Debut Book Marketing Round-Up: Oct-Dec (Part 1)

I thought it would be helpful to other authors, both traditionally and independently published, if I catalogued the marketing that I’ve been doing in the first few months of my pre-order phase. I’ve looked for other helpful posts on this subject for authors who are just starting out, with real-life examples, but I haven’t been able to find them. So, I decided to catalogue my own journey for the benefit of others. If you enjoy this and want to thank me, buy my book and sign up for my newsletter.

Background & Distribution Strategy

My debut novel, a romantic comedy called SHOOTERS, is out in March 2023. For the digital version, I am publishing with Amazon and taking advantage of Kindle Unlimited. When I have more books, my plan is to switch to wide distribution, so that I can reach a bigger audience. For paperbacks, I have listed with Ingram Sparks, which allows me to have paperback pre-orders on Amazon. Note that, if you want to upload your paperback direct to print-on-demand with Amazon, they DO NOT allow a pre-order phase. As soon as you hit that publish button, your book is available. After my publication date (March 6 for paperback), I will list a second version of the book for sale direct through Amazon print-on-demand. One annoying thing about paperback pre-sales is there is no way for me to see how many paperbacks I have sold as Amazon does not share this data (all they care about is digital pre-orders). For the sake of my ego, I will assume I’ve sold at least 1000. Haha.

As of January 2, I have pre-sold 62 digital copies of SHOOTERS through Amazon.

Pre-order vs no pre-order

Having a pre-order phase is by no means a requirement of publishing a book; however, I chose to do one for a number of reasons:
-       It gives me time to organise PR
-       It allows anticipation to build
-       I wanted to release the book in conjunction with an event (the story starts at a fictional version of a real photography conference [SWPP] so I am launching there in the second week of March)

Pricing

This is a difficult decision for anybody who has ever priced anything. I decided to price the digital copy at £4.99 and the paperback at £12.99. Even when I ran my photography studio, I believed in setting prices that were fair and reflected the quality and value of the work. I spent 3 years writing this book. It’s a full-length novel at 110k words; therefore, I think this pricing is fair. As it is, I’ll only be making pennies on the paperback version. I’ll update you on my learnings when I’ve gained more information and insight into this. If you have any thoughts or experience with pricing, please do leave a comment.

Initial marketing

SHOOTERS went up for sale on October 29, but there were a few things I needed to do before making it available.

 1.     Cover design: I cannot stress enough how important finding a good cover designer is. I won’t go into it here, but I have done a couple of TikToks about my experiences with this (video one and two). Thankfully, I found Bailey who did an amazing job. Two bits of advice:

a.     Write a clear brief for your designer. Having spent the first decade of my working life in advertising, this is something I have a lot of experience with. I’ll do a post on writing a cover design brief when I have a moment and I’ll link it here.

b.    Make sure your cover fits with your genre. Do not fight this. For example, in the romance genre, there is a tendency towards illustrated covers; however, I really hated the trend for cartoonish characters à la Sophie Kinsella. Bailey was able to avoid this while still doing something apropos to the genre. I knew as soon as I saw this idea that it was The One.

One word of advice on covers. You may be tempted to use AI art or royalty-free images (like Unsplash) for your cover. I would counsel against this. AI-art generators like Midjourney are great fun to play with and wonderful for character creation and world-building, but legislation is nonexistent in this area at present, and this will most likely change eventually. Regarding royalty-free images from sites like Unsplash, you want to own rights to whatever image you use on your cover. As a cautionary tale I’ve read a case where an author’s Amazon account was cancelled because there were rights issues with the picture on the cover, despite the author saying that it had been a royalty-free image from Unsplash. You’ve been warned).

2.     Website: Before I could launch, I needed a website to showcase my author brand.  Having just built one for my podcast, Two Lit Chicks, I decided to do the same for me. I used Squarespace, which I find to be pretty user friendly (Because I am a creature of habit, I used the Paloma template for both my TLC site and this site, but they are skinned with their own brands to make them look different). The reason a website is so important is so that you can start building your newsletter list. More on this later.

3.     Get Professional Headshots: As soon as you start your publishing journey, you will find that you need at least one good headshot to represent you online and in your book. As a pro photographer, I urge you to put some budget towards this and get them done properly. I’ve written a post with advice on author headshots here.

4.     Write a marketing plan: I can practically hear you groaning as I write this. But a marketing plan is important. As Stella’s dad in my book says: “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail” (it was originally said by Ben Franklin). A marketing plan is a document that helps you set your goals and your budget. It helps you to focus down on who your audience is and how you want to reach them. You can revisit the plan time and time again, to help you stay on track with your marketing. For example, when I was a wedding photographer, I used to get calls from sales cold callers all the time with tempting advertising deals for various bridal magazines. They would always put pressure on me for a quick answer, and I was always tempted because I am an absolute sucker for a good sales pitch. But then I’d look at the plan. Was advertising in there? Was it in budget? The answer to both was usually no. Sometimes I did it anyway and, surprise surprise, it didn’t bring me any new business. Should have obeyed the Plan!

5.     Approach other authors for pull quotes (Indie Only as traditional publishers will do this for their authors). Pull quotes are the quotes on a book jacket by other authors that say things like “What a magnificent book!”, “Best book since Shakespeare!”, etc. Some people pay companies like Kirkus Reviews for these quotes, but I think that they have more weight coming from other authors. Bonus if those authors are in your genre. Be sure to ask more people than you need because a few of them will say yes and then let you down (busy lives!). Usually, these readers are happy with an epub version of the book, but having some early run paperbacks on hand, printed by someone like Ingram Sparks, can be useful, too, for those readers that prefer hard copy.

That pretty much covers what I put into place before hitting that publish for pre-order button. Go to Part 2 for everything I’ve done from October 29 - December.