Marketing An Indie Book: What ISN'T Working For Me

When an author self publishes a book, one of the most challenging things that he or she will have to deal with is actually marketing that book. And you know what? This is something that many traditionally published authors now have to deal with, too. Publishing houses will put a lot of money into publicizing a well-known author, but many newbies still have to do the bulk of their advertising and marketing on their own.

Since I'm still very new to the indie author game -- BAND GEEK hasn't even been out for two months at this point -- I'm still experimenting with marketing techniques and am finding my way. The great thing about publishing an indie book is that I can always change course and try something new .. and don't have to worry about angering a publishing house. The only one who has something to lose or gain is me.

So far, I'd have to say that my most successful marketing technique has been signing up for KDP Select and then using the five free days. My last run was very successful and I saw a significant bump in sales (about 500 percent!!!) over the next couple of days. The bump was short-lived, though, so I'm looking at other avenues that have worked -- and haven't worked for me.

Social networking has been somewhat successful, as was my Virtual Book Tour. With the book tour, the days that I saw the most sales were the days where either a review of my book was posted or I wrote a guest blog post. I didn't see quite an increase on the days where a blog simply posted my book's summary or an excerpt.

Which leads me to report what HASN'T worked for me -- and that's static advertising. I've invested some money in a couple of sites where they simply post a photo of my cover, a blurb and a link to my Amazon purchase page. But that just doesn't seem to attract readers.

Now that I think about it, I almost never click on ads that appear on blogs or other pages that I use, like Facebook. I mostly ignore them -- and I imagine that this is true of many other readers, too. But when you post something ACTIVE -- like a blog entry or interview or review -- it gives viewers something more than just your book's cover. It lets them know about you, the author, and gives them a reason to invest in your book.

From now on, I'm going to stick with active marketing; I have another blog tour coming up in the new year, and this time, it's going to be all reviews of BAND GEEK. Hopefully, these reviews will be positive ones and will get the attention of even more readers. That would be a nice way to kick of 2013!

Please read and review REVENGE OF A BAND GEEK GONE BAD.