You have a day job.
You have a family to look after.
You have a relationship to maintain.
You hate having to sell yourself, it feels cheap!
Besides, you did the hard work writing it, it’ll do okay without your input.
It’s brilliant, after all.
Here’s the thing: books that aren’t marketed don’t sell, no matter how good they are.
Combine traditionally published novels with self-published novels and your little book is swimming against a tidal wave.
You do have time.
You found time to write the thing and you can find time to make sure people know about it.
Cold, hard fact: you have to do some marketing to build your author profile every day.
Not-so-cold, hard fact: you don’t need to spend hours on it every day, you ‘just’* need to be organised.
Top tip: clear a regular, sacred slot at the same time each day – it can be only 15 or 20 minutes – for social media every day.
What you do with that time (commenting, engaging in conversations, posting, researching your audience etc) is a subject for another post… one I’ll get to on another day.
*I say ‘just’ because it’s not always easy if, like me, you’re naturally chaotic – but it can be done!
About The Author
Nigel Cooper
Nigel’s debut novel Beat The Rain was a semi-finalist for Best Debut Author in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2016. His second novel The Pursuit of Ordinary was a finalist in the People’s Book Prize for Fiction 2019. It was also one of the 8-12 titles ‘called in’ for the Man Booker Prize, a first for his publisher. It was also long-listed for The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize. His third novel will be released in September 2022 and is now available for pre-order. Nigel brings his own experience of the trials of getting published, building an author profile and marketing his own novels to AuthorSpark. As well as co-founding AuthorSpark, Nigel co-founded digital marketing agency and employee advocacy platform We Are Togethr alongside Andrew, alongside online content sister company Togethr Lab. Prior to that he was a newspaper subeditor and a writer and editor for Channel 4 Interactive.