It’s the first Wednesday of the month and time for another posting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

First, there are various audiobooks available for free on YouTube about running your author business on the Creative Penn channel. Here’s the link.

Book Marketing is an important part of our business as authors, as we can’t sell books if we don’t do marketing — whether you’re indie or trad, you need to market.

I wrote a couple of posts over the years about marketing:

• Adding BookBub to Your Author Toolbox
• How to Use Pinterest to Grow Your Author Business
• How to Set Up Instagram to Grow Your Author Business
• How To Add An Author Newsletter To Your Toolbox
• Adventures in Audio: An Introduction to Audio Production 

I also wrote books on the subject:

I found an interesting video on YouTube by a reader. I’m using this as a guide to improve my business. We need to listen to our readers…

I’m not ditching Goodreads, as I do find it to be an easy interface to use to keep track of books I want to read and books I’ve read. I also use BookBub, but only to share my reviews, not to build my TBR. I use both to promote my author bio and books. I like the idea of StoryGraph, but there’s no author program (though it is supposedly in the works) so I can’t manage my books like on the other two platforms. If they get around to creating an author program with bio, etc. I’ll sign up and take charge of my brand there.

I use Canva for all my visual needs.

The video editor is easy to use. I create an image for my podcast episode, drop it in and add my audio, which produces a static-image video for YouTube. I also make videos for my books – images, words, music, voice-over (new) and publish this booktrailer on YouTube. I’ve tried using actual videos instead of images, but find them too time-consuming and didn’t see any difference in views.

I also upload my photos to Canva to optimise for Instagram. (I’ll talk more about this platform below.) I like to add a border to my photos as a branding mechanism. There’s a template for size and I just copy-paste the border to each photo. I do the same for quotes, review images and whatever else I need for Instagram.

Making images for Pinterest isn’t a high priority, but when I do take the time to do it, the easy-to-use templates on Canva makes it a fairly painless task.

I even create extras for my books on Canva. Like the stickers I paste on my covers. I upload the cover to one of the blank Canva templates for book covers and copy-paste the sticker from the logo project I’ve created. I download it as a png or jpeg as needed and upload to all the sites. No need to ask a graphic designer/book cover designer to help you with branding and marketing after the fact.

Pinterest is still my favourite unsocial social media platform.

I create boards for all of my books, update it with book information (UBLs, covers, posts about the book, folklore posts about characters/creatures in the book, images that inspired me, etc.) and find that a lot of passive sales comes from it (also sign-ups to my newsletter). I also have boards for each folklore creature I discuss on my blog and podcast, again with loads of images, information and book links. I have a couple of other boards, like quotes and interesting articles for writers.

I use Instagram as my main social media platform.

I keep up with my writing friends, share reviews, talk about my podcast, and share photos of my furbabies and garden. The posts that do the best are those of my dogs. I get it: they’re absolutely adorable. It’s a great way to connect with readers as a person. I’ve chatted with readers in the DM section about my books – for some it’s less intimidating that email.

I’ve been urging my writing friends to use Instagram as a branding tool. If you like taking photos and sharing them, this is the best place to do so. It’s also a user-friendly place for readers to find you and see that you are a real person with a life outside of writing. Remember your brand and share your photos! Remember those hashtags, people.

If you need to edit a post, press the three dots on top of the post and choose edit. You can fix typos, add hashtags and even @mention someone if you’ve forgotten to do so during your initial upload.

Some profiles have the ability already to upload the new rectangular format, but most of us still have squares – which then show up as rectangles on our profile pages. Urgh. It’s a new thing since January and doesn’t seem likely to go away. Just another way you need to be flexible where it comes to social media.

LinkTree for all your link needs.

Because a lot of social media platforms only allow one external link, I’ve found that LinkTree is quite useful to share everything I think someone interested in my brand needs to know. There’s a paid and a free version. The free version works very well, thank you. I don’t overload mine, though I know some authors use it as a way to add people to their ARC team with a link that they remove whenever ARC time is over, or to direct people to their newest release. Be creative and customise it to meet your needs.

Email isn’t dead.

I’ve heard that email and newsletters are dead in the water since I joined the creator economy over a decade ago. And yet, it’s the one place you have permission to directly contact your readers. They gave you that permission. It’s a precious commodity, so don’t waste it.

I’ve always been a fan of Mailchimp and hadn’t seen the need to swap providers. Until now.

You need a welcome sequence when someone joins your newsletter. Why? Because they need to get to know you and your writing. Perhaps they signed up because of a pop-up on your website or from a link in the back of a book they just finished. Which means they know little about you. And you can’t start each newsletter with who you are and why they wanted to get to know you. Which is why a welcome sequence is important – even if it’s only to say “thanks and here’s your free book”.

Mailchimp has removed this feature from its free plan. They’ve made other changes, too, that I’m not too happy with. But this was the nail in the coffin. Their paid plan is much too steep in comparison to other providers, so I moved.

I started by googling various email providers. And then I saw that Convertkit (now Kit) had a free plan – finally. And it’s a good plan with everything I need and want.

I wanted to add BookFunnel to deliver the free eBook, but they still insist on a credit card and don’t accept PayPal (as a South African it is much safer for me to use a service like PayPal to do Forex).

Anyhow, the Kit system has all I need. It took a while to figure out how to set up the various forms and landing pages, but they look spectacular. I even have a template for my newsletter now that I don’t have to manually do every time. It was also quite easy to migrate my list from one provider to the other (there are loads of help pages to get one through this).

What took the longest, was to change the link at the back of my books to the new signup page. Doing it on the blog was close… The rest was thankfully one time copy, paste and save.

It was a lot of work to make sure I updated the links everywhere, but it’s worth it to have a smooth-running newsletter.

I only send one newsletter a month, bringing value each time. You can sign up here.

Content marketing is still king.

I know people like to use ads and throw money at the problem of invisibility in a crowded book market, but I still like doing content marketing. Especially with the exchange rate being worse than ever, the economy scaring me a bit, and people ignoring ads whenever they can anyway.

My favourite kind of content marketing is writing and sharing folklore blog posts and podcast episodes. It isn’t free, but it’s effective. This is how I’ve built my newsletter for years and sold books to people interested in certain subjects.

I also share reviews of books I’ve read. If you like what I’ve said in a review, it might mean that you have the same ideas and would like what I have to say in my books.

I’ve concentrated my efforts to April when I participate in the A-Z Blogging Challenge and have more traffic. Though my posts are evergreen, comments are only open for 30 days (spam, AI attacks and more have made this stringent policy necessary).

After looking into BookTube, I decided to share my reviews there as well. I won’t be doing traditional video, but it will reach those who prefer audio over reading.

Doing in-person sales in various ways is a good thing to do, if it’s something you’re interested in. From doing book fairs, book signings at bookstores, talks at schools and other places with back-of-room sales: these are all possible with hard work and dedication.

But, right now, it’s not what I want to focus on. You know the saying: you get what you focus on. Right now, I want to focus on doing work once that will keep working for me long after I’ve finished the project.

How do you market your books? Anything I missed that you have found success with? You can learn loads more on my For Authors page here.