This is my attempt to provide a roadmap to building a following as an indie author. I am by no means an expert. I still need a day job, so take all this with a grain of salt. Or a pinch. Or the whole shaker.
This is not original to me, dozens of people write books on it and sell online courses on it. I’m just going to type down my own thoughts on it.
The bad news is, it’s not a get rich quick scheme. The only road I know of to anything like success at self publishing is long term. It’s writing book after book after book and slowly, over time, increasing the number of people who want to buy them.
The good news is, this formula definitely can work. Many far more successful writers than me use it.
Here’s what we’re going to cover:
Build an email list of subscribers/customers. Keep growing it over time. Send emails to this list to sell your new books when they come out.
Get your cover, blurb, and reviews to the state where people who land on your books pages will actually download them.
Give books away for free. Use free days and create a book or books that are permafree.
Promote those free books through paid promo sites or social media to send new potential readers to those free book pages.
If your cover, blurb, and reviews are good, many will download the free book.
If your writing is good, some will finish the book and sign up for the email list to get more. Some of those will buy your other books that aren’t free.
Let’s dig in!
Before You Publish
You may already have published. That’s probably OK. A lot of this can be done retroactively after you’ve published. Some will take more work to do retroactively, but… we’ll get to that.
So, before you publish your book, first, create an email list. Pick the mass email service that’s best for you. I use Mailchimp, and they have a limited free plan, but there are many others. Add whoever you can to the email list. Your friends who are willing to hear about your books. Your family.
(If you’ve already published, just go ahead and create the email list now.)
Second, put the link to your email list signup form at the end of your book.
“Did you enjoy this book? Sign up here for updates about my next one!”
You want this to be the very next thing the reader sees after they read “The End.” They’re happy, they liked your protagonist, they want to know more, and boom, the very next thing offers them more. All they have to do is give you their email address.
If your manuscript is already published, You can update your local file with this link and re-upload it.
Third: do a paperback manuscript too. I find that I sell close to zero paperbacks, but they’re valuable as a sales tool. They make it look like, “Hey, this paperback costs $15, but if I buy the e-book it’s only $2.99. Look how much I’m saving!”
Fourth: Write a series. It’s just so much easier to get people to buy the second book when they already know the characters and the world.
Now: a couple of pieces of advice that are going to cause a bit more controversy.
You need a book cover before you publish. The best advice I can possibly give you is to pay money for a professional cover.
(NB: Do as I say, not as I do. My Sherman Iron Mysteries have covers I made myself. I broke the rules deliberately for a specific reason. Don’t you do it. Pay money for a professional cover.)
This is why I recommend a professional cover designer: books absolutely do get judged by their cover, and it happens in less than two seconds. Sucky cover = sucky sales. If your cover is bad, people will get to your book page on Amazon and leave immediately without buying.
Next controversial advice:
I suggest going exclusive to Amazon at first. The reasons for this are:
1) Having your book exclusive to Amazon gives you free promotion days you can use to grow your email list. Five days per quarter, you can make the Kindle version of your book free. I’ll talk about why it’s a good idea to make your book temporarily free a bit further on in this document.
2) Having your book exclusive to Amazon means your book is in the Kindle Unlimited program. KU, as it’s called, is where readers pay Amazon $12/month to read all the books they can get through. If you’re exclusive to Amazon, one of the books they can choose from is yours, and you get paid a certain rate per page read.
3) Amazon has 80-some percent of the e-book market. Yes, being exclusive to Amazon means you can’t reach that other 20 percent. But to reach that 20 percent, you’re going to need powerful marketing, and you don’t have that yet or you wouldn’t be reading this guide. You can go to Apple and Kobo once you’re up and running. To get started, Amazon exclusivity gives you marketing tools you really need when just starting out.
If you’ve already published your book on all platforms, or if you’ve already published many books on all platforms, then all the stuff about using free days to build subscribers isn’t going to work for you. But keep an eye on the part about making books permafree.
There is one more “before you’ve published” step. I recommend a professional editor almost as highly as I recommend a professional cover designer. A lot of indie authors can’t afford this because they’re pretty expensive for a novel-length manuscript. I write a little bit below on ideas to come up with the money for it. But if it is anywhere at all within your means, a professional editor is one of the two most powerful expenditures you can make on behalf of your book.
Right now you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, I’ll just do my own editing, get grammarly, and have some beta readers. I don’t need to hire a professional editor.
If that’s all your financial situation will permit, then it is what it is. But there is a very specific reason why I recommend a professional editor if it’s at all possible, and you’ll see it below in the section on reviews.
After You’ve Published
Get your book on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats.
Email your subscribers that the book is now for sale. Then, email your subscribers on a regular basis. Let them know where you’re at as far as progress on the the next book, and other personal tidbits. These are customers. Just like regulars at a restaurant, they are more likely to keep coming back if you invest in the relationship. Talk to them. Share from your life.
Every time you mail those friends and family you put on your initial email list, beg them for reviews. Beg.
How many reviews you have, and how many stars the reviews rate your book, are almost as powerful as the book cover. 100 5-star reviews? I might buy. 10 reviews and half of them are two star? Probably not going to buy. Reviews sell books. Number of reviews and high star rating are absolutely essential to sales.
So have no shame. Beg. Plead. Demand. Everyone who tells you they’ve read your book, congratulates you on having published a book, or asks about what it was like to get it published, tell them: Reviews are a huge help, would you please write one.
There are two selling tools that matter more than anything else on Amazon. These two things alone sell more books for you than everything else you can do on your book page. Book cover and reviews. I already made my pitch about a professional book cover.
Here’s my pitch about hiring a professional editor: Mistakes, typos, bad grammar —> bad reviews. It’s direct, inevitable, and instantaneous. Readers will quit out of a book to leave a bad review for it if they hit enough typos. A professional editor is the first step to good reviews. If your editing is bad, no matter how many people you get to buy your book, each sale will be reducing the odds of future sales, because people are leaving bad reviews after they read “your” instead of “you’re.”
If you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it. But if you go without, it’s like going onto a medieval battlefield without armor. If everything goes right, you might still win, but it would be a whole lot easier with some chain mail.
Create a second book. At the back of it, include not only the email signup link, but also a link to buy your first book.
Email your list and let them know the new book is out.
Go back into the manuscript of the first book. In addition to the email signup link, add an excerpt — 2000 words, 5000, 10,000, whatever — from your second book, and following that excerpt a link to buy it. Re-upload to Amazon.
Continue emailing your subscribers regularly. Always be asking your email subscribers for reviews. Continue regularly using free days for all books, and promoting them for free on social media.
This is the basic theory: Your email list is how you sell your expensive books. Your marketing is how you give away your free books. And your free books are how you get people on your email list so you can sell them expensive books. It’s like the circle of life. Someone call Simba.
Shampoo, rinse, and repeat for a long time, and prepare yourself for…
Leveling Up
There are some huge steps we’re going to take here that may be mentally challenging.
The first is to create some content that people get for free whenever they sign up for your email list. The obvious choice here is a book or short story, but other things can work.
The idea is, they get to the end of your novel, they loved it, they loved the characters, they want more, and there’s that link we did earlier inviting them to sign up for your email list to hear when the next book is due. But now, instead, that same link says, “Get an absolutely FREE short story set in my universe right now by signing up for my email list.”
That’s more attractive than merely the subscribe link. You should begin to get a larger percentage of people who read your book converting into email subscribers.
The next step is making one of your books permanently free. “Permafree” is slang you’ll hear all the time in the indie author community.
Amazon won’t let you do this. Their minimum price is 99 cents. The trick is, they WILL do it if your book is free on other book buying sites. So we’re going to take one of your books “wide.” In other words, publish it on many book publishing sites, not just Amazon as I advised before you publish.
Go to smashwords.com, go through their entire publishing process, and especially include the steps they require for them to distribute your book to Kobo, Nook, Apple, etc. This can be somewhat challenging, but you can do it!
Set the price to $0.00. Once you’ve gotten through all this successfully, your book is now $0.99 on Amazon, but $0.00 everywhere else. Amazon will want to fix this. Have someone you know go to your book page on Amazon and use the link to report a lower price. Give it a few days, and your book will be free on Amazon.
Now, you’ve got a free book on Amazon, and it’s always free. The next quest in Level 2 of the Self Pub RPG is…
The dreaded boss fight…
Spend money to promote your free days and free book.
Ack! Spend money? But I’m broke! I’m writing because I need money, not because I have it to spend on promotions.
I know, I know. I’ve been there. I would still be there if I didn’t have a great day job to help fund my writing. And at the end of this essay, I’ll make a suggestion or two about how to get some money for this. But first, let’s cover the subject itself.
I already mentioned, email subscribers are the key to selling books for money. And by this stage of the process, maybe you’ve got a hundred, maybe a thousand, whatever. But there are people out there who have hundreds of thousands, in some cases even millions of email subscribers. And for a fee, they will email their subscribers about your book.
The biggest names in this business are Freebooksy, Fussy Librarian, and… drumroll please… ominous music plays… the 900 pound gorilla in the room, BookBub. Trust me: start with Fussy and Freebooksy.
So you buy a $50 promotion on the Fussy Librarian for your free book, they email all their hundreds of thousands of subscribers, your book gets a ton more free downloads than you’ve ever had before, some of those actually read, and some subscribe. A few may buy some of your other books. You probably don’t make the $50 back on those other book sales, but you probably do make some of it back, and you get something that may be worth more money in the long run: new email subscribers!
A Note About Making Your Books Free
I’ve said a lot about free promotion days on Amazon, and making books permafree. You may be asking something like this:
“What? Free? My book is a masterpiece! It’s worth $30 a copy just like James Patterson gets!”
I know. I feel the same. But James Patterson doesn’t get $30 per copy because his writing is good (far from it, imho). He gets $30 per copy because everyone has heard of him and knows exactly what they’re getting when they buy a book with that name on it. No one has heard of me. No one has heard of you. So we don’t get $30 per copy, and have to resort to giving the book away for free to build awareness.
More importantly, free promotions can get you something that, in the long run, can be more valuable than the $2.99 you might have gotten for your book if it weren’t free.
Email subscribers! Email subscribers are the heart and soul of selling indie e-books.
So use your five free days per quarter that you get for being exclusive to Amazon. When it’s free, Facebook it. Twitter the heck out of it. Hashtag like crazy. Let the good people of Parler know.
Conversion rates are small. Not everyone who actually finds your free book’s page in Amazon will download. Not everyone who downloads will open. Not everyone who opens will finish. But when they do finish, they probably liked it. Those are the ones you want on your email list.
A Note About Paid Promotional Sites
There are several that actually do deliver decent results, but the newbie level of this is Freebooksy and Fussy Librarian. Be confident that you know what you’re doing before going to any other book promotion site.
I know there are many authors who make Amazon ads work for them. I’ve never been any good at it, so I don’t have any useful advice to give.
I’ve never had even a little bit of luck with buying ads anywhere for a full price book. It has to be free or $0.99 to have any chance at all of the paid promotion / ad achieving any results.
Facebook can be useful once you have confidence in your book marketing, but I don’t recommend it while you’re learning.
The best time for paid book promotions is after you have 3 books and some free email subscriber giveaway content. That’s when your odds of recouping your investment become decent.
You might not be able to afford paid promotion sites. I’ll be honest, this gets a lot harder when you can’t afford paid promotions.
The main substitute is to chase social media followers as hard as you can. Hashtagging on Twitter. Asking people to share on Facebook. Ugh. It’s a long slog, and every day Facebook makes it harder and harder to promote for free on their site. If this is all you can do, pour your heart into it, because it sure won’t work if you don’t give it maximum effort.
Another free substitute for paid promos is asking other writers you know if they’ll do email swaps with you. You send an email to your subscribers about their free book; they send an email to their subscribers about your free book. It exposes you to some new customers in the same way Freebooksy or Fussy do, but at much smaller numbers.
Building on Your Foundation
Congratulations. You’ve mastered the basics of this system. Level 3 is about refinement.
Are your book covers the best they could possibly be? Do they clearly communicate the genre you’re writing in? Do they catch the eye? Especially the permafree book, is its cover eye catching and selling?
I want to be clear about this: The entire theory of book marketing I’ve outlined here depends on three things: Cover, Reviews, and Blurb. Once people get to your page on Amazon, they have to decide whether or not to buy (or download for free). The three biggest factors in that decision are, in order of importance, cover, reviews, and blurb.
We’re writers. We can probably do the blurbs ourselves. But the cover, if you’re not a professional graphic designer or artist, then you should be spending money on this. Get the cover right. It’s the only way people will actually buy/download for free a copy of your book.
Are the books themselves the best they can be, especially the free book? Have any reviews pointed out typos?
- Polish your manuscript up and re-upload it to Amazon (and smashwords, if it’s the free one. Remember, the entire purpose of your free book is that people will be so delighted they’ll buy the next one and sign up for your list.
- Get a better cover if you can. Cover is the most powerful selling tool you have. And, for this step, we have to go to …
Startup Cash
Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform to help creative products get off the ground. A quick outline of how it works is, you create a budget for how much you need to launch your creative project, and you invite people to “invest” in the project at certain levels. Each level has a prize they get for investing.
Kickstarter doesn’t like us to say it this way (or at least they didn’t. It’s been years since I did this) but we use it, in effect, as a pre-order platform. People give you money *before* the book is out, and once the book comes out you give them their reward for investing at that level.
So for self published authors, create a budget. Here’s a quick and dirty thumbnail sketch of how I would do it if it was me:
$400 for professional editing
$400 for professional cover
$1000 for marketing
$1800 in total.
Now, set one investment level of $40, and for it, people get a signed copy of your book.
Get creative with some other investment levels. When I did it, I had one where people could be named on a page in the book, one where people could name a character… etc.
Get two people to kick in $100 each to be named in the book, then get 40 people to essentially pre-order signed paperbacks, and you’ve got your marketing budget funded.
But the thing about Kickstarter is, you get no money, and your investors are not charged, unless the entire stated budget is funded. It’s a balancing act. If you don’t think you can get $1800 from your friends and family and other potential early investors, make the budget lower. You can get covers for cheaper than $400. You can cut the marketing budget back as far as you need to, but be aware that less marketing = less sales.
If you think your potential circle of early buyers can reach a higher number than $1800, go for it. Add the excess into marketing.
Some people don’t like this Kickstarter thing, because it is, essentially, asking your friends and family for money to start a business. But then again, you’re going to do that anyway once your book is out. I say try it this way.
CONCLUSION
As an unknown writer, your challenge is that no one has heard of you. How do we slowly fix that? There are about ten million indie e-books on Amazon’s Kindle store. How is anyone going to discover yours?
The answer is to build your own email list of customers so you can make sure they do discover each new book you write.
Get your cover, blurb, and reviews to the state where people who land on your books’ pages will actually download them.
Use free days and create a book or books that are permafree.
Spend money with respectable promotion sites to send new potential readers to those free book pages
If your cover, blurb, and reviews are good, many will download the free book.
If your writing is good, some will finish the book and sign up for the email list to get the free story.
And if that’s good, they’ll buy your other books that aren’t free.
Keep at it. This is hard and it takes a long time. There’s no shame in having a day job.
Be systemic about it. Track your spending on promotions.
There are going to be long days when it feels like you’re doing all this work and getting nothing. But if you believe in your writing and keep working hard, it’s definitely possible to slowly grow your readers list.