As we draw close to the end of the year, it's time to round up the best of the best on the Alliance of Independent Authors blog. Today, we're bringing you the most comprehensive marketing blogs from 2021. It's time to review your marketing plans, tools and resources and prepare for 2022. These are the best marketing tips for indie authors from 2021.
Marketing Tips for Indie Authors: General Topics
When you first start out, winning an award might feel like a distant far off impossibility, but unless you try, how will you ever know? Awards are a great way to raise your profile, but what does it take to be a winner? In this article, we looked at tactics to increase your chances.
In 2021, we also looked at how to grow your print publishing sales. In this article, we discuss all the main options from print on demand, consignment printing, print partnerships and more.
Networking and meeting other authors and industry experts is vital in this day and age. Previously everything was in person, but now being able to network both in person and digitally is essential to keep growing your author business and network. In this post, Dan Parsons gives you the run down of networking tips here.
Understanding the genre you want to write in is one of the most important elements of being an author. It helps you craft books closer to what your readers want, it helps you be more marketable and hopefully sell more books. But what do you need to know and where do you go looking for that market information? In this post, partner member Nat
Connors from Kindletrends to explain how to understand your book genre.
Digital Marketing Basics
In The Ultimate Guide to SEO and Findability for Indie Authors we examined what SEO is, how much indie authors should worry about it, on and off-page SEO, SEO for blogs and podcasting and tips and tricks for improving your SEO.
Marketing Tips for Selling More Books
Launching a book is an exciting moment in an indie author’s life–but there’s so much to do. What order should you do it in and how much time do you need in advance of your launch to complete it? In this post we give you a guide to launching a book (including timeline) find out more here.
Reader magnets are a fast way of enticing readers into your marketing funnels. We outline what they are, why you need them and how you can use them to harness readers. Read more here.
Pre-orders are marmite: either you love them or hate them. But what are the benefits of using them on different stores, and how can you use them to generate buzz during your pre-order period? Well, we dive into the detail of all things pre-order right here.
Everyone knows they need to find readers, but once you identify where they are, how do you capture them? How do you turn them into super fans? In an extract from her book, Orna Ross, explains everything you need to know about fans, true fans and super fans. Have a read here.
Last, we ask how you should find comparison authors – people whose work is aimed at the same readers as yours. It’s a great way to learn about the industry and your genre, from how to write it to how to sell it. That’s what we discuss in this article.
Traditional publishing is organized around seasons, which you’ll have seen in the bestseller charts and the marketing activities of bookstores. Should indie authors also follow these seasons? Are there any aspects we could do in a different way, as our business model is more nimble? That’s the topic we cover in our ultimate guide to seasonal publishing.
Photo by Jukka Aalho on Unsplash
Podcast Marketing
Podcasting is popular business, many authors are taking up the mic and putting their voices out in the world to help them find readers, building up a platform and growing their confidence. This year, we launched a new book all about podcasting for indie authors, designed to show you how to create a podcast show for indie authors. Find out here.
Marketing Tips for Indie Authors: Publishing Wide Tips
There are many long-running debates in the writing world: plotting or pantsing, trad or indie, and one of them is whether to distribute exclusively through Amazon or to publish as widely as possible. ALLi's policy and advice is to publish and distribute your books as widely as possible. There are numerous reasons for this. This post, with guidance from author consultant and thriller author Mark Lefebvre, dives into the whats, whys and hows – read it here.
This year we also examined some of the less common sales outlets that are worth exploring like Lulu, Blurb, Aerio and more. If you're interested in widening your distribution, then find out more about the alternative options and why you might want to use them here.
Marketing Children's Books
Grab the book here
Marketing books is hard enough. But what happens when your readers aren’t the people who buy them? That’s the problem faced by children’s authors. ALLi’s children’s book adviser Karen Inglis and author member Kate Woodard discuss marketing tactics, selling strategies and how to sell English language children’s books in a non-English speaking country. Read it here.
ALLi was also delighted to launch a guide all about how to publish children's books. Structured across the seven stages of the publishing process—editorial, design, production, distribution, marketing, promotion and rights licensing–it will teach you:
- How to work with professional children’s editors, illustrators and designers, and how ALLi can help you to find them
- Why in-person events like school visits matter and how to do them successfully
- How tools and tech can help you and make your publishing life productive and profitable
You can find out more about the book in this post, or alternatively ALLi members can download a complimentary ebook copy of How to Publish a Children’s Book in the Member Zone. Navigate to allianceindependentauthors.org and log in. Then navigate to the following menu: BOOKS > GUIDEBOOKS. Other formats are available to members and non-members in ALLi’s Bookshop
