Help for Indie Writers: New Marketing Book

If you’re like me, new to the indie publishing scene, you’re overwhelmed with tasks necessary to sell your books. You are not only the author, but the editor, publisher, designer, and marketing department. Well, I can’t help much with the first bits (although I post some good tips in earlier posts about these critical items) the time has come to provide some real help for indie writers when it comes to marketing.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some great blogs out there providing advice for indie writers. For instance, Jane Friedman posts on her blog a couple of times a week and I read her stuff faithfully. Writer’s Digest also has some great tips for marketing your book.

Here are other places offering a lot of help for indie writers:

The Creative Penn
The Writer’s Life
Forbes
Author Media
Reedsy – a great article on how not to market your novel
Huffington Post
OKDork
Entrepreneur
And the list goes on, and on, and on

Add to this the many books on Amazon. There’s Goodreads, which is a social network for authors and readers run by Amazon. Publishing sites like Amazon, BookBaby, Ingram Spark, and others offer numerous articles on marketing your book. Now add the thousands of consultants and companies who vie for your hard-earned dollar promising massive sales.

The amount of reading you’d do just to cover a fraction of these sources is staggering. You’d never have time to write another word.

Help for indie writers

Well, along with some other awesome indie writers, we’ve written a book with help for indie writers when it comes to marketing your book called “Indieworld Marketing”. It builds on the bestselling book, “Navigating Indieword”, published earlier this year by my co-authors.

As a marketing professor who has always argued that marketing is built on a set of core marketing principles regardless of what you’re marketing or what channel you use to spread your message, this was a natural for me. Especially given that I’m also an indie writer–the third book in the Dark Web Series, “Azure’s Revenge” comes out later this month to join “Buried Ladies” and “Scars of the Past”, which are already in print.

Not only do I share my marketing knowledge filtered through the lens of my experience marketing my own books, but my extensive reading on book marketing from many of the resources listed above.

Indieworld Marketing

So, what makes “Indieworld Marketing” such a help for indie writers?

First, it solves one of the major problems I find with all the references mentioned earlier–they’re too general for folks who haven’t done this before. For instance, they might advise using social media to spread the word about your book but fail to mention how to set up an account of social networks, how to build an audience, how to optimize results from social media.

Notice a pattern here?

“Indieworld Marketing” doesn’t tell you what to do to market your book, it provides the how-to’s necessary to get the most reward for your efforts. And, it’s built on state-of-the-art advice from experts within book marketing and digital marketing in general.

For example, many authors mistakenly set up a website using Wik or Square or one of the other drag and drop website builders. They do this because it’s easy and it’s relatively inexpensive. In “Indieworld Marketing” I show you why this is costing you big when it comes to traffic on your site (and, all things being equal, traffic translates to sales). I also walk you through the relatively simple steps necessary to build a self hosted website that costs less than $100/year to run.

Sound good?

Well, it doesn’t stop there. I provide screen shots to guide you every step of the way, showing you which button to click and what information to enter on every screen. You don’t need to be able to code or know anything about web design or graphic design other than what looks best to you and your readers.

Other ways we provide help for indie writers

Of course, that’s just one example. There are many detailed instruction for creating everything you need to market your book and the best ways to use each component of your strategy. I even include a detailed book marketing strategy template to get you started.

Here are just a few topics covered in the book:

Setting up and managing Goodreads for success, including the code to create hyperlinks to all your social networks.
How other tasks such as writing, formatting, covers, and reviews impact your marketing success
Using book conventions and face-to-face marketing helps sales
Why it’s important to build an email list and strategies related to email marketing

The book contains links to:

Videos
Podcasts
Recommended service providers
Articles and data that support our recommendations
And, maybe the most valuable element is a link to our Indieworld community where you can connect with other indie writers, get help with problems, discuss what’s working for you, practice some of the tactics we teach, and lots more.

My co-authors provide help for indie writers

Carol P. Roman writes children’s books as well as having a massive resume demonstrating her ability to market her books and those of her son, who writes adult fiction, as well.

Julie A. Gerber also writes as an indie. Moreover, she runs a consulting business for authors, blogs, and works with other social media management companies.