Many literary fiction authors feel caught in the middle, shut out of a traditional literary establishment that foregrounds their genre, but also out of indie advice urging marketing methods that feel misaligned. Orna Ross explores the psychology of literary writers who feel uneasy about selling their work, shares her own marketing shifts as a literary novelist and poet, and explains why literary fiction is not a special case—simply another genre with its own reader psychology and buying behavior.
Listen to the Podcast: How Indie Authors Market Literary Fiction
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About the Host
Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.
Read the Transcript
Orna Ross: Hello and welcome to Self-Publishing with ALLi. I am Orna Ross, Director of ALLi — the Alliance of Independent Authors — and I'm here today to talk about marketing and promoting literary fiction as an indie author. So this one is for all the literary fiction people out there. It's also slightly relevant if you write poetry or other genres that cluster around this space — literary memoir, creative nonfiction — essentially those genres where language and engagement with craft are very, very central.
I will be doing a separate episode about poetry next time. But this time I'm looking closely at literary fiction.
Why talk about this particular genre? We don't generally give genre-specific advice at ALLi because the Alliance is a huge, broad church and focusing in on one genre is not really something that we do. But there is a particular set of challenges for literary authors. I was at an event last night with a lot of indie authors and the question came up in the room again: how do you market and promote literary fiction? And it comes up every single time. Nobody ever asks how to promote romance or how-to nonfiction. It only ever comes up around literary fiction, poetry, and literary memoir. So I thought I'd go in there — and these are my own genres, so I have something to say about this from personal experience.
The Double Shut-Out: Literary Establishment and Indie Culture
I think the main thing going on here is based on flawed assumptions. In writing circles there is an assumption that author marketing only works for genre fiction, and that it is much harder — shall we say — for literary fiction authors. This thought is so ingrained that many give up or don't even try marketing and promotion.
There is a kind of double shut-out for people in this genre. On one side, we feel shut out of the literary establishment — the place where literary work is most visibly celebrated. The big prizes, the newspaper reviews, the literary festivals, the media coverage. The cultural conversation that happens in traditional media tends very much to pick up on traditionally published work, and it operates similarly to how trad publishing works: it's all about gatekeepers. Someone else decides whether you're going to be there or not. Completely opposite to the indie world, where you choose yourself and decide where you're going to be, what you're going to do, and how you're going to do it.
So on that side you can feel: my work belongs there, but I'm not invited. I'm locked out. I'm not taken seriously because I'm self-published. There's a cultural prestige barrier — a status barrier. That can be really painful. I see a lot of literary authors with a deep sense of rejection and even grief around this, and it presses down on the bruise of imposter syndrome that we all carry to some degree. So it's not a small thing at all.
And then on the other side — the indie side — when people talk about marketing and promotion, very often what they're talking about is rapid release, gaming the algorithm, ads and funnels, a whole productivity culture. Publish more books, because more books means more income, more readers, and so on. All of which is true. But the literary author can feel very locked out of that too. That's not my work. That's not my pace. That's not how I think. It's not what I want to do and it's not my audience.
The gap between these two worlds is what this episode is trying to bridge. I'd like to reframe the whole conversation. Literary fiction authors absolutely can market and promote effectively, and there are many examples of people doing that. But it does need a different mindset, different expectations, and different tactics. At the end of the day, it's not a special case — it's just another genre. But its readers have their own particular psychology and buying behaviour, and working that out is no different for any other indie author. You need to understand how your readers think, what they're looking for, what your promise to them is, how they discover you, and where they buy.
Marketing vs. Promotion: An Important Distinction
Just before we dig into the actual topic, I want to make a distinction that we always draw at ALLi between marketing and promotion, because it will feed into everything else I'm going to say.
Marketing means setting up your author platform and fostering the long-term relationship with the reader — the discoverability piece, which is slow, steady, cumulative, and foundational. It's the big question: who are my readers, what am I promising them, and how do I build a relationship with them over time?
Promotion is different. It's a time-limited campaign with a clear start and end and a very clear goal. It answers a much smaller question: how do I create a moment of attention for this book right now?
I'm making this distinction because if you don't set up your marketing properly as a literary fiction author, then promotion is going to feel like shouting into a void. And there's nothing unique about literary fiction there — except that it's sometimes harder for literary authors to find the right advice about setting up marketing properly.
Three Publishing Models: Volume, Engagement, and Craft
There is one other theoretical foundation to the thinking in this episode and in everything we do at ALLi around book publishing. That is the idea that there are three publishing models: volume publishers, engagement publishers, and craft publishers. Every author is always selling books, engaging with readers, and producing the best book they can — that's a given. But each author must decide which of those three things is their lead.
This is the big reframe for literary fiction and poetry authors who may have been listening to classic indie advice about high output, rapid release, wide funnels, and large audiences. Literary and poetry authors are more likely to publish fewer books, to spend longer writing each of them, to layer and build thematic bodies of work, and to care very deeply about design and physical editions. They're more likely to attract readers who will read standalones. And their need to reach the right kind of readers is served well by selling more directly, relying less on algorithms, and more on the trust that comes from excellence.
That's not to say volume or engagement publishers don't make excellent books — they absolutely do. What I'm suggesting is that literary fiction authors are almost always craft publishers: they care about the publishing craft as well as the writing craft, with a slower publishing pace, a smaller audience, and deeper engagement. And this isn't a weakness. This is the marketing world in which the literary fiction author operates. And leaning into that is the first thing you need to do — in your marketing, as well as in your writing and book production.
Very often I find that literary fiction writers, particularly those new to publishing, are not inclined to do the marketing work. There's a sense — after spending so long on a book, working so hard at the writing and then at the book production — that this book should sell itself. But literary fiction is a crowded genre. It is also a genre where excellence prevails, and it is most visible in traditional publishing, even though it isn't actually more common there than in indie publishing. It just gets all the attention over there. So you've got to get your book all the attention over here — and that means your marketing focus needs to shift. If you've been thinking in terms of reach, scale, and speed, you need to lean into relationship, depth, and longevity.
The Audience Is Huge — and Highly Valuable
Another thing I hear authors say is: it's a smaller audience, therefore it's a smaller opportunity, therefore not enough people will buy my books. I think that's a myth we need to dismantle. Yes, the literary fiction and poetry audience is smaller than the romance audience, which is the biggest readership of all. Of course. But ‘smaller' is really irrelevant, because globally we're talking about millions of readers. And it's a very engaged readership.
Literary fiction readers read more. They're very engaged. They form book clubs for discussion. They're also very high value in comparison to other genres. In mass fiction like romance, readers are going through books at a very high rate and looking for lower prices. But literary fiction readers will pay a lot more for an individual book. They'll pay for subscriptions, for deluxe editions, for beautiful print versions.
So the main thing to know here is that the size of the audience is largely irrelevant to you. You don't need millions of readers. You just need thousands of the right readers. And depending on your publishing model and how you set yourself up, you might only need hundreds of the right readers.
Literary readers also attend book events, subscribe to newsletters more readily than most, and are very willing to support a crowdfunder. Once they find an author they love, they follow them anywhere, often for years, and tend to buy the back catalog. And they recommend passionately. Book clubs around the world tend to read literary fiction because those books make for very good discussion — so the word-of-mouth effect can actually be an advantage in this genre.
I think the best way to describe literary fiction readers is that they behave more like patrons than casual consumers. It's a fantastic market once you understand it and set up your marketing to reach it.
Common Tendencies to Overcome
So as we set out to do that, it's worth understanding our own particular challenges. Common tendencies I've witnessed — and experienced — include being uncomfortable with marketing language, being wary of sales tactics and consumerism, being resistant to ‘buy my book' style content marketing, and being less drawn to tech and analytics than other authors might be.
I think literary fiction authors may also be more private and introverted than average — though I'm less certain about that. But what I am sure about is that artistic integrity is something they take to a different level. It's part of their identity and part of how they approach their work in a way that tends to be more pragmatic in other genres.
And then there's this whole idea of selling out. Literary authors are much more sensitive to that, and sometimes very uncomfortable with visibility. The ideal would be the ivory tower: just write my books, and some Galahad agent comes along, sells them to the right publisher, and they pay me to keep going. It's a fantasy. And it creates a false belief that marketing is not for me.
If you just want to write in your ivory tower and you're happy not to seek readers, then you can happily do that — and that's beautiful. But if you want to reach readers and you're waiting for a traditional publishing deal, that's becoming less and less likely unless you self-publish first. It's still happening, and always will — big publishers will always scoop up talent. But it's just not what it was. And meanwhile, everyone who is writing literary fiction and publishing traditionally has no real income. It's essentially a hobby, and probably a hobby costing a great deal of money, time, and angst.
For me, and for many of the authors I've seen in the Alliance, understanding what indie can bring — what it means to be an indie literary fiction author — is just so freeing. So liberating. Because it can be just about you and the craft, and then finding the people who appreciate that. I'm not saying that's easy. It definitely isn't, and it evolves. It doesn't stay in one place. But it does happen, reader by reader, subscriber by subscriber. If you're writing to standard and publishing to standard — and by publishing to standard I include marketing and promoting to standard, because they are fundamentally part of the publishing process — then over time you will find your readers and begin to succeed.
The Fear Underneath Everything: Is My Writing Good Enough?
Something that often isn't talked about is the question that haunts many literary fiction authors and weighs very heavily on them because of the quality piece: is my writing good enough? There's a fear stack underlying every creative block, and for literary authors there are loads of fears — the fear of being too commercial, too visible, looking self-promotional. But underneath it all, it's that question: is my writing good enough? And the fear of that judgment can really hold us back, particularly because you're measuring yourself against the review establishment, the prize committees, all of that.
I want to say: asking whether your writing is good enough is an absolute waste of creative energy. It's a great big hole that leaches your energy, because ‘good,' ‘great,' and ‘bad' are just empty adjectives when it comes to books. They have no objective meaning whatsoever. An epic fantasy novelist is not likely to enjoy a slim volume of poetry, and vice versa. And even among people who like the same kinds of books, what's great for you is not great for me. I'm a member of a book club, all of us literary fiction lovers — and we often disagree passionately about the books. Very often.
And the other thing worth saying, connected to this, is that there is sometimes a snobbery about literary fiction within the indie community that can be felt by other authors. More conversation helps here. But what helps more than anything is realising that literary fiction is just another genre. As I believe it was Gabriel García Márquez who said — something to the effect of — writing is nothing but carpentry, and both are very hard work. If we begin to think about our writing and our marketing in that way, it really, really helps.
Values-Aligned Marketing for Literary Fiction
The solution out of all of this is good, values-aligned marketing. Let's stop mystifying ‘literary' in inverted commas and look at it as just another genre — with its own reader expectations, its own buying patterns, its preferred formats, and its preferred discovery pathways. If we reconfigure ourselves to think about it in that way, we end up with the same simple marketing question all our other indie author friends have to grapple with: how do readers of this genre discover and buy books?
Like every other genre, word of mouth is the number one driver of book buying — useful and useless in equal measure, but still the top driver. Book clubs are great drivers for literary fiction in particular. Social media works well for literary fiction authors if they get the branding and author platform right and actually enjoy the engagement. Literary festivals and other live events where your kind of readers gather are also a recognised discovery pathway.
Reviews and review magazines with large audiences can help. One thing I see a lot of literary fiction authors doing, though, is putting a great deal of time and energy into magazines with little or no readership. You would be better off building your own readership or working with another indie or traditionally published author who is already reaching the kind of readers you want. Literary magazines are a beautiful part of the landscape, but if you're serious about selling books, they are all but useless — unless they have a huge readership like the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books.
The same goes for podcasts, essays, and interviews. Always ask: does this outlet actually reach the people I want to reach, and in sufficient numbers? It doesn't need to be huge — literary never will be. But spending energy on something that will deliver readers in the tens is probably not the best use of your time.
And wherever you are expressing yourself — on a stage, on a social media post, anywhere — keeping the voice of the author of the book is very important. I have seen indie authors get an opportunity, be on a panel, and not do themselves justice because they talk about how they published the book, or about being indie, rather than what the readers who have turned up actually want. Thinking about what the reader wants from you as a literary fiction author is really important, and holding that voice as you step out into the various spaces is equally important.
Physical spaces are much stronger for literary fiction authors than they tend to be for authors in other genres. Indie bookstores, libraries, festivals, events, talks, and workshops are all much more alive in our genre. So yes — all of those things are worth thinking about.
Orna's Own Shift: Going Direct and Simplifying
A little bit about my own recent shift. One of the things I felt about my own writing and reaching readers was that it wasn't being well served by my previous publishing model, which was a wide distribution model with an emphasis on being everywhere. Similarly on social media: I started on Twitter back when that was my favourite platform, then Facebook, Instagram, and various other places. Quite an active online presence, and I enjoyed the engagement. But I consider myself a craft publisher, not an engagement publisher, and a while back I began to feel strongly that this wasn't the best way for me to reach my readers. I wanted to move to more of an ownership model that would be more sustainable.
So I decided to go direct and produce beautiful editions. I had done a lovely edition back in 2016 before it was a widely done thing, and enjoyed that experience enormously — though I thought of it as a one-off. Looking back, possibly I should have kept going with that, but the structures and tools available to us then weren't what we have now.
I now use PublishDrive to reach out into the world — I don't even go direct to Amazon, though I'm looking at that and might change it back. But for now I think of the retailers as essentially advertising, to bring people back to what is now my Shopify store. I also recently closed my WooCommerce store and moved to Shopify. And I closed everything else social-media-wise — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Patreon, and various other platforms — and brought everything to live on Substack.
I'm loving it. It gives me simplicity. It gives me deadlines. I have targets to reach on short posts that eventually build into books. And slowly — it's very early days, I've only been there a couple of months — I can see how I can build a readership on Substack. This isn't to say everyone should be on Substack. Not at all. But the reason I went there is that it is still a writing-first platform. The readers there are my kind of readers. The relationships there are deep and satisfying. You own your list. You can leave any time. And it's combined with Notes — their social media feature — so you've got your email and your community combined. I'm able to do essays, serialise my next novel, put out poems, do audio, run a monthly live salon with a chat room. It's a place where literary readers are already gathering, and some of them are beginning to gather in my little space.
So instead of chasing readers everywhere, I am now choosing to build in a place where they can come to me. I think that's a very powerful model for literary authors.
What Literary Readers Want From You
Literary readers love ideas. They like context. They like to understand what's going on. They love to know what's happening behind the books. You can have this direct reader relationship when you're selling direct and you get the emails and the newsletter. This audience likes their emails — if they're as carefully crafted as your books, that's a key part of it. Emails that offer thoughts, reading lists, anything to do with process, personal connection, and community.
Literary community is important. This isn't a community brought together by emotions, fashion, or lifestyle — it's a community that comes together around reading. They love reading, and you are one of the authors they love. So you can talk to them about reading much more than you might in other genres, and literary culture generally is something they're interested in.
They also love special editions and hardbacks. They tend to be socioeconomically well-off and have more money to spend. If you can create beautiful things that they want to acquire, that's very appealing. And they love arts and publishing. They love the idea of the author. Buying directly from the author appeals to a lot of them — they're often socially motivated and they get the indie thing. Once they know about it, they want to support it.
So all of those things point toward a crowdfunding model as a launch, pre-orders building in advance, speaking in the voice of the writer of the books as you go around online, doing tactical promotions on each book, making a big event of each book's arrival — because it's taken you a long time to write it. Building up to a significant launch while you're writing, and doing creative things that are different: this audience can definitely tolerate that.
They're also more interested in awards. For the literary fiction reader, the fact that you have an award, or that you're appearing in a particular place, can be significant.
Closing: The Long Game
There's a great deal more that could be said, but I hope this provides some food for thought and something useful to work on.
I want to leave by saying: this is a marathon, not something that happens overnight. Literary careers grow slowly, but if you do it well they grow steadily and cumulatively — and then a tipping point comes and things get a lot better. Think of each book not only as the book itself, but as something that is strengthening your marketing through authority, discoverability, and reader trust.
Understanding what you're doing as a literary author, leaning into it, not being pulled left or right by things that don't apply to you — being somewhere, being meaningful, being consistent. Those are really important for everybody, but they're especially important for literary authors. One strong content platform. One strong direct sales channel. Whichever way you go: value depth over spread.
For those of you on Substack, I will be doing a live on this soon — just to see if we can connect literary authors on Substack, share what's working, ask questions, learn together, and build confidence in how to market literary work. You don't have to figure it all out by yourself. Do get in touch if that sounds interesting to you.
And I suppose I'd just leave you by saying, at the risk of repeating myself: like every other genre, when you understand the reader, marketing literary fiction becomes far, far easier. That's it for this time. Next time we'll talk about poetry — which is much easier, actually. Until then, happy writing and happy publishing. Bye-bye.
Thanks, Orna, a brilliant piece