An author friend on social media recently decided to take an online hiatus; she had been tirelessly marketing all of her indie-published books, running free promotions and giveaways, and wrote a rather dejected post about how she was reaping very little for all her hard work, including getting only a handful of post likes – to the point where she decided on a complete digital detox to refocus her author career goals.
I can relate.
It’s disheartening to run free promos and reap no benefits. After running a free promotion for my novel, The Buddha’s Bone, on its one year publishing anniversary back in October 2022, I had so many downloads my book was propelled to #5000 or thereabouts in free Kindle sales rank and #8 in psychological literary fiction. Yet it yielded NO ratings and NO reviews. I had no social proof that any of those freeloaders had even read my book.
Did I get down?
Sure I did. As an author I worked hard for many years on that book. As my own publisher I worked hard planning the free promotion hoping it would generate interest around the one year bookiversary. Instead it attracted a bunch of bargain hunters probably only interested in getting free swag, rather than what the freebies actually were.
So, you know what I did?
The only thing I could. Yep, I learned from the experience. I decided that freebies aren’t worth the effort, but that 99p discounts do tend to pay off, and so I continue to run these from time to time.
An Indie author has to wear many hats. Not only will you be a writer, but you will be an editor, social media manager, publicist, digital marketer and many other roles. Introverts like myself have trouble switching hats at times. Luckily for me, I have an amazingly supportive hubby who is also a writer and poet, and often gives me much needed pep talks. Over the years, I’ve managed to gain a little bit of the wisdom about how – and when – to switch hats.
Running free or discount promotions requires wearing my digital marketer hat. This means shelving my writer hat – and my author ego along with it! It’s hard as an author to be selling my books for 99p…but as a digital marketer, it’s worth it to reach new readers and as a publicist, great to see a boost in sales ranking.
Doing reels and promotional photos of my books requires wearing my social media manager hat. The introverted writer side of me cringes in the shadows at hashtags such as ‘shameless self promotion’ or ‘book boost’, but the social media manager hat-wearer knows that the more visible book covers and titles are, the more chances readers will remember them and search for them later. I have one or two instances of such proof; comments on Instagram (in response to a book blogger reviewing one of my books) saying, “Oh, I know this book, I saw it on Tiktok!” and on another occasion when someone in real life approached me at a spoken word community event and said “You’re Leilanie Stewart? I’ve heard of you”. I’ve since learned to wrap my delicate author hat in cotton wool and put it on its high shelf while I indulge in shameless self promotion on Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok, so that the fragile writer fabric won’t get frayed by all the promotional frivolities. Lol.
Writing, editing, publishing, marketing ad campaigns and then promoting on social media is non-stop. It’s not quite the 24-hour job that parenting is, though it’s pretty damn close. Even in my dreams, I have my author hat on, churning story ideas, and even in my daydreams I’m seeing promotional opportunities.
The hats are always switching, as much as the seasons pass. That’s literary life for you!
Leilanie Stewart 