Selling Books, Part 2: Free Promotion

Regardless of arguments to the contrary, the majority of writers are, in fact, introverts. This immutable characteristic is great for writing, but awful for marketing, at least marketing the old-fashioned way. 

Nevertheless, I'm going to lay out the free methods for moving book sales. Luckily, not all of them require an author putting him or herself out there.

ARCs (Advance Reader Copies): Do this prior to publication. ARCs are valuable in generating early reviews, and that's obviously something an author wants. Yes, you can pay a service to find ARC readers for your novel, but you can also do it for free.  

There are a few places where an author can solicit ARC readers: Goodreads groups, Reddit (r/ARCReaders), Facebook ARC groups, probably others I'm not aware of.

The site Voracious Readers Only will get you 20 ARC readers for free (if you want more, you'll need to pay), and they'll get them fast--within a couple of hours or at the most, in one day. Be forewarned, however: I've tried both the free and paid service and never landed even one review, and that's out of thousands of ARCs distributed. Your results may be better.

Word of Mouth: Well, this one is tricky for an introvert. If you're a reader of this blog, you know that I haven't told anyone I know that I write books. Telling risks being judged, and aren't we all judged enough in our day-to-day lives already?   

Sadly for me, word of mouth is probably the most effective means of driving sales of your book. Or at least it gets the ball rolling. If you have a wide circle of friends and you're not cloistered like me, get the word out! Gift them a copy, if you choose. Good friends will read it to support you, casual friends will read it out of curiosity. And those friends have friends. If enough of them mention in passing that their friend wrote a book, you could wind up with a hundred people reading it. 

The goal is "buzz". Indie authors can't pay for buzz, like big publishing houses can. We don't have a publicist. We won't get interviewed on the morning shows; we won't get a book tour bankrolled. You want people saying, "Oh, I've heard about this book. I'm going to check it out." The human race possesses the FOMO gene (fear of missing out). Ever notice that once one neighbor hangs his Christmas lights, soon every other neighbor's exterior is brightly lit? 

That innate drive exists for things besides Christmas lights--it works for books, too. 

Word of mouth sounds almost too simple. "Shouldn't I have to pay to get traction?"  But your book needs a jumping off point, and what could be better than someone who's already on your side, unlike random strangers?

Social media: Well, it's free; I'll say that for it. Many marketing experts advise that if you're going to go the social media route, choose one platform and hit it hard. I'll be honest: social media marketing doesn't work. There's no harm done in employing it; there's just no upside. Tales of an indie author's book becoming wildly successful via social media are just that--tales. Sure, it could happen one time out of a million, but I doubt that one in a million is technically true. That author is, believe me, doing more than posting on social media.

If you're like me, you'll soon come to view social media as one giant hassle. I took the experts' advice and focused my efforts on one--Instagram. I liked the visual aspect of it, and I could market my book without creating cringy videos. My goal was to attract the attention of bookstagrammers. Well, it just didn't work. What you will get from Instagram, and from every other social media site, is tons of unwanted solicitations. It became daunting for me to sift through all my notifications every day, especially knowing that most who suddenly started following me wanted my $$. 

I can't prove it, but I'm pretty certain I never sold one copy of my novel via social media.

Kindle Free Book Promotion:  An author can schedule a free book promotion via KDP for up to five days every 90 days, but he or she must be enrolled in KDP Select in order to do so. KDP Select grants Amazon exclusive rights to an ebook for 90 days, although an author can opt out after that time. 

I've used the free promotion from time to time, frankly with little success, but other authors have reported good results. Again, it depends on the book's genre. When I did use it, I was stingy with my days, choosing to go with only two or three days at a time. I'd generally schedule mine for a Friday through Saturday; my assumption being that readers either wanted to grab a weekend read on Friday (at work--who doesn't?) or that on a Saturday morning, they'd have time to look through the selections. There's probably not a right or wrong time, but as you know, we authors are always looking for an angle.

Newsletters: I'll keep this brief. If you'd like to have an author newsletter, go for it. Bear in mind that having subscribers would be helpful, and there purportedly are ways to obtain them; the most accepted way is by offering a reader magnet.

If you're unfamiliar with the term, a reader magnet is something an authors offers for free in exchange for a newsletter signup. Generally, it's a short story or a novella. If you're promoting your book to strangers and you want to drive interest, offering a sample of your writing might work. 

Here's my problem with that: Why in the world would anyone so badly want your short story--you, the unknown writer--that they're gonna risk getting spammed with inbox garbage? I sure wouldn't, but I'm not bereft of reading material, either. Granted, they can grab the free thing, then unsubscribe, but the whole exercise seems like unnecessary effort on the author's end. I can see offering a reader magnet in the back matter of your book, but first someone would need to buy the book to know about it, and if they like you enough, they probably won't need to be bribed.

But maybe you just enjoy the idea of sending out a monthly or bi-monthly missive. Maybe you've got a lot of interesting things to say. Maybe you're planning ahead for when you release your next book, and dedicated subscribers will be ideal purchasers of that book. All reasonable justifications. However, I think other writers simply like the idea of a newsletter, which is why they're always pushing it on Reddit and claiming how beneficial having one is.  

Nevertheless, if we're talking free marketing methods, the only way I can imagine offering a reader magnet is via social media. And if you do have subscribers or are confident you'll get some, Mailerlite offers a free basic newsletter builder.

Of course there are other no-cost things an author can try, such as contacting book bloggers or cross-promoting with other indie authors via newsletter swaps. (I'll leave the procurement of that second deal up to you. I personally don't know any other indie authors.)  You can contact your local library, I suppose, or talk a local bookstore into hosting you for a book signing. My purpose here is to address efforts that most authors have access to, and that wouldn't scare an introverted one to death (like approaching a bookstore owner or a librarian would do).

You'll notice, too, that I didn't mention an author website (which, by the way, isn't free unless you do it my way). I enjoy having a website, but no one is going to find it by accident and buy one of my books. I do, however, try to include my website address in all my Instagram stories, just to cover all my bases. 

My suggestion is to try free methods first before laying out money, because spending money on promoting is a trap crapshoot. 

I'll talk about paid promotions next time around.