As I mentioned in Is Self Publishing a Realistic Way to Make Money? it is entirely possible to make money as a self published author. What stops most (good) authors is marketing. You can’t skip this, and unless you already have disposable income, you can’t outsource it. You have to learn marketing. And yes, at first it will take up more time than your actual writing. Get over it.
Free Advertising
There are a lot of ways to advertise your books for free. It only costs your time. In the beginning, when you have less money for paid advertising, and more time to research, this will be a good way to go.
Newsletters
You want to build a newsletter following. All the basics of newsletter writing apply to books. Write a reader magnet. Just a 2-10,000 word extension of the first book (bonus chapter). You’ll use this to entice readers to sign up so they can receive it free. Put the link to your newsletter into the backmatter of your book. Make sure you’re always updating the back matter. It works as free advertising as well, with your Also By Author section. You’ll also want to include all of your social media links in the back matter. Once you have a few hundred subscribers, you can begin doing newsletter swaps with other authors of the same genre. This is where you feature their book in your newsletter and vice versa.
When it comes to books, Facebook is still the first stop for social media. You’ll want an author page. This is where you can update your fans on progress, releases, etc. You can also start a FB reader group, and do the same. It’s a place for your rabid fans to congregate and talk about your books. Make sure you’re interacting with them! Post about your books, but also post questions that they can answer for themselves and then YOU RESPOND. Do not leave them hanging. They are taking the time out of their day to support you, get to know them. Have fun. Be nice! A little tip, the more engagement you have on your Facebook page and your reader group, the cheaper your Facebook ads will get, once you’re running some. Engagement shows FB that you’re worth pushing out to more people and since you have to pay-to-play, the way they make that worth it for you is to make ads cheaper when you’re doing well.
Both your page and your group themselves are more about cultivating your current fans more than finding new fans. The Facebook organic algorithm doesn’t do much for you anymore. Paid is usually the best way to find new readers on Facebook, with two exceptions. FB reader groups, and takeovers/parties. You’ll want to join other FB reader groups, not other author’s reader groups, but the groups created and run by the readers. Oftentimes, they’ll allow you to recommend your own books in comments of posters looking for books. There are some rules for this. Make sure your book fits the criteria. Make sure you know the rules of the group. If they allow it, you can post your book releases, or if you’re looking for ARC (Advanced Reader Copy-more on this later) readers. But don’t spam them. That’s a good way to get kicked out and ruin it for other authors. You need to talk about your book, but not if it specifically asks you not to, or if it doesn’t fit the criteria a reader is looking for. That will just piss everyone off and ensure they won’t read your books. (Think of how the MLMers used to spam FB groups. Don’t be like that.)
FB takeovers/parties can usually be found in FB groups where authors congregate and look to do things like swap newsletter slots, have open spots for anthologies, etc. An author will have a book release coming up, will find a group to ‘take over’ for the day, then they will search for other, similar, authors to take a time slot and share their own stuff. The original author gets credited for pulling it all together, but the readers who come to the group can potentially find multiple new authors to read. To fill up the time slotted to you, can be fifteen minutes to an hour, depending on how it’s set up, authors will play games, give away prizes, tell the readers about themselves and their books, etc., in posts. These can be successful. You’ll have to gauge whether they are for you.
You can absolutely build a rabid fan base from Instagram. You’re going to want to have a theme for your page. Make it aesthetically pleasing. Most readers on Instagram love visuals. It’s the main reason they use the platform versus TikTok, X, or Facebook. Make it pretty. Give reels a shot. They still aren’t as good at converting as a TikTok video (which we’ll get into next) but it’s worth a try. Hashtags are going to be your main weapon on Instagram. Go search other authors who are huge in your genre, and see what hashtags they’re using. Save them in a document, and collect as many as you can. You can only use thirty per post, but you can never have too many saved, as long as they’re relevant. Instagram is a long game. It can take a long time to build a following there, but it can be done.
TikTok
TikTok can make or break you. You can post a new video every day and get little conversion, then have a video go viral out of nowhere and 10x your sales in a single month. Then the algorithm changes and your sales plummet. Many authors have fallen for this momentary virality and blew the money on rapid expansion. (I will cover how to handle both slow and rapid growth in a future article)
If you go viral and it converts to sales, use that money to invest in things that will last. Book covers, editors, stable advertising (which is paid advertising).
DO NOT stop your FB/Amazon ads because TikTok is going well. When TikTok winds down you’ll need a solid and reliable advertising base to fall back on. TikTok is fickle. It’s like winning the lottery. It could happen a few times, it could even happen for six months straight, but eventually the algorithm changes will get you and what used to work won’t anymore.
The point of TikTok is to sell books, not to be an influencer. Although the strategies are similar, there is a key difference. Your views have to convert to sales. If you get 10k views on a video, and it leads to 10 sales, vs 1k views and 100 sales, then replicate the 1k video. All the views in the world don’t mean a thing if you’re not reaching your reader audience. Remember that.
That doesn’t mean stop trying. If you’re stuck in the two hundred view range, so what? Keep making and posting videos. If you need a break, take one, but don’t stop all together. Like any social media, you have to be consistently posting on TikTok for it to work well for you. If all you’re doing is getting two hundred views, that’s more than zero. And if it’s all your current fans, you’re at least interacting with them. They love that! You should be working hard to cultivate the relationship between yourself and your readers. This is how you build life-long fans.
This could lead you into dipping your toes into things like subscription models, where your readers pay to read your book first on sites like Ream, Patreon, or Substack. It will also make sure that if anything ever happens where Amazon gives you the boot—it sucks but it does happen—your fans will follow wherever you go, this could be going wide and trying sites like Apple, Kobo, etc., or if you decide to sell direct, off your own website, Etsy, or Shopify. (We’ll go over subscriptions and selling direct in another article.) The point is to make sure those fans remember who you are, so if there’s a glitch and something goes wrong, they will search you out to find out where you’re selling, and they’ll continue to buy.
Paid Advertising
Facebook and Amazon will be your starting points for paid advertising. You can start off the same way all ecommerce advertising does, by looking at other people with similar products and copying their ads. This will get the ball rolling, but if you don’t understand e-commerce and more specifically how FB/Amazon ad algorithms work, you’ll want to hire a digital marketer that has experience WITH YOUR GENRE.
Since paying for more help might be out of reach initially, here’s a few tips
Test your ad copy and the photos, or videos, you’re using. (This is for Facebook)
Set your daily ad spend low ($5). Pay attention to your clicks and conversions (Who ultimately buys). If you’re getting $1 a day in sales and paying $5 a day in ads, you need to rework them. You can settle for breaking even in the beginning, since this is generating sales that will help push you up the rankings.
Look for ad fatigue. Check your ads metrics daily to see if they are losing their effectiveness. One day of bad conversion is a hiccup. One week of bad conversions means it's time for a new ad.
Keep an eye on your ads. You can set safeguards in place, but technology can glitch. And when it glitches, it glitches big. You don’t want to look at your ads after three days only to find out you’ve been paying $34 per click. It’s happened, no one likes it. Check them, daily.
FB and AMZ ads can be convoluted, but there are courses that will teach you how to do both. Some are free, some are paid. If you can’t afford to hire a digital marketer—many can’t at first, if ever—then that means you need to learn to be that marketer. Choose one to start. And begin to learn it. I would recommend AMZ because it’s easier to learn, however the ROI isn’t usually as good as FB. Facebook will take longer to learn, and it’s more in depth, but oftentimes authors prefer it because they see better results.
There’s no way to go more in depth in this article, it would be an entire book. And in six months the algo could change so much that anything written here would be out of date. Search for author groups, and search FB Ad courses, or AMZ ad courses, and go from there. Make sure the courses are up to date. Most authors are going to hate learning to do this, but if you want to keep growing, and get reliable advertising, rather than the slot machine formula of TikTok, then you’ll need to figure out paid advertising for yourself.
The Algo changes, so must you
All of this is a starting point. I wish I could be more specific, but the details of your genre and the constantly changing algorithms mean that any specific advice I give will be irrelevant in a few months. Don’t get complacent, and keep track of the changing algo.