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Colleen Mitchell, host of the Novel Writing Podcast, had me on to talk about book marketing strategies that don't require handing your soul over to social media. From advertising basics to cover design, launch strategies, and the realities of traditional versus indie publishing, this conversation covers a lot of ground for authors at every stage.
Key takeaways:
- Organic social media marketing has not meaningfully worked for authors since around 2016.
- Advertising to people who are already shopping for books, like on Amazon, is far more effective than interrupting social media scrollers.
- The cover is the single most important marketing asset a book has.
- Beginning authors should focus on writing the best book possible before worrying about advertising or platform.
- Launch strategy matters far more for traditionally published authors than for indie authors.
- Traditional publishing is losing market share to indie publishing every quarter.
- Finding one representative reader and marketing directly to that person is more effective than trying to reach a broad, undefined audience.
How Thomas Got Into Author Marketing
Thomas: I started off in the 2000s building websites for authors. That led to speaking at writer's conferences and consulting authors on marketing, and eventually it led to me becoming the marketing director for a publishing company, a literary agent, and hosting the Novel Marketing Podcast, which is now the longest-running book marketing podcast in the world. We've seen many book marketing trends come, go, sometimes come back, and sometimes go away again. Things go in and out of popularity. We have learned what always works, what sometimes works, and what used to work and doesn't anymore.
Colleen: So what's a recent trend that's come back that you maybe didn't expect?
Thomas: Launch teams are coming back. They've actually always worked, but there were a lot of sloppy launch team practices that caused people to fall out of favor with them. And this points to something important I've learned over time. Other than having an email list and a website, there's no marketing technique that works universally. A lot depends on your genre, your strengths, your weaknesses, and your readers.
Launch teams work really well for some kinds of books and not others. A big factor is whether your fan base has a tribe. Do they hang out together? Do they like each other? Do they admit that they read your genre?
It works really well for fantasy and sci-fi, or for anything with a nonfiction cause-based motivation. It doesn't work as well for, say, steamy romance, because a lot of readers of steamy romance don't want to be publicly associated with what they're reading. What you'll see in the author community are romance authors saying, "I tried this strategy and it didn't work, therefore it doesn't work." That's a fundamental fallacy. What they've actually learned is that the strategy doesn't work for them. You have to ask whether it failed because you did it wrong or because it's simply not a good fit for your specific situation.
Why Social Media Stopped Working for Authors
Colleen: Where do those people in those tribes hang out that's not social media? I personally hate social media. I'm only on it for very specific reasons, and I don't even post to my author Instagram. When you're trying to get people on your email list, where do newer authors start looking for those people in a way that doesn't drain them?
Thomas: The best way for marketing not to suck your soul is to just say no to social media.
When I first started teaching book marketing in the late 2000s, social media actually worked. You had a reverse chronological timeline, and anything you posted would be seen by your fans. It was just a matter of getting enough likes or followers, then posting content they'd get excited about. Then Facebook introduced algorithms where you had to create genuinely good content to float to the surface. It was a game you could win, until 2016. So we're at about ten years now of social media not working as a general rule.
You'll occasionally see authors who make social media work, but it's almost always because they're already famous somewhere else, and they're leveraging that existing fame. And even then it doesn't always work. Billie Eilish has tens of millions of social media followers and sold tens of thousands of copies of her book. Her conversion rate was just abominable, and she's a major celebrity.
When people say social media doesn't work, I should clarify what I mean. If you expand your definition to include blogging, podcasting, Substack, and YouTube, those things work a lot better. When most people say social media, they think Instagram and Facebook, which have both basically become TikTok. Those platforms don't work for selling books.
People will say, "But what about BookTok? What about Bookstagram?" The TikTok algorithm is very good at drilling down into what you specifically want to see and feeding you more of it. That's why it's remarkably effective at matching erotica readers with the exact tropes they want. But that doesn't mean your cozy mystery is going to do well there, and it doesn't mean you can create content on TikTok yourself that will reach those readers. You're much better off paying the five TikTok influencers who are influential in cozy mystery $100 each to promote your book. You're $500 in, and then you're done. You don't have to do any more TikTok, and you've reached all the readers on that platform who are there to be reached.
People say $500 is a lot of money. But it's actually less work to go get a job and earn that $500 to pay those influencers than it is to try to become an influencer yourself.
The Case for Deleting Instagram
Thomas: There's really good research showing that the anxiety and depression people are experiencing right now is tied to exposure to the Instagram algorithm. Getting off Instagram is more effective as an intervention than therapy, and almost as effective as walking for 30 minutes every day. If you have anxiety or depression, delete Instagram and Facebook off your phone, walk for 30 minutes every day, and you will be a completely different person after 30 days. Twenty-one years ago you walked more, you were on Instagram zero, you were on Facebook zero, and you were a happier, less worried person.
Colleen: I was talking with E.A. Winters about an app called ScreenZen, which limits your time on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. It will completely block you if you set it that way. It pops up and asks, "Do you really want to do this?" and then unlocks it for about 20 minutes. That's really helped me cut the addictive reflex of just tapping Facebook out of habit.
Thomas: And if you see that time spent on social media as time you could be spending making money somewhere else, the math gets real. A lot of people spend four or five hours a day on content consumption. If you worked those hours at $20 an hour, that's $100 a day and thousands of dollars a month. That actually gives you a real budget for the things that cost money in marketing.
Finding Your Readers Without Social Media
Thomas: I have a technique here that reframes the whole problem. You don't look for your readers, because that leads you in the wrong direction. Instead, you try to find one actual human being, not related to you, who is a representative sample of your full audience.
I call this person Timothy, inspired by the books of the Bible written to a specific individual named Timothy. Millions of people have read those books, but they were written for one person. Most great works of literature were written for an audience of one. Authors will often say who that person is in the dedication at the front of the book. It's actually an ancient practice we've fallen out of.
So you write the book for one person, and you also market for that one person. You find out where that person hangs out online, figure out how they discover new books, and then you do whatever you can to be in those places.
And often that means spending money. One of the soul-sucking aspects of the social media era was this idea that you could spend time instead of money for marketing. That's a broken approach. You need to think in terms of customer acquisition. You're spending money to acquire customers. You build a business around being able to buy readers for less than what you make from that reader. If it costs $4 to acquire a reader, you need to be making at least $4.01 on your book to be able to buy the next reader.
If you can be profitable at that level, every reader can buy the next reader. You spin that flywheel until you have thousands of readers. And readers get cheaper over time if your writing is good, because they'll come back for sequels and other books without you needing to spend as much on advertising.
Where to Start With Advertising
Colleen: At what point would you say is the best place to start advertising? Is it your first book, or do you need a backlist? And if it's a backlist, how many books is the minimum?
Thomas: The frustrating answer is it depends, and it depends a lot on your book and your audience.
As a general rule, I don't recommend starting with Facebook advertising. I would start with Amazon advertising, or retail advertising in general, any place where people are already in a buying mood. If someone walks into a Barnes and Noble, they've already decided they're the kind of person who buys books and today is the day they're going to buy one. Now it's just a question of which book they're going to pick. Publishers spend a lot of money on shelf placement at Barnes and Noble because it's a target-rich environment where book buyers are already gathered.
The kind of people who doom-scroll on TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram don't tend to read a lot of books, because the very act of scrolling presupposes that they're not doing anything else at that moment. Reading a book and scrolling social media are in direct conflict. In the evening, you either pick up your phone or you pick up a book.
Advertising to someone who's already shopping for books on Amazon is a much lighter lift.
Should You Advertise on Your First Book or Wait?
Thomas: There are two schools of thought. One says you need a series first, because the cost of customer acquisition is too high on a single book. If it costs $5 to acquire a reader and you're only making $4 off that reader, you're losing money until you have a sequel to recoup the difference.
But I think there is a huge unmet demand, particularly in sci-fi and fantasy, for good standalone books. There's real battered reader syndrome out there. A lot of authors with a postmodern worldview don't know how to end a story in a satisfying way, so they just keep adding sequels. Postmodernism leads to nihilism. I've never seen it lead to anything else. That's why everyone's always angry at how popular postmodern TV shows end. People are shocked they didn't like the Game of Thrones ending or the Battlestar Galactica ending. How else was it going to end? It's a fundamentally postmodern story.
If you know how to tell a classic story and you can stick the landing, I think a standalone book can absolutely work. If it's popular, you can write sequels. But those sequels also need satisfying endings.
Battered readers, meaning readers who started series they enjoyed but the author never finished, are real. Game of Thrones is the most famous example. Readers would rather not start a series than start one they love and have it abandoned. Most authors don't finish most of their series. We don't notice the abandoned ones because they're obscure and didn't sell well. But those readers who did invest in those books are less likely to trust a new author's series the next time around.
The Trunk Book Strategy for Beginning Authors
Thomas: Some advice given by advanced authors, like you have to have a big backlist and write really fast, leaves beginning authors completely exhausted. They'll launch three books they spent ten years writing, get 50 sales, and then quit. Because that advice is terrible for somebody just getting started. The advice you give an advanced author and the advice you give a beginning author are very different.
My advice for a beginning author is this. Write the very best book you can, and then don't publish it. Set it aside. Write another book. Once you finish that second book, get it edited, get it as ready as possible, and then maybe publish it. But maybe set that one aside too.
The best authors, and I mean financially successful ones as well as the classics, often have between two and five trunk books. That's an old term. Back when books existed on physical paper, authors would write a manuscript and then lock it in a trunk rather than publish it. They couldn't bear to get rid of it, but they knew it wasn't ready.
There's a phenomenon of grandchildren finding trunk books from famous authors and publishing them posthumously. And there was a reason Jules Verne locked those books in a trunk. It took practice for Jules Verne to become Jules Verne. He wasn't born a great author. At one point he was a beginning author still learning how to tell a good story.
If you're willing to set a book aside and then go back and read it after writing another one, you'll be able to see it clearly. You'll see that it's not as good as you thought it was. Because, Colleen, every episode you do about writing is also a marketing episode. For fiction, the quality of the writing is actually the most important thing. That's not the case for nonfiction. Poorly written nonfiction can do quite well because sales there are based on the fame of the author and whether the book delivers on its promise. Nobody cares if "What to Expect When You're Expecting" is beautifully written. They only care if it helps them know what to expect during pregnancy. But for fiction, you're either enjoying the book or you're not.
Colleen: My first book is actually the combination of two terrible full-length books I wrote in junior high and high school. I didn't touch them for ten years while I wrote fan fiction, which helped me develop my voice. When I finally smashed those two books together and wrote what became "Mark of Stars," it still went through three developmental edits. And I will still go back and read it and cringe at the head-hopping.
Thomas: You'll often find that the seeds of your whole career were in that first book. A common mistake is that authors cram every idea they've ever had into that first book. It's like planting a whole garden's worth of seeds too close together. If you let each idea have its own book, it becomes a much more mature and fully fleshed-out idea. When it's competing for attention with every other idea, it's starving for sunlight and soil and water. That first book often has a whole bunch of good books inside it, but it has to go into the ground and die first.
Colleen: That first book turned into a four-book series with multiple prequels. And the more time I spend writing in that world, the more ideas I have for spinoffs, standalones, and duologies. Which also goes back to what you said about good standalones. If authors can figure out how to write standalones but keep them in the same universe, they're not stressed out building a new world every time. And actually, this was the standard practice for sci-fi originally. All of Asimov's books are in the same universe. "I, Robot," which takes place on Earth, is technically in the same universe as the Foundation series. Heinlein did this too. But reading "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" or "Starship Troopers," they feel like complete standalone books. They all have satisfying endings. They're written by modern authors rather than postmodern ones, and that really makes a difference.
Personal Brand vs. Product Brand
Colleen: Something I've talked about with Seth Ring is this idea that when you're starting out, you want to pick between being a personal brand or a product brand. A personal brand means visibility on social media, in-person events, and community-focused engagement where people buy your books because they recognize your face. A product brand means cranking out books, building a backlist, and cultivating long-term readers who don't care what you look like. They just want a good book. What's your take on that split?
Thomas: I actually see it as very straightforward. If you're writing nonfiction, you're a personal brand. People don't read nonfiction from authors, they read nonfiction from experts. They have to believe you know what you're talking about. But people don't read fiction from celebrities, they read fiction from novelists.
And even the quote-unquote personal brands in fiction are effectively product brands. Think of Brandon Sanderson. He's become his own micro-genre. Stephen King is his own micro-genre. If you're familiar with the Stephen King brand, you know specifically what kind of product to expect. It's not just going to be scary. It's going to be unsettling and weird and disordered and well-written. That's what Stephen King is. And a Sanderson book, you know it's going to have a really hard magic system. He could be considered a personal brand because his name is famous, but really it's a product brand because there's a set of genre expectations that come with every book he publishes.
Every big-name author eventually becomes their own micro-genre. And my definition of big-name author has a very literal measurement. It's font size. Look at a Stephen King book or a Brandon Sanderson book and the font size of the author name is bigger than the font size of the book title. People don't really care about the title at that point. They already know what the brand means. It's "Oh, a Brandon Sanderson book I haven't read yet, shut up and take my money."
But you don't start there. If you look at early Brandon Sanderson or early Stephen King, the title was the big word on the cover. Because they were trying to sell people on an obscure author no one had heard of. And don't think you can shortcut this by redesigning your cover to make your name bigger. It doesn't work if people don't already know what your name means. You have to already have readers for the big-name strategy to be effective.
Indie vs. Traditional Publishing
Colleen: Does all this change whether you're going indie or traditional?
Thomas: It depends what you mean by traditional, because most people who think they're going traditional are actually getting picked up by an indie author pretending to be a traditional publisher. You can tell what kind of publisher you're working with by the size of your advance. Real traditional publishers pay five-digit advances. The others pay almost nothing or a four-digit advance. If you're getting a small advance, you're working with an indie author who's going to use their KDP account to publish your book. They may have a big brand and look like a serious operation, but they don't have any real money.
I see small publishers as the worst of both worlds. If they can't afford to pay an advance, they can't afford to do any marketing. But because they're the publisher, they don't give you the marketing data or the control you need to make the book a success. Authors with small publishers almost always fail to achieve their goals.
It changes if you work with a big publisher that has real budget. I worked with one author whose publisher had a full-time marketing person attached to that author, even in years when he had no new books coming out, because his backlist was selling so well. There's a myth that traditional publishers don't pay for marketing. They do, if you're successful. They can pay a lot.
But traditional publishing overall is struggling. On the Author Update show, one of the things we cover is industry trends and sales numbers, and traditional publishing has been losing market share every quarter to indie publishing since we started. Sales overall are down many quarters from previous years, and even when they're not, they're still down when you adjust for inflation. We're seeing a lot of consolidations, publishers going out of business, imprints being closed down.
If you're a debut author with a traditional publisher, you're still expected to do a lot of the marketing yourself to prove to the publisher that you're worth investing in. A lot of midlist publishers take the approach of publishing 2,000 books and putting all their marketing money behind whichever one performs best, letting the other 1,900-plus books fail or barely break even.
This makes the launch far more critical for traditionally published authors than for indie authors. Not only is your publisher deciding if your book is a winner, but retail outlets are deciding too. If Barnes and Noble can't sell the copies on your shelf in the first 30 days or so, they return them to the publisher and you never go on the shelf again. Your whole career can be judged by those first 30 days.
The difference for an indie is that you can have a poor launch and still fix it with advertising later. If you can figure out profitable advertising, even if you're only acquiring 20 readers a week, that will build into hundreds or thousands of readers over time. But most indie authors can't profitably advertise because their covers aren't good enough.
The Most Important Thing in Book Marketing
Thomas: I apologize that we got this far into the episode without me mentioning this, but the cover affects everything. It is critical, and almost all books have bad covers. By that I mean covers that can't generate a high click-through rate on Amazon or Facebook, where someone sees the thumbnail and instantly knows the genre and instantly thinks "this is a book for me." Most covers are way too pretty and way too ineffective. It's not about being pretty. It's about convincing people that this is the book for them.
I just interviewed someone on Novel Marketing who could not make ads work. He followed my advice and split-tested book covers. He paid for a bunch of different covers to be designed, then used ads to test them, showing different people different covers to see which ones got the most clicks. He tested thirteen different covers. The winning cover was chosen based on the judgment of hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook who scrolled past the ads. That's a great test because that's exactly the competition your book cover faces on Amazon. Even your own book page has fifty other covers on it. You're always competing against a sea of other covers.
After switching to the best-performing cover, his ads went from unprofitable to profitable. The book didn't change. The only thing that changed was the presentation. It cost money to test those covers and run those ads, but now he has an engine he can keep running to continuously build readership and notoriety as an author.
Picking Your Category Before You Write
Thomas: For this particular author, he was also in the wrong category. This is one of the most common mistakes new authors make. They write a book and then try to figure out what category to put it in. That is a terrible mistake if you want to make money in this business.
You pick the category first. You read the best-selling books in that category, and then you write a book that fits solidly inside that category. Not innovating. Not blending genres or merging categories. Just driving right down the middle of the road.
There is so much unmet demand from readers for authors who will drive right down the middle of the road. Right now a lot of the authors doing this are using AI to generate those books, and they're making tens of thousands of dollars a month because every human author wants to be a special snowflake combining genres. The AI-generated content is simply creating the book that readers want. There's a lot of money in satisfying a customer.
The Power Law and What It Means for Authors
Thomas: The whole publishing industry is governed by the power law, also known as the Pareto distribution. Most people think the world is governed by the bell curve, the standard distribution. But that's not the whole story. The Pareto distribution, or 80/20 rule, governs any system with a reinforcing cycle.
Think about how planets form. Gravity exists. The more mass you have, the more stuff in space you can pull into your orbit, which adds to your mass, which gives you more gravity. That's a reinforcing cycle, and it creates winner-take-all markets.
Fiction works the same way. People want to read what their friends are already reading. Being popular leads to greater popularity. It's self-reinforcing. Ninety percent of the money in a genre can go to just the top book. The number one author might be making $100 that week. The number two author is making $8. Everybody else is splitting the remaining $2.
This is why that author I mentioned had a full-time marketing person paid by the publisher even in years with no new releases. His books were generating so much revenue that the publisher was happy to pay for that ongoing support. And publishing gets almost unbelievably profitable with bestsellers. The advance, the editing, the cover design, the typesetting, all of those are fixed costs. The more copies you sell, the more those costs get amortized. You're not only selling more books, you're making more profit on the millionth copy than on the first.
Most traditionally published books sell a dozen copies or fewer. That's shocking to unpublished authors who assume that getting a contract guarantees success. It doesn't. Not if you don't have a good launch, a good cover, and the ability to clearly explain to a potential reader why your book is for them.
The AI Thomas Tool and Where to Learn More
Colleen: For listeners who want to learn more, do you have a list of top episodes people can start with?
Thomas: I have something better. I have an AI tool called AI Thomas. You have to be a patron of the podcast to access it, but you can ask any question and it will give you an answer based on my 500-plus episodes, along with a list of the best specific episodes for your situation. If you ask how to launch a book, it will answer the question and then say, "Here are twelve episodes Thomas has done on launching a book." If you ask how to grow your email newsletter or how to advertise, it will guide you there too.
Not every tactic works for every author. That's exactly why getting customized advice is so valuable. The more detail you share about your situation, the better the answer you'll get. I will say that while I have strong privacy protections on all my other tools, I do use questions asked of AI Thomas for episode ideas, and I state that clearly. Don't tell AI Thomas anything you're not willing for human Thomas to know.
And when someone is frustrated that AI Thomas doesn't have a good answer on a topic, that tells me there's a gap I need to fill. Either I need to record an episode on it myself, or I need to find an expert and bring them on.
You can find everything at authormedia.com. All three of my podcasts are there, along with AI Thomas, the patron toolbox, and blog versions of all my podcast episodes.
The Novel Writing Podcast is a production of Colleen Mitchell Writes. For more writing resources, including Curios, Talley Ink Author Services, and the 60 Day Novel Writing Challenge, check out the links in the description.
