Guerrilla marketing secrets of successful self-publishing authors

This site is one of about a dozen writing and publishing related sites I’m not using much, so I’m posting an update on some of the things I’ve been working on to help indie and self-publishing authors sell more books.

My book design templates and book formatting resources remain popular, but increasingly I’ve been focused on what comes after book design. Namely, how do you keep a book selling long term, without spending so much time and money on promoting it that you don’t have time to keep writing.

Those are problems with I’ve wrestled with first hand this year as I started publishing my own fiction. First I built up a solid author platform and began building relationships with successful authors in my field and genre. In less than a year I’ve grown the alliance of young adult authors to over 1000 and the members work together to actively promote each other’s books.

This summer I launched my first online course, Reach Your Readers, which sold out in 48hours. But I’ve learned a lot since then and new I could do better. Plus, Reach Your Readers is probably overkill for most authors.

I started building a “21-Day Bestselling author platform” course which is meant to cover all the basics, but increasingly with my own fiction I focus on only a handful of easy book marketing tactics that don’t take much time and money.

I’ve been practicing with my book launches – right now, the YA mermaid romance I put up on preorder and the dark fantasy based on Greek mythology that I just changed from permafree to 99cents are both doing well, even though I haven’t started promoting them yet. Also, I’ve gotten over 500 reviews in less than a year.

I’m putting out a new book soon that’s based on the shorter online course I’m building called Guerrilla Publishing. It’s my 5th book on book publishing and marketing, and will actually be the companion workbook for the course of the same name.

I’m also going to test out using bonus offers to presell books: for example I’ll give away a limited number of the course for free if people preorder and review the book in the first week of the book launch. I’ll also use the book to drive sales of the course by offering a discount coupon at the end of the book.

Basically, rather than publishing stand-alone books, I’ve been thinking more in terms of building funnels – both for fiction and non-fiction – and encouraging purchases with valuable bonuses, especially during launch week.

I post case studies of my book launches on my main site, www.creativindie.com, so follow me there if you’d like the latest updates about what I’m doing to promote my books.