster it's success. These depend on the type book.

Those two points boil down to this: it is never too late to start doing some marketing. It is frequently too early.

If you are considering investing in marketing advice (either time or money), judge it by the results and their applicability to your book. Because of the 2nd point above, this is not always easy to do. However, if someone is selling marketing advice, but their own work sells not much better than average for similar work by comparable authors, it's a good bet the advice they are selling will be a minimal value.

[W.T.]

I understand how you feel, Kelleen. I agree that not everything works for everyone, but I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what maybe works for me people than it doesn't work. It's hard and there are so many different factors to consider.

I half agree with Martin: Writing a good story should be your first concern. However, I don't think that's the only thing you should worry about. If you've written the best book in the world and no one knows about it, what good is that? And, let's be honest, I think we've all read books that were really badly written and yet somehow managed to sell a lot of copies. I wish all you had to do was write a good story, but sadly it's just not that simple.

Following this thread for advice. Will also check out the other marketing threads in the pinned folder.

[Owen]

Kelleen wrote: "Owen wrote: "it is never too late to start doing some marketing. It is frequently too early"

Thank you Owen, I think that was some very good advice. I think I will continue writing, fiddle around ..."

Another thing to consider with paid advertising, especially free or discounted deals, is that one can hit the point of diminishing returns quickly. We did our first paid promo this year for a free giveaway, and it was fairly successful. The other two free-giveaway promos we ran were not as successful (and the discount promos did not make back the outlay). I attribute this to the fact we have only one series and only 3 (at the time we ran the first promo), and now 4, books.

That gives us, in effect, only 1 book to promote. After the first promo, the readers of the best sites for our book had been exposed to it. When we ran another promo 7 months later, we got about half the downloads and a small fraction of the sales that resulted from the first promo. Obviously, there can be a host a factors for that, but that the subscribers of the services we used had not turned over sufficiently to make the promo worth it cannot be discounted, and my feeling is that this was a primary factor.

Having more books out and being able to offer more books across more services obviously helps that. Also, genre matters. Our genre is not as popular on most services out there as other genres, so we have fewer services to choose from. Books in other genres can be promoted cyclically through a range of services and delay the point of diminishing returns.

But the real lesson is that our paid promotion efforts were dwarfed by releasing another book. Even though we hadn't release a new book in 20 months, and undoubtedly lost a considerable portion of our readership, the boost from our new release has been much, much larger than the results of all our promotions combined.

For this reason, we do not plan to run any paid promotions in the future, unless we can land an ad on Bookbub (which I confidently predict will never happen). Instead, we are doing our best to release our books in a more timely fashion. Compared to the boost Amazon gives a new release, paid promos for us are insignificant.

Every book and every author's situation is different, but by the time you have a few books out, you will be able to gauge how much your books benefit from a new release and be better able to gauge the benefit the promotional opportunities that are available to you.

Best of luck!

[Marie Silk]

Hi Kelleen, congrats on your books :)

Since you are in KDP Select, you really have nothing to lose by using the free promotion days, so I say go for it if you want.

I am new to publishing too but I have noticed how much the marketing sites have changed just in the last 8 months. I did a free promotion back in June that had 1600 downloads and I only used free marketing sites to advertise the promotion. But since then, the free sites that helped me get the most downloads have either stopped being free or have shut down altogether. So I am mostly using paid sites now. Some are worth it for me, others not.

I think I probably lost sales on the sequels of my books by not having them available for purchase yet. So there is something to be said about having all the books out already before getting really serious with marketing...but you could be building a fan base, getting feedback, and making sales in the meantime.

[Amie]

Man...it's really a tough and personal call, no matter what you do. So I will answer only for myself.

My debut novel is part of a series. I feel like I have 3 more installments in me to follow. But at the same time, I am "all in" on book 1. The only way I can explain how I feel is thinking of other books that I love like "Anne of Green Gables."

I read the entire "Anne" series, and they were mostly entertaining. I truly enjoyed "Anne of Avonlea." But everything I needed and loved was wrapped up in those initial beginnings. I could lose all else so long as I did not lose Anne breaking a slate on Gilbert Blythe's head, LOL, and everything beautiful in those first few hundred pages.

What happened to Anne in college was good and lifted my spirits for a little while. Children to follow in other books with cute antics like Gilbert's were also worthwhile reading, but it wasn't the material that stayed with me forever or kept me up at night. I mean, I own these books still. I saved them for my daughter. But it's the first book I can't help myself but collect multiple copies of.

I keep telling myself go ahead and spend half my time writing the sequel and half my time marketing the first book. (It's probably the wisest thing to do.) But something in me says, "No. Tell the world THIS story."

We write these books purposely to be able to stand alone, and if I left this world and had only one literary contribution, I know this is the one I'd want to be remembered by. I would hate for it to get lost out there.

So...I'll work super diligently to make that happen. Well, at least until book 2's storyline won't shut up and forces it's way into my affections! ;)

[D.]

Kelleen wrote: "I'm pretty new to the whole self publishing thing. I had two books I'd written that I was totally convinced I was going to actually go through the steps to get published... then realized a year had..."

I'm thinking this is a common problem for all of us. What I've started doing recently is posting chapters on my facebook page. I started NaNoWriMo this year and started posting the chapters I turned out on my author page. Also tied it in a little on my twitter account. Not a lot happening but it's a way to get you and your stuff out there.

[W.T.]

Amie wrote: "Man...it's really a tough and personal call, no matter what you do. So I will answer only for myself.

My debut novel is part of a series. I feel like I have 3 more installments in me to follow. Bu..."

I've heard series books do better than standalones. Wish I could get more than one book out of any of my ideas, LOL.