But with any kind of pull, I can quickly jump to the scenes the provider picked out and choose three to recut in a way that makes the snippet actually work.

Because picking scenes is not the hard part. It’s pretty obvious which parts of your book are going to appeal to your readers. You probably knew it while you were writing them.

It’s the scenes with:

• high emotion

• representative of a particular trope/universal fantasy

• relatable to a large group of readers

Most authors are familiar with the above list if they’ve done any marketing research whatsoever. Where they go wrong, however, is forgetting this one key factor when choosing snippets of their book to post on social media:

The scene must be enough to get readers invested on its own, without context.

Authors see “high emotion” and are like, “I know! I’ll use the moment my mmc confesses his undying love to the fmc at the end of the book. That’s SO emotional.” And it is. To someone who has read the book and cares about these characters. Otherwise, the reader is like - do I care that this mmc is professing his undying love with flowery language? Not really.

This goes for spice too btw. It can help with views (although getting around the latest censors is a real b*tch) but the scene either has to be strong enough to stand on its own without context or a simple hook with character archetypes has to be enough to get you invested. (For example, “When the star hockey goalie agrees to tutor the class nerd in spicy lessons”.)

I saw a snippet one time that was representative of all three. It was a scene where the fmc is having dinner with her family and her brother’s best friend. Her mom is belittling her (emotional, relatable to a large group of readers) and says “Who would date you?” FMC feels tears prick her eyes but then her brother’s best friend says, “I would.” (representative of a particular trope/universal fantasy).

When you have a scene like that, you literally don’t need any other. You can just repost it forever. Seriously. Good marketing is boring AF for the author.

So, how do you cut these high emotion, relatable, tropey scenes for maximum effect?

Start with dialogue.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule. But if I’m not able to start a scene with dialogue (external or internal), I usually annotate the “hook” to the scene as if it is dialogue.

Here’s an example snippet of mine that works just okay. It’s a strong scene because it’s representative of a particular trope (two actually), but there’s literally no dialogue in it.

Dialogue makes every scene easier to sell. You can annotate it, it’s easier to read, and it’s snappier. What I did in that scene is annotate each characters internal thoughts and physical actions as if it’s a back and forth dialogue to try and make it work.

In contrast, here’s a scene that works pretty much every time. It doesn’t even need a written hook because the first line of dialogue hooks you on its own. Think of any banter, any snappy exchanges or particularly good lines in scenes that contain the three things listed above.

End with “what happens next”.

This is the thing that will make your readers one-click your book. They will not even need to read the blurb or your caption hook. They will see the title and pop straight over to Amazon to find out what happens next.

In this example, the reader is like oh sh*t! He just revealed he’s jealous! Right to her face! What does she do next?

BookBuzzPR once posted about using a two-slide TikTok post that goes like this:

Slide 1: Hook

Slide 2: Three lines of dialogue that ends on a story-bait cliffhanger

Using the above example, it looks like this:

Slide 1: POV: He sees you dancing with another man at the ball and ✨roughly cuts in✨

Slide 2: “I couldn’t stand it alright, is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Couldn’t stand what?”

“You…in someone else’s arms.”

Even if you’re not planning on making a two-slide post like that, I find it is a good exercise when trying to pick scenes that end strong.

You want the feeling after readers see your social post to be “ADDING TO TBR!” And keep in mind, with trial reels, those are cold readers. They don’t know anything except what’s in this post and a subset of them should still be ready to download it immediately.

Length of snippet depends. Some people’s account favor shorter ones: Just the back and forth or even one single line of dialogue with a strong hook.

MissMoodyReader does these short reels with the BOOM! line of dialogue so well (example).

My account favors longer one snippets. Test cutting your scene in different places to see what works for yours.

Annotate.

In addition to highlighting the dialogue, you want to add in underlines, circles, emphasis. I had a PA for a brief time who did this with my snippets and it was night and day difference.

It helps keep the reader’s attention through the non-dialogue parts and can emphasize the parts you want. Here’s an example of emphasis on the word “MINE”.

Go overboard with your censors.

Put lines through any words or phrases remotely likely to hit the censor and change the color of the line to match the background text. If you’re getting less than 5 views, you probably missed a word that needs to be censored in either your video or caption. (One time, I missed that “his laughter dies” so it doesn’t have to MEAN something graphic to get picked up.)

Counter-intutively, people are drawn to seeing those crossed out words, especially with spicy scenes. It feels more taboo when they read them and they can still basically see the word. So don’t be afraid to use the censor.

Re-post what did well.

NO ONE REMEMBERS and they probably didn’t even see it the first time. Please do not be afraid to repost.

Pick 3 scenes to test.

Try cutting them different ways.

Test different hooks/captions/hashtags/audio/b-roll. (See how much there is to test? Even with only three scenes, you have a lot to work with.)

Value saves and shares over views.

Especially when picking scenes, engagement is going to be the best indicator of success. That’s how you know you’ve got something cooking.

I also find it’s the best indicator that this reel is going to result in conversion (page reads, purchases).

What questions do you have on how to pick the best scenes for social media?

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It all went downhill from there.

I was perplexed. I had primed the algorithm. I had great reviews, a professional cover and blurb, and my also-boughts were spot-on.

I was posting gra…

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However, what had taken off like wild fire was farming out your IT support. So we were forced to work at our desk from a company computer but if we ran into a technical problem with said computer, we had to call a 1-800 number to an offshore call center and sit on hold.

I would do almost anything to avoid this, and I was fairly tech savvy as PR people go, so most times I didn’t have to resort to it. But this one time, I just couldn’t get the computer to cooperate so I bit the bullet and called the IT support line.

After jumping through a series of automated prompts and then waiting more than 25 minutes for the human support person, the first thing he asked was whether I had tried restarting.

Now, I try not to be the kind of person who blows up at call center people for doing their job, but in my mind, I’m thinking, “BITCH. You think I looked all over the company intranet for your IT helpline and sat on hold for 25 minutes and I didn’t try restarting the damn computer first??”

I didn’t say that.

I get my problem solved, and afterwards, I’m complaining to my office mate—a truly stellar PR person who went on to have a fantastically successful career in the industry while I washed out and became an indie author.

She was not, however, very technically savvy. Because she responded, “I don’t think I would have tried restarting before calling.”

I was dumbfounded. But it taught me a valuable lesson that I have remembered to this day which is that when trying to troubleshoot a problem for someone else, you must start with the lowest common denominator.

Before we can examine your marketing and see why it’s not working, you need to try restarting.

This means passive marketing. I know, I know. The exact thing I told you NOT to focus on in my post about how to bring in readers.

I still maintain that learning how to market your book to readers is where to start.

But if conversion isn’t happening or your marketing still isn’t working (sending traffic), no matter what you’re throwing at it, then we need to try restarting.

And look, passive marketing is important. If your sales page isn’t optimized, you might have some freak post that goes viral and drives tens of thousands of views to your product page, only to have more than half of them decide not to buy/download.

This is bad for more reasons than just your quest to get readers. The Amazon algorithm sees this and makes a note: this sales page does not convert. If I send users to this page, they will not buy.

It goes without saying that Amazon likes people to buy and their algorithm is built to reward that.

So let’s go back to that established author and her advice to authors whose books weren’t selling (remember, I said it was good advice!):

“Get a cover that matches your genre and fix your blurb.”

I can’t tell you how many authors I see spending money on things further down the marketing funnel to try and fix the problem(s) at the top of it. And they’re usually spending more money trying to work around the problem than they would just fixing it.

This is why you should never, ever pay for ads before optimizing your passive marketing. That is what we in the biz call “throwing good money after bad”.

I could write a post on each of these and I probably will, but for now, here’s a checklist to get you started. If you can’t emphatically answer YES! to everything on this list, you are always going to be rowing uphill trying to get people to read your book.

1. Does my cover look like the top 3 indie books in my genre that my potential readers are reading?

2. If a reader only saw my cover, would they be able to tell my genre?

3. Does my cover pop in a small thumbnail image?

4. Does my blurb start with a strong, attention-grabbing hook?

5. Is my blurb under 180 words?

6. Does my blurb have a CTA (call to action)?

7. Does my blurb entice the reader to click “buy now” with conflict, intrigue? (NOT a synopsis of my story)

8. Am I using data-driven keywords and categories?

9. Does my sales page have attractive A+ content?

A few of these items are Amazon-centric and there’s a reason for that. Nearly 80% of books are sold on Amazon. We are trying to get the broadest group of readers to pay attention to your book. That means maximizing your presence on the website of the biggest worldwide seller of books.

The cover is probably the most important of these and the most expensive one to fix. The cover’s main job is to SCREAM your genre. If you write spicy romance and it reads YA, you have a cover problem. And if you have a cover problem, and not a lot of money to fix it, here are your options:

• Jump on a sale - my custom reader magnet cover was $50 from GetCovers

• Buy a pre-made cover - it may not be custom but it will definitely look like your genre

• Make your own in Canva - you can buy the commercial license to stock photos or even character illustrations

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the list and wondering which to tackle first, start with your blurb. Your blurb is free to change and you can change it as many times as you want so it’s the low hanging fruit. Just…write a new one. Throw it up there. See what happens. No need to be precious about it.

My favorite resources are @BookBlurbMagic and T. Taylor’s The Butter Blurbs Masterclass Book. The biggest mistake people usually make with their blurb is #7 - there’s no “story bait” or clear question readers need to know the answer to that will make them click “buy now”.

For the data-driven keywords and categories, I use Publisher Rocket. It is a one-time cost (not a subscription! praise be!). If you don’t have the means to purchase it, check with other authors and see if they’ll run a search for you. I try to update mine once a quarter.

For A+ content, I use Spellbound Marketing templates. But, if you haven’t signed up yet, here’s a fast primer on how to make A+ content:

• Use this sizing to make your A+ content in canva: 970 x 900.

• Use the Image Splitter app to split into 3 rows.

• Select the “Standard Image and Light Text Overlay” module.

• Upload your background image, no text for all three modules.

Answering an emphatic YES! to the above checklist means you’re spending your time, energy and money at the top of the funnel. It means everything you do from here on out will pay dividends.

Note that not one of these listed items has anything to do with the quality of your book.

I’m sure your book is very good. I have a unique perspective on selling books, which is that I don’t think it much matters how “good” your book is. “Good” in art is subjective after all.

If I only pitched the tech stories I thought were worthwhile for reporters to write about, I would have been fired posthaste. So “quality” is not really what we’re aiming for here.

However, there is one thing I care about when it comes to getting people to read your book:

Satisfy your readers.

There was a very public TikTok scandal where a young woman went viral selling thousands of copies of her debut only to put out a very beautiful, full of custom art, sprayed edges product with a half-coherent, barely edited story inside. This is a great way to get a lot of readers and then lose them for good.

If you want your book to continue to garner new readers every month, it needs to be satisfying. And what’s satisfying for some genres would piss off other readers, like having an obvious HEA in a mystery instead of a romance.

Fulfilling genre expectations is ground zero for your fiction book. Authors who do this naturally seem to have no problems marketing their book because they understand implicitly what their readers expect and know how to deliver it to them.

Sometimes this is because they are analytical and like to examine market trends. Sometimes, they are an avid reader of the genre and know intuitively what they want to see in a book. Sometimes, they hire a really good editor or helpful beta readers who point this out to them.

However you get there, your book must satisfy YOUR READERS, the readers of your genre.

Here’s what happens when your book doesn’t do this:

• You keep paying for marketing consults and content pulls, trying to find THE THING that will hit

• Your book gets bad reviews

Finally, if your marketing DOES appear to be working: your posts are reaching enough people, or your ads are converting and you’re sending enough people to your Amazon sales page, but they’re still not buying or reading your book, that means one of two things:

1. You are hitting the wrong audience (the wrong side of reels is a dark place to be) or

2. You didn’t listen to me and didn’t make sure you answered an emphatic YES! to each of the questions on the checklists and your Amazon sales page isn’t converting.

In which case, have you tried restarting?

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He wasn’t wrong.

I have an almost pathological need to look on the bright side of things, which means I have to be extra careful not to venture into toxic positivity.

But in some places of my life, this can be a real boon. Book marketing is one of them.

When I was getting ready to launch my debut novel, I sat down and thought about all the things that made me unique as an author. I specifically did not frame them as strengths and weaknesses because these things about us are really neither good nor bad, they just are.

Let me give you an example.

I am not yet a full-time author. This means I write in my free time so rapid release may always be a struggle for me. (Weakness.)

But it also means I don’t depend on my books to pay for my life or my family’s life. (Strength.)

What I lack in time, I can theoretically make up in funds to put towards my author dream. I can also try more things and take more risks, knowing that paying my bills doesn’t depend on book sales yet.

Take a moment to think about your own background, your experiences. What do you bring to the table as an author? How can you find the bright side (strengths) of those that might be considered weaknesses?

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Here’s a few from my list:

• Skilled in community building

• Personally use social media

• Knowledgable about basics of design

• Tech-saavy

• Live with autoimmune conditions

• Voracious reader in my genre

• Mom and wife

• New to the online book community

• Never attended a book event

• Positive outlook

• FT job outside of writing / breadwinner for my family

Let me explore the “living with autoimmune conditions” one because I’ll bet that surprised a few people. What does that have to do with “what I bring to the table as an author”?

First, the chronic illness community overlaps hugely with the book community. For many of us, books are one of the only escapes we have from our bodies. Not only does that experience influence my writing, it heavily informs my marketing. My brand is one of bingeable escapism because that’s what I personally turn to books for as a reader.

I’m also less likely to succumb to burnout because I’m experienced in managing my energy levels. I know how far I can push myself and I’m used to making educated choices rather than “trying to do it all”. I’m used to finding accommodations for myself and I actively seek them out.

I take the time to establish my author goals and determine whether this marketing action is worth the “spoons”. It means I’m going to be fine with “done” instead of “perfect” because living with chronic conditions mean you have to learn to be fine with that.

Think about how you show up as your whole self and then take the time to find the strengths you can use to fuel your author career. The results might surprise you.

I think the reason I know how to bring in readers is because my entire career has been in communications. I started out pitching very boring tech stories about file storage to harassed reporters inundated with thousands of daily pitches. I am used to sifting through chicken shit to make chicken salad, then selling it for lunch to people on Ozempic.

When you ask other authors how you can get more readers, most of them will immediately jump to your “passive marketing” aka your social links, cover and blurb.

One time, I saw a well-established author post on Threads, “Send me the link to your book and I’ll tell you why it’s not selling”. She got sent hundreds of links to books with no readers, which she dutifully checked and responded to. I then dutifully reviewed every single response and 99% were some variation of the exact same message, which I will share with you now:

“Get a cover that matches your genre and fix your blurb.”

While this is great advice, it is actually not where the majority of authors need to spend their time. You might end up pouring budget and energy into maximizing your passive marketing and end up with nothing left over for the real problem.

If you don’t have enough readers, this is an active marketing problem. You need to be bringing in more readers, who will then (hopefully) be converted by your passive marketing (the sales page, your social links, etc.). That’s the marketing term for it - conversion. But before we worry about converting all the readers we’re bringing in, we have to actually…bring in the readers.

The same way I pitched chicken shit stories to harried reporters, I now pitch my (quality) book to (equally busy) potential readers. This is second nature to me and my background has made me immune to feeling embarrassed by this.

You don’t need to cold call San Francisco tech reporters and beg them to pay attention to your chicken shit story to learn how to bring in readers. Like everything with marketing, there is a formula.

Audience <

1. Audience: Are you targeting the right people?

For authors, this means have you clearly identified who is buying your books? This could be readers in your genre but alternatively, it could mean parents or school librarians or booksellers. Kickstarter users are their own audience independent of Kindle Unlimited readers or wide readers, etc.

Eventually, we want to get super specific here, like a SAHM mom of 2 who lives in the midwest. But I’ll argue that most of us can just start with “readers of my genre looking to read on their e-reader”.

Audience < Medium

2. Medium: Are you speaking to your target audience where they are already hanging out?

Medium is just a fancy way of saying channel which is just a fancy way of saying where you put your marketing message.

This can mean trial reels, TikTok Capcut meme videos, responding to a Threads post asking for book recs like yours or it can mean selling in person at events or pitching it to bookstore owners to have on their shelves.

Where do readers of your genre hang out? Are they the purchasers or is someone else (a parent, a school, a bookstore) purchasing on their behalf? In that case, the purchaser is the audience. What do bookstores want to hear/know about your book?

If you’re trying to run a Kickstarter campaign, you should start with maximizing your marketing on Kickstarter, not Instagram. Spend time creating a kickass video for your Kickstarter page before you film a trial reel.

If you’re looking to sell at an in-person event, you’re selling your physical books. That’s going to require a different approach than convincing someone to download your ebook off kindle unlimited because they saw a reel on TikTok.

First step, clearly define your audience. Next step, establish where they hang out and focus your attention there. Make sure you are putting your maximum efforts in the right place.

Audience < Medium < Message

3. Message: Is your message right for your audience?

If you are reaching the correct audience where they are already hanging out, but they’re not responding with engagement (likes, saves, shares, follows, stopping by your booth at the event, pledging to your kickstarter), your message may be the culprit.

Hopefully, you are, yourself, a reader of your genre. Think about the last book you read. What pushed you over the edge and made you decide it was worth reading this book over all the others in your TBR? I’m willing to bet it wasn’t a trope list.

This is what marketing people are trained to do and what you can learn how to do too. They look at other comparison products that are selling like they want their product to be selling and pull “lessons” to use in their own outreach. Marketing even has a fancy term for this called a “swipe file”, which is basically a collection of comparison marketing that they can refer back to and “steal” the angles for their own products.

When I was pitching a reporter, I would read their other articles to see what kind of topics and companies they were interested in. Then I would literally write in the subject line, “re: your article on XX” and in the body say, “Given you write on x and y topic, I have “story z” for you featuring all these bullets with x and y.”

This does two things:

1. It forms a connection between you and the person you’re pitching because you have shown that you care enough to put in the bare minimum research to determine what they want. That creates trust. This author understands me. She probably understands me enough to write a book that will satisfy me.

2. It gives the potential reader a frame of reference they understand. This is why trad marketing relies so heavily on comps, or comparison books. This is also why your cover needs to look like the other covers in your genre. It creates a feeling of psychological safety that gives readers the confidence to hit “buy now”.

Here some questions you can ask yourself to try and get at what’s worth marketing about your book:

1. What is the thing in my book that readers of my genre will find the most satisfying?

2. What is the most “fun” part of my book?

3. What is the coolest part of my book?

4. What is the weirdest thing that happens in my book/about my book?

5. What is an example of an inverted trope in my book?

6. What is a scene from my book that perfectly exemplifies a popular trope in a short snippet?

7. What feeling do I expect readers to get from reading my book?

8. What is the benefit readers get from reading my book?

Are you just sharing a list of tropes instead of speaking directly to your ideal reader with the unique parts of your book that will satisfy them? Do you have a CTA (call to action)? Is your message compelling and urgent enough to get them to click buy now?

Message is the one everyone ends up focusing on and it’s really a shame, because I actually don’t think it’s the thing holding most of us back.

Like I said, most of us are readers of our genre. We intuitively understand our audience and how to speak to them. We get obsessive about crafting the perfect hook instead of focusing on this final, simple step that 9/10 is the one to actually move the needle.

So how do you do it? What is the #1 way to get people to read your book?

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If one of your social posts takes off, or one of your readers’ posts does, the last thing you want is to lose sales because it takes more than one click for people to find your books.

Before you make a single graphic in canva, you need to add links to your books in your social media bios.

Obviously I feel very strongly about this topic.

If you’re waiting to do this because you’re a perfectionist and you heard you’re supposed to host the links on your own website and first you need a website and you need to buy the domain and, and, and…

Done is better than perfect.

In most things, but ESPECIALLY in this, because it is so, so incredibly easy to update later. And in the meantime, people are reading your books!

LinkTree is free and it’s very straightforward. People are used to seeing it. Even if you are fancy and use a canva site or caard, I still recommend using the traditional linktree format. Here’s the links to include, typically in this order:

1. Read my book

2. Read my other book

3. Buy my book (if this is different than reading, like a special edition or signed copies)

4. Sign up for my newsletter and get this freebie

5. Anything else you’re trying to get people to take action on (ARC sign ups, kickstarter, cover reveal sign ups, etc.)

6. Links to your other socials

7. Bonus links you can include: Link to series pages, link to Amazon profile to follow

I use free universal links from Books2Read that show every format of the book and work no matter what country the reader is in, but you can also just link straight to Amazon.com.

Remember, done is better than perfect.

A note about using your own website to host your l!nk in b!o. This is obviously the preferred route, rather than sending them to a third party site. But I would argue that’s ONLY the case if the page you’re sending them to is specifically designed for mobile, doesn’t have annoying pop-ups, and doesn’t require too much scrolling. As much as possible, it should mimic the linktree format.

There are tons of canva templates for a gorgeous looking l!nk in b!o - I personally use SpellBound Marketing for my templates and she has a great one (that I promise I am going to use…as soon as I get a chance).

Alright, now that you’ve popped that link in all your social bios, it’s time for your pinned post.

In Threads, this is usually one pinned post with your books, tropes, and maybe a hook.

In Instagram, it’s usually three pinned graphics at the top that make up your Instagram “banner”. However, one graphic with all the covers of your books in it plus the reading order is good too.

In TikTok, people tend to just pin their most popular videos/slideshows - the ones that convert.

Your pinned post should answer the question: “Where do I start?”

If someone stumbles across your profile, they should be able to tell right away: your latest book/series, your most popular book/series, and which book to start reading first.

Finally, your bio. Yep, I started with the links first. I know writing the bio is easier, the links are more important. I said what I said.

The #1 first thing in your bio should be the genre you write in. The role of this line is to instantly tell the reader, “This is for me”.

If you write in multiple genres, list them. If you want to get creative and say “Writing fantasy MMC who will sweep you off your feet”, fine. But I tend towards keywords rather than getting cute when it comes to this.

If they are a mystery reader, and you write mysteries, well then. They know instantly they are in the right place. Maybe they’ll click on your pinned post to see which book they should start with. Maybe they’ll head straight to the l!nk in b!o, click the first link and download your book. (An author can dream.)

Next, if you have few enough books to list them out with release dates, that’s usually my preference. If you have too many, you can say, “Paranormal romance series “Love Bites””.

A trick that influencers use is to have the last line in the bio be a down arrow or finger emoji pointing to your link and to use that line to tease their freebie.

“Download my free prequel novella now ⬇️”

Speaking of, if you can fit them, action verbs are always nice. “Read Book 1 now” “Out June 25, pre-order now”. Your bio is just another spot for sales copy. You can use these not only in your written bio in the links within your l!nk in b!o too.

Here’s my free linktree as an example. (Done is better than perfect!)

Notice how every single link is its own CTA (call-to-action)? I’m telling the prospective reader exactly what to do.

They can see clearly the difference between Book 1, Book 2, or the free book.

Again, the whole point is to make it easy, easy, easy for people to start reading your books.

We know how much work it is to get that post to take off. Don’t lose out on the fruits of that labor because your readers couldn’t find your books.

Yes, even the marketing.

I think it’s because I started my career in public relations by pitching mind-numbing stories about software to tech reporters where I was forced to uncover the “there, there” wherever it might be hiding. In contrast, selling my own fiction books to fellow readers is a breeze.

I also love the community. And as I’ve progressed from debut indie to 2x published indie author, I’ve met more of my colleagues and discovered that many of them face the same problems. Problems I have a unique perspective on as a person who’s day job boils down to “convince people to pay attention to the things I want them to pay attention to”, also known as communications.

I’ve called this Substack Debut 2 FT Indie Author because that’s my story, and I’m writing it in real time.

You’ll get in-the-moment lessons learned from someone who’s actively building their career along with you. No offense to the trad route or indies who established their fan base during the gold rush when you could toss your book up on Amazon and people would somehow find it. More power to you. Their advice just isn’t always applicable to someone starting their indie author career today.

I’m facing the same challenges you are: AI slop, an incredibly competitive market, algorithms that change on the daily and, oh yeah, balancing it all with my FT gig that pays for my family to live.

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• How to build a community of ARC readers that become your first fans

• How to pitch your book to potential readers

• How to FIND those potential readers so you can pitch your book to them

• How to plug your leaky funnel so when you find your readers they actually buy

• And also some mindset posts about jealousy and imposter syndrome because the mind is a beautiful thing but it can also be a real bitch sometimes
  

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And that brings me to today’s lesson. This is one I didn’t have to learn the hard way, but a lot of authors do, and I don’t want that to be you.

Tell people what you want them to do.

Marketing has fancy terms for everything, which makes marketing people sound important and like they are more intelligent than you. Don’t worry, they’re not. Marketing is actually extremely formulaic and once you learn it, you’re set for life. You can sell anything from storage software to solar panels to bingeable romantasy books.

If you learn nothing else from my posts, I hope you learn not to be afraid of marketing. It’s just a skill, and as a writer, you are actually predisposed to be better at this skill than the average bear. Plus, you don’t have to tell yourself to “think like a San Francisco tech reporter” like I did. You are selling to other readers just like you, which means, you already know what they want to hear.

The fancy marketing term for telling people what you want them to do is called a “Call-to-Action”. Marketing people make this jargon even more jargony by using its acronym, “CTA”.

Every single thing you post about your book should have a call-to-action or CTA.

In my day job, if posts don’t have a CTA, I don’t write them. Why am I bothering to communicate to people if there’s no action for them to take?

We live in a busy, busy world and part of respecting people’s time is only going to them when there’s a direct action they should take.

So, how does that translate to your author business?

Put a CTA in the caption of your posts and/or post a comment ON EVERY SINGLE POST with the CTA. Mine is usually, “Drop an [EMOGI] for the 🔗”. I comment this on every post, including TikTok and trial reels where I have to DM them manually with the link because I use the free version of ManyChat. Sometimes nobody asks for the link. MOST TIMES, NOBODY ASKS FOR THE LINK. Whooooooooo caaaaaaaaaares????

When they do, and I send it, they buy or download EVERY TIME. Once they have a DM from you with the link, it’s easy to buy. They may have already forgotten about your post, but then they see that DM and they’re like, oh yeah! I wanted to read that! And they buy.

What if your book isn’t out yet? Even when your book is out, your CTA isn’t always going to be to buy your book. Sometimes it’s to sign up for your ARC team or subscribe to your newsletter to get some NSFW character art.

My recommendation for those haven’t debuted yet but want to start marketing now is to set up your newsletter and use that as the CTA. Eventually, you can say - Want to read the first three chapters this book before it releases? Drop an [EMOGI] for the 🔗!

Remember, you don’t have to be shy to ask people to help you. Especially as a debut indie author, EVERYONE wants to help you. This is a special time. Debut authors tend to think they’re at the disadvantage (oh woe is me, nobody knows who I am, why would they read my book) when really, the community is never more hyped to support you than ahead of the launch of your debut book. It’s a wonderland of beautiful possibilities. You might be the next Suzanne Collins! And they’ll be able to say they knew you when.

Ask people to share your posts so they get more reach. Ask them to request your books at their local library (this is a GREAT one for older family members or coworkers who love and support you, but don’t read your genre).

Tell them what you want them to do.

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