This episode of Indie Author Weekly features 5 practical tips for how you can find the time to market your books.
After all, writing your books is one thing… but it’s not enough to just publish it. There’s a whole other side to being an indie author, and that is marketing.
Frankly, this is something I’ve noticed come up again and again in my business journey. People often talk about the joy of the craft, but what they don’t tell you is that in the beginning especially, you have to put in a huge proportion of your time and energy into marketing, whether your business relies on services or physical products or digital products.
But you love the craft of it, right? You don’t want to spend all your time marketing your books. You started writing books because you enjoy it. Marketing seems like a scary prospect, or maybe you even think of “selling” as a dirty word.
It doesn’t need to be! In fact, last year, I went through a complete attitude adjustment around marketing in general for my business. Nowadays, I actually look at “marketing” as “just another form of content creation.” And that makes me happy! This simple act of reframing my approach to marketing has made it a much more enjoyable experience, and I’d also argue that I’ve gotten better at marketing as a result.
Does it still take time? Yes, absolutely. But because I enjoy it now, it doesn’t exhaust me the same way it used to. And that is extremely powerful, because it means that I can do more effective marketing in less time, while still having the creative capacity and bandwidth leftover to do other things—such as writing books.
If you’re curious to learn more about this entire concept and how to apply it to your own situation, then I recommend you check out my signature program, Productivity Powerhouse, which teaches you exactly how to do all of that. You can learn more at SaganMorrow.com/powerhouse. I’ll drop the link in the show notes.
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Hello friends! Sagan here. Welcome back to Indie Author Weekly, where I share my behind-the-scenes journey of writing and self-publishing books.
If you’re new to this podcast, I am a productivity strategist for multi-passionate creatives at SaganMorrow.com: I help people manage their time and energy effectively, through customized, actionable strategies that work for your unique life and business. When I’m not teaching about productivity to solopreneurs, I spend my time writing romance novels, and occasionally, business books. And that is what this podcast is all about: the adventures of the author life.
Now let’s get into this episode of the Indie Author Weekly podcast. Today, I want to share a few practical tips for how you can find the time to market your books.
After all, writing your books is one thing… but it’s not enough to just publish it. There’s a whole other side to being an indie author, and that is the marketing side of things.
Frankly, this is something I’ve noticed come up again and again in my business journey. People often talk about the joy of the craft, but what they don’t tell you is that in the beginning especially, you have to put in a huge proportion of your time and energy into marketing, whether your business relies on services or physical products or digital products.
But you love the craft of it, right? You don’t want to spend all your time marketing your books. You started writing books because you enjoy it. Marketing seems like a scary prospect, or maybe you even think of “selling” as a dirty word.
It doesn’t need to be! In fact, last year, I went through a complete attitude adjustment around marketing in general for my business. Nowadays, I actually look at “marketing” as “just another form of content creation.” And that makes me happy! This simple act of reframing my approach to marketing has made it a much more enjoyable experience, and I’d also argue that I’ve gotten better at marketing as a result.
Does it still take time? Yes, absolutely. But because I enjoy it now, it doesn’t exhaust me the same way it used to. And that is extremely powerful, because it means that I can do more effective marketing in less time, while still having the creative capacity and bandwidth leftover to do other things—such as writing books.
If you’re curious to learn more about this entire concept and how to apply it to your own situation, then I recommend you check out my signature program, Productivity Powerhouse, which teaches you exactly how to do all of that. You can learn more at SaganMorrow.com/powerhouse. I’ll drop the link in the show notes.
Okay. With all of this in mind, here are a 5 actionable ways you can find the time to market your books:
Tip #1: Plan ahead accordingly.
If you know you have a book launch coming up, then block out that time on your calendar so you give yourself plenty of time in advance, and during the launch, and ideally also post-launch, to really put in the effort for marketing your books.
When you are planning ahead, look at your complete timeline to see what will need to be done, when. If you are sending advance reader copies of your books to book bloggers, for example, then are you giving them enough time to read your books before the launch date?
Also, if you have a pre-sale going on, then are you doing enough to promote the pre-sale so people remember to buy? If you rush this and do it all the week before your launch, it’s going to cost you a lot of headaches and a huge number of hours during that single week, with minimal payoff. The more you can do in advance, the less overwhelming it will feel, and the more effective your marketing efforts will be.
Tip #2: Batch it.
Batching is really about setting the time aside to do some work now, to save yourself time down the road. When you’re already “in the zone,” it makes it easier to do similar types of work within a single chunk of time.
A great example of batching is to do a book photoshoot, so you take a whole bunch of photos of your books in one sitting, and then you can have a library of photos to pull from whenever you want to post about your books on Instagram. This can save you so much time down the road, especially because you can get your lighting and props and camera set up just once, and get a series of beautiful photos from it to use at any time in the future.
I adore using the Instagram app Planoly to plan my Instagram feed and schedule posts. You can check it out at SaganMorrow.com/planoly (I’ll drop the link in the show notes, too).
Tip #3: Outsource it.
Okay, so, outsourcing your book marketing is something that can be quite pricey, and it’s also a gamble. You don’t really know what will pay off and what won’t. I’ve put a decent amount of money into some past book promotions and I haven’t necessarily seen a return on it that I would like. But if you have the cash and want to try this as an experiment, it certainly has a lot of potential for reaching out to wider audiences and getting your name out there.
A few examples of what this could like is hiring a PR company for your book marketing, or getting someone to create Facebook ads, or paying for your book to be featured on book lists, and so on. If you are truly strapped for time, then outsourcing your book marketing efforts might be a good avenue for you.
Tip #4: Build relationships.
Something that has been an absolute pleasure over the past couple years since I started writing novels is the relationships I’ve made with book bloggers. Book bloggers are the most incredible people! Now, it takes time to get to know the right book bloggers for your book, and to reach out to them and build relationships, but I view them as online friends. It’s a joy to connect with them on social media. So this is something that can help you a lot.
By the way, in my very first book launch I ever did back in 2016, I put the call out on Twitter to organize a book launch team. That was for my first business book, The Business of Writing & Editing, which you can grab at SaganMorrow.com/books or your favourite e-bookstore. Anyway, one person who joined my book launch team subsequently took my online course for freelancers a few months later, and then she quit her day job to become a freelance editor, and she’s since pivoted her business to become a successful artist, and I’ve since bought art from her a couple times. How cool is that? We’re still friends to this day. I think it’s really beautiful how relationships can develop over something as seemingly simple as a shared interest in your book topic.
Making new friends is a lovely experience. And when you build relationships with other people, they’ll be that much more likely to help you promote your books. So in the long-term, doing this takes some of that time and energy off your plate, because they’re marketing your books to their audiences, too.
Tip #5: Have fun with it.
As a productivity strategist, this is always 100% my recommendation for any kind of business! If you don’t enjoy the work you do, then you can get so much value from identifying what specifically you don’t like about it, and identifying whether or not you need to keep using that strategy or if there’s a way you can make it more enjoyable for you, or play with it and try a different strategy that appeals to you more, or reframe it and try a different approach to marketing.
I intend on playing with this a lot in the coming months! I like sharing snippets of my upcoming books on Twitter, and sharing teasers on Instagram. It feels fun for me. I enjoy sharing photos of my books and reviews from readers.
And again, the more that we enjoy how we’re spending our time, the more creative energy we have. Plus, when you enjoy the marketing strategies that you use, you’ll also discover that it feels much easier and more natural to promote your books. It doesn’t feel weird or salesy: you’re simply letting people know about the books you’ve written! They won’t know you’ve written books unless you tell them. And with all the noise in the online world, you have to continue to market yourself regularly to ensure that potential readers turn into actual readers.
Okay! There you have it, some things to think about for marketing your books more effectively.
To recap, the 5 tips for how to find time to market your book include…
- Tip #1: Plan ahead accordingly
- Tip #2: Batch it
- Tip #3: Outsource it
- Tip #4: Build relationships
- Tip #5: Have fun with it
If you want to learn more about saving time—and making much better use of the time you do have—then I recommend you check out my signature course, Productivity Powerhouse.
Many of my clients who take that program tell me that within just a couple weeks of barely scratching the surface of implementing the strategies in that course, they already save 5 - 10 hours every week. Plus, it includes the exact strategies for how I was able to write and self-publish 6 books within a year and a half, in between doing everything else in my business, taking up new hobbies, and dealing with mental health issues.
So as you can imagine, Productivity Powerhouse has a ton of really valuable tips which are both actionable and motivational. You can check it out at SaganMorrow.com/powerhouse.
Now, I would love to hear your thoughts on all of this: Do you struggle to find the time for marketing your books? Has this episode of Indie Author Weekly changed the way you think about marketing?
Connect with me on Twitter and Instagram, @Saganlives, to chat about it! And you can send me a message on either of those platforms if you have requests for future episode topics, too. The more you tell me what you’d like to see more of on this podcast, the better that I can accommodate that. You can also submit your questions or topic ideas anonymously at SaganMorrow.com/question.
If you enjoyed this episode, please take 2 minutes to share this podcast on social media and rate it on Apple Podcasts—any time you share it or leave a rating or review, it helps more listeners find the Indie Author Weekly podcast, so every bit counts! I really appreciate your support.
By the way, you can access complete word-for-word transcripts of this episode and all past episodes, plus sample chapters of my books and a few other bonuses and goodies, on the “secret” version of this podcast. Get access to all of that at SaganMorrow.com/secretpodcast.
Thanks so much for tuning in to the Indie Author Weekly podcast, and I will see you in the next episode.