Book marketing - How it went for us

 

We almost finished our debut novel, Shackles of the Storm in our native language (Hungarian), when we realized that we need others to read it as well. It is our book baby after all. So I dived into the depths of the internet to learn some marketing and boy… if you think writing a book is hard, then you ain’t see nothing yet.  

In today’s blogpost I want to share with you how we started, what did we learn, and how it is going…

1. The authortube

When I needed a new recipe, a way to insert the dishwasher, or anything related to DIY my first source was always youtube videos. So, naturally, I went there first when I wanted to learn more about the craft of writing, what it takes to get traditionally publish and how should we self-publish. After finding booktube, I soon came across the two biggest authortube channels – which I won’t name here – and realized, that I was the incarnation of Jon Snow in this world. I knew nothing. 

So I started to religiously watch the videos about the industry and marketing and I was paler and paler after every new piece of information. But I knew we have to at least try it because we wanted our book not just to be out there, but people to read it, maybe have a few fans with whom we can share our enthusiasm. This goal hasn’t changed by the way.

We soon learned that most importantly we will need an author platform, and a newsletter but about that later.

2. Author platform

I don’t know how individual authors manage all of their social media accounts. There are two of us, and we can still only manage Twitter and Instagram, but initially, we didn’t know which platform will be the best for us, so we created a page on Facebook and Tumblr as well. The latter went fine, we started our blog there, but somehow we couldn’t make connections there, and we ran into technical problems like the page didn’t let us upload our blogposts. And Facebook… it just never worked for us, I don’t know why, maybe later we will make more effort on that platform. I have been using it for a very long time for personal things, and my real-life acquaintances don’t know that we are writing, only a few close friends and close family, and I want to keep it that way, this is one of the reasons that we use pen names.

I personally like Twitter the most, because it’s easy to talk to others, and the hashtags were effective to find the Writing Community – which is amazing – and it wasn’t too difficult to get some followers. If you are just starting I highly recommend Twitter!

The other platform which is working for us is Instagram. I still don’t know why, we have much fewer followers there but still get more engagements than on Twitter. Dar is good with visual things so after we got used to it we now try to upload more things than just promo images for our blog. There is no writers-lift there like on Twitter but the followers are coming steadily.  Slowly, but steadily.

We also created a website, just because everyone said we needed one. We tried a few platforms for it, but we use Weebly now. It’s good so far, but honestly, I have no idea how many people wandered there.

And we have this blog. We planned to post weekly and try to keep it up because blogging tips included consistency, but as you can see we don’t always have the time, or interesting topic to blog about. If there is some topic you want us to cover don’t hesitate to contact us!

3. Newsletter

We are in trouble here. One of the first marketing tips was that we absolutely need a newsletter and don’t even start anything if we don’t have one. Well, we don’t have one. I find newsletters annoying, but now I will try to subscribe to a few authors’ newsletters to see how others do it, but I don’t know. My main problem is that our first book will come out in June, who would be interested in an unpublished author’s newsletter? But the sooner we get to it the better I guess, so I will set it up soon and try to do our best. 

4. Before debut

Another tip was to set up a pre-order, which we just did! Setting up everything now turned out to be a very good idea, because that way we could catch a few mistakes, there will be enough time to order author copies and see if we need to change anything, so I highly recommend this step! Also pre-order gave us more time to build hype, I hope we can build some, I don’t know yet.

We also set a pre-order price for 1.99$ which is lower than the book’s price will be.

And yesterday in a huge rush, we contacted over 20 book reviewers (mainly bloggers) from all around the world. Since this is somewhat of a social interaction, and introverts aren't particularly good at those, it gave us quite a panic attack for the first few emails, but eventually it became monotonous and that stole away the anxiety. I'd recommend a few things, some of which you probably heard elsewhere.

First, make it personal. You don't need to go overboard and attach some personal detail you just found on the reviewers blog, because it sounds cheesy, but I'd suggest writing a casual blank email. Imagine you're writing for a friend about your book, and word it like that, then check what details each reviewer asks and modify that blank to fit your target. It's a bit of a hassle, but if they don't think you're just a faceless corporation sending out mass emails, you're good to go.

The other thing, as I said, it becomes monotonous after a few, so if you're socially awkward like me, just jump into it. Grit your teeth, bite the bullet for the first 10 or so, then it will get easier.

I know there are a lot of other things we could do, giveaways, for example, and I also plan to do ad campaigns on Facebook and Amazon after release. What kind of marketing strategies do you have? Something cool? Something terrible? Share it!

And stay safe.

Cheers,

Lory