How to Market Your Indie Book

Expectations are everything in the publishing world. (Actually, in most places, but we’re here to talk about books.) Your reader is going to come to your book with some expectations—whether that’s from the cover, the blurb, your social media marketing or their own worldview—and you want to make sure that you’re meeting their expectations.

Marketing can be so hard for indie authors. Many of us are introverts and don’t love shouting about ourselves or our projects. Does that sound familiar?

It’s time to start looking at marketing as connecting with people instead of just selling. Marketing matters because it’s not just about getting your book in front of as many eyes as possible. It’s about getting it in front of the right eyes.

What does it matter that ten thousand people saw your book if only ten people were actually interested? Or what if a couple hundred people were interested but then felt like the marketing didn’t fit the book? Would those people be happy they picked up the book anyway or upset they didn’t get what they expected? I’d argue it’s most likely the latter.

I’ve definitely picked up books I’d heard about on social media thinking they’d be one thing only to find out the tone was completely different from what I’d expected and wanted to read.

So how do you make sure your marketing is appealing to the people who are going to love your book? Research!

Here are some tips for how to make the most of your marketing budget.

Know your ideal reader.

If you don’t know who you think will enjoy your book the most, take a second now to think about it. Try to visualize a specific person reading your book. The person you see loving your book.

You’ll want to home in on what kind of reader they are, as well as what kind of person they are. The more specific you can be the better.

Some questions you can ask yourself about them are:

-       What is their demographic background? For example: age, race, income bracket, etc.

-       What are their priorities and hobbies? How do they spend their money?

-       What do they read other than your genre? How do they read? Where do they spend their free time on the internet? (Are they on BookTok or Bookstagram?)

Now, you might be thinking, “But Sarah, a lot of people are going to read and like my book!” Yep! You’re right. But even big companies like Pepsi use the idea of an ideal customer to target different segments of their client base. Pepsi has a specific ad for hockey watchers. Are hockey watchers the only people who drink Pepsi? Heck, no! But they know that in Canada, a significant amount of their client-base does watch hockey, so they created an ad specifically for them. They also have ads targeted at American football fans, soccer fans, and pizza lovers to name a few.

If you think you have a couple different ideal readers, you can list as many as you want! Just know that if you decide you have a couple different kinds of people who want to read your book equally, you might need to market to them differently!

Research your genre.

Genres exist so that people can more easily find what they’re looking for. You may or may not have been thinking about genre when you wrote your book. However, you will need to think about it when you’re marketing as there are certain conventions and standards in each genre that readers will expect you to adhere to.

An example of this is that in romance, readers expect a happy ending. Whether that’s a happily ever after or a happy for now, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the couple (or poly partners) are together and in a place of peace and contentment in their relationship and life at the end of the book. If your book doesn’t end this way, it cannot be classified as a romance.

If your love story doesn’t have a happy ending, that’s okay! It doesn’t have to. You’ll just need to classify it as something else. Perhaps it’s contemporary fiction or women’s literature. Knowing where your book fits in the genre gives you the tools you need to understand and cater to the expectations of your audience.

Find comparative titles.

Books that are similar to yours—meaning in the same genre, with the same kinds of themes, and the same audience—are called comps or comparative titles. Finding a couple comps is important because they give you a blueprint for how to market your own book.

That’s not to say you can do exactly what they’ve done or use their promotional materials. However, if their marketing campaigns were successful, you can see what kinds of things these books did that were similar to each other and decide what marketing strategies would also work for your book.

Let’s pretend I’ve written a male-female hockey romance that’s similar in tone and story to Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus series. Looking at the books in that series and how they’ve been marketed will be helpful when learning what the readers of that kind of book are looking for.

You will notice that there are two different versions of the covers. There’s one version that features feminine bodies in slouchy sweaters or T-shirts and one that features bare masculine torsos. The feminine covers are the ones I see in grocery stores because they appeal to women who are looking for a cozy romance and who don’t want to be side-eyed when they add the book to their shopping cart. If those are the women I want to target as well, I could definitely go down that route.

Of course, that’s just one comp. It’s always good to have a couple, so I would do some research to see what other books are similar. The cover design is one example how you can use comps to research marketing, but this extends to their social media campaigns and other marketing strategies as well.

Know what you want your readers to feel when reading your book.

Doing your market research is important, but so is making sure that all your marketing strategies and images match the tone of your book. You need to stay true to your book!

One thing I like to ask my clients during the editing phase is: How do you want your readers to feel while they’re reading your book? How do you want them to feel when they finish your book?

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can make sure that your book is hitting beats that will pull on the right heartstrings of your reader. The same is true in the marketing of your book. If you want your reader to have a fun time reading your book and laugh out loud, your marketing needs to hit that same tone. If your book is emotional and going to hit some tender spots for your reader, those are the emotions you want to play into in your marketing.

There’s nothing worse than going into a book expecting it to be light when it’s actually super dark or vice versa.

So what does this ultimately mean for you, an indie author?

Getting your book in front of the right eyes is more important than getting your book in front of the most eyes. You want to connect with people quickly and give them a taste of what your book is about.

To do do that, you’ve got to research! Find out what other books are similar to yours in tone, genre, themes, and audience. Learn what those authors have done and get ideas for content and marketing strategies.

Don’t forget that to get inside your reader’s head, you need to have an ideal reader—the person you know is going to love your book. Knowing that person’s demographic info and what other books they might like will let you discover where your ideal reader likes to hang out on the internet, how they liked to be talked to, and what other things they like. Those details will help you when crafting your own marketing strategy.

Marketing can be scary when you’re thinking about it as a means to get sales, but if you think about it as a way to connect with people who get your book, it’s not so bad!

There are also a ton of people out there who specialize in book marketing and work with indie authors. I love Jenn dePaula from Mixtus Media’s approach.

You can find her on Instagram here or on her website here.