Can AI Run Your Book Marketing? Member Q&A with Michael La Ronn and Sacha Black

October 18, 2026

In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Member Q&A podcast, hosts Michael La Ronn and Sacha Black discuss whether AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT can run an author's book marketing, from managing Amazon ads to updating metadata and delivering weekly trend reports.

Listen to the Podcast: Can AI Run Your Book Marketing?

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About the Hosts

Michael La Ronn is ALLi’s Outreach Manager. He is the author of over 80 science fiction & fantasy books and self-help books for writers. He writes from the great plains of Iowa and has managed to write while raising a family, working a full-time job, and even attending law school classes in the evenings (now graduated!). You can find his fiction at www.michaellaronn.com and his videos and books for writers at www.authorlevelup.com.

Sacha Black is a bestselling and competition winning author, rebel podcaster, speaker and casual rule breaker. She writes fiction under a secret pen name and other books about the art of writing. She lives in England, with her wife and genius, giant of a son. You can find her on her website, her podcast, and on Instagram.

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Read the Transcript

Michael La Ronn: Hello, and welcome to Self-Publishing with ALLi. This is the Member Q&A podcast where we answer your most burning self-publishing questions. Anything you want to know from the idea process all the way up to rights licensing, we have you covered, and we've got your answers. I'm Michael La Ronn, I'm ALLi's outreach manager, and I'm joined by Sacha Black, ALLi's communication strategy manager. How are you, Sacha?

Sacha Black: Hello, hello. I'm good, thank you. How are you?

Michael La Ronn: I am fantastic. And I'm hanging in there. Well, okay, that's contradictory. I'm fantastic and I'm also hanging in there.

Sacha Black: It feels a bit like that midsummer though, doesn't it? Oh, no, I know, I know. I'm so sorry.

Michael La Ronn: Okay. Well, you didn't say this. It may or may not be summer, depending on when you're listening to this. We've got to have some fun a little bit. It may or may not be summer. We might be recording this on a summer day, but you might be listening to this on a spring day. So I don't know.

Sacha Black: And you know what? We are clearly both exhausted this morning.

Michael La Ronn: Yeah. Well, I've been up since 5:00 in the morning.

Sacha Black: Ouch.

Michael La Ronn: And, you know, I don't know if I've ever talked about this. So I'm in the United States, I'm in Central Time Zone. Sacha, you're in London, and we have a six-hour difference between us when we record this show, and it's been that way since the beginning I've done this show. There was a couple of years where I did this show with Dan Blank, and I think he was in New York, so there wasn't much of a time difference between us. But all of the co-hosts that I've had for the show have been, you know, across the pond.

Sacha Black: That's hilarious.

Michael La Ronn: And so I wake up at 5:00 in the morning and usually record, like, 6:00. And I've done that for, I don't know, it's probably, like, 10 years. But I don't think I've ever talked about that on the show.

Sacha Black: No. It's worked. The joys of international publishing, eh?

Michael La Ronn: Yes. And you know, I enjoy it. I'm a morning person anyway. I get up, I go take a walk, like, I walk around my neighborhood for a little bit and then just meditate for a little while, and then I usually log on and we record.

Sacha Black: That's wild to me.

Michael La Ronn: But it may not be a summer day here. Could be something else. But anywho, what are you working on, Sacha?

Condensing Warehouses and Launching a Prequel

Sacha Black: Well, we've just had some really cool merch arrive. I have been condensing two warehouse buildings into one. And starting to outline a new book. So it's busy, busy, busy here.

Michael La Ronn: Awesome.

Sacha Black: How about you? What are you—

Michael La Ronn: Well, I'm continuing to work on novels and just continuing to kind of do all the things. You know me, I'm just kind of all over the place. But doing some travel here coming up soon, although I won't say where, so we don't date ourselves here. But getting ready for a certain conference that may take place in a very large city that may have a bunch of casinos. So let folks do their own inferences on where that might be.

Sacha Black: It's a mystery.

Michael La Ronn: It's a complete mystery, but I'm getting presentations ready and getting ready to reach out to folks that are going there, and just trying to get ready. It's been a long time since I've been to this particular conference in a very large city that has a lot of casinos. So it'll be kind of fun to go back. But that's what I'm working on for the most part. So you're condensing warehouses.

Sacha Black: I am.

Michael La Ronn: Getting merch together. You have any upcoming campaigns or things that folks need to know about?

Sacha Black: I've got a book launch for the prequel in my mafia romantasy. So it's sort of fae versus vampire, Seven Deadly Sins inspired, so that is coming up. And that is what the cool merch is for. So yeah, that is probably the biggest thing that's going on at the moment. We're kind of mid-launch. I was working on emails this morning, trying to get all my once-a-week email marketing prepped so I don't have to do it once my days are a little bit freer, so that I can concentrate on outlining. Do you have any launches or anything coming?

Michael La Ronn: No, I don't have any coming up right now, but I've got some things in the works. I've just had my head down the last few months. I don't know, I feel like I go through these seasons where I'm not as productive. But I'm still working on things. I'm still writing every day. I'm still working on stories and, like, I just wrote a magazine article. I'm doing a lot of stuff, but externally it doesn't look like I'm doing very much, if that makes sense. So I'm in one of those seasons where I kind of have my head down and getting my head correct so I can come back and start it up again.

Sacha Black: No, I understand. I was looking at my writing tracker 'cause I track my word counts, and I'm very, like, either I am writing or I'm not writing at all. There's no in between. I am not one of these 500-words-a-day people. I'm all or nothing. So I suppose in a way I write seasonally. I also know that I do tend to write more in the winter than I do in the summer. I think part of that is, well, for us in the UK at any rate, school summer holidays. I'm definitely less productive in the school summer holidays, but I think in general I'm less writing oriented in the summer and more admin, project based in the summer, and I definitely write a lot of words in the winter.

Writing Through the Time of Great Forgetting

Michael La Ronn: Dean Wesley Smith has a term for that. He calls it the time of great forgetting. It's that period. It starts right around the end of May, and it goes up until, like, September, and it's the time when it's basically summer, or at least in the Northern Hemisphere. But it's summer and people are enjoying summer, and vacations, and traveling, and they've got kids that are home all day, and it becomes harder to write. And so some writers just don't write at all. And then school starts, and then there's a little bit of a ramp-up period, and then you get to, like, October, and it's like, “Oh, crap, I haven't written anything all summer,” and then you get into high gear.

Sacha Black: I wonder if for people in the Southern Hemisphere it's the same, but the other times of year.

Michael La Ronn: The opposite. Yeah. It wouldn't surprise me. I would be curious, for our friends in the Southern Hemisphere who are listening, does this resonate with you? But it certainly has been true in my life, and one of the things that I try to do in the summers, although this summer I haven't been able to do it, I always try to do challenges. So I'll say, okay, I want to write, or I want to start the Ray Bradbury challenge. Do you know what that is?

Sacha Black: I don't.

Michael La Ronn: Basically you read a short story, an essay, and a poem every day for a year. And then that's only the first part. And then the second part is you have to write a short story every week for 52 weeks, or for a year.

Sacha Black: I literally could never. It's so brutal. You have consistency in your CliftonStrengths.

Michael La Ronn: Oh, yeah. But I'll tell you, that challenge is brutal. It is a real brutal challenge. It's probably easier to just write like 10 novels in a year than to do that. And I've done both. It's very challenging. And it's challenging because it requires you to go off and find short stories and poems and all that, but then you also have to stay disciplined enough to write a new short story.

Sacha Black: Yeah, which you also have discipline in your top 10, right?

Michael La Ronn: Yeah, I'm very disciplined. When I want to be.

Sacha Black: I have no discipline and no consistency. That literally sounds like an absolute nightmare to me.

Michael La Ronn: But so anyway, I do challenges over the summer because I'm not immune to summer vacation and the great weather just like anyone else. And so it's nice because you can get to the end of the season and you can have something to show for it. Even if you fail, even if you decide, “Hey, I'm going to get out of country for three weeks,” and you get no writing done, at least you have some sort of, okay, well, I have a couple of short stories, or I've got a third of a novel written. Whatever your challenge wants to be, but it's just something interesting that is kind of fun. But I'd be curious if that resonates with folks, and if it does, then look up The Time of Great Forgetting. Dean Wesley Smith writes about it all the time on his blog, and I found it to be true. It's one of those things where it's just something that has always resonated with me, and that's something I've always tried to avoid.

Should You Get an EIN, a DBA, and a Business Bank Account?

Michael La Ronn: All right. Well, we should get into questions here. So our first question is from Rita, and Rita says, “I would like to know if you recommend getting an employer identification number, EIN, a DBA account,” so I guess a doing business as, “and a bank account for your writing business.”

Sacha Black: Well, you should always seek legal and accounting advice from professionals, so I'm not equipped to give you legal or accounting advice. What I can tell you in the UK is only specific to kind of my very basic knowledge in the UK, which is that regardless of whether or not you are self-employed or you have a limited company in the UK, it always makes sense to separate out writing-related income and expenses from your personal bank account. Because at the end of the day, HMRC or the IRS or whoever it is in your specific country will want you to be able to account for all of the incomings and outgoings related to your writing stuff. That's considerably easier to do if the data is clean, and the only way you get clean data is by having it in a separate account.

So regardless of the other ones, I would definitely recommend that you have a bank account as soon as you start spending and/or having income. Certainly when you start getting income, I would recommend it. And of course, if you are a limited company, you would then get access to actual business accounts which have slightly different parameters and things around them. Most of the time there's a small monthly fee or whatever. Obviously, Sacha is not my real name. I don't have a doing business as. I'm not sure what that is. But that is my company name. And I don't remember what the other one was. I don't know if you have more insight on the other two.

Michael La Ronn: Yeah, I agree with everything you said. Starting a business bank account is just, you have to think about this like a business, and what would a business do? And the answer is that a CEO of a major corporation doesn't put their personal expenses on the company bank account, right? So you don't want to be commingling funds. And I think I had a conversation with an accountant about this. You can have everything out of the same bank account if you wanted to. You can have your business expenses and your personal expenses, but what you said I think gets to the heart of it, Sacha, which is you've got to have clean data, because at the end of the day, you're going to have to provide an accounting to HMRC or the IRS or whatever blood-sucking, money-sucking government entity lives in your country. And it makes it a lot harder.

Sacha Black: Sorry, that's so true.

Michael La Ronn: Blood-sucking. Sorry, everyone. They are. They are.

Sacha Black: Michael's spicy this morning.

Michael La Ronn: I am spicy. That's what happens when you run on three hours of sleep. But it's all good. But yeah, you want to provide some detail. And the other side of this is also true. You don't necessarily want the government to know what your personal expenses are. From a business perspective, there's also some privacy in it as well that I think you have to think about. But there can be penalties and things if you don't get this right. So I would recommend just a separate bank account. Makes it super easy to do your accounting every month.

The other two, so employer identification number, you have to tell me, Sacha, if you have anything similar in the UK, but basically this is a number that you can use to identify your business for tax purposes instead of using a highly personal Social Security number. And I don't know if you have anything similar.

Sacha Black: Well, you have a company number.

Michael La Ronn: A company number?

Sacha Black: Yeah, so when you register your company, you get a company number. And then when you have to register for VAT, you also get a VAT number. But employer's number. We also have something called a UTR. I don't know what UTR stands for though. And when you employ someone, you do have to register an employee.

Michael La Ronn: Unique taxpayer reference.

Sacha Black: Unique taxpayer reference. I don't know whether you have those as an individual or as a company. I am, like, the single worst person to ask any accounting information to. I literally pay my accountants more money so that I don't have to have anything to do with it.

Michael La Ronn: I am too. Okay, so here's my question. What happens if you don't get those numbers? Let's say you're just a single, like a sole proprietor, sole trader. You decide, “Hey, I don't want to do all that.” What are the consequences in the UK for not doing that? ‘Cause here in the States, I'll give you an example. So if I don't get an employer identification number, then whenever I make money, like when I'm filling out the tax interview at KDP, or I write a magazine article and they want all my tax information, I would have to give them my Social Security number, which here in the United States is a very, very sensitive piece of information that somebody could use to steal my identity, do all sorts of really bad things. And so that's the reason why you don't want to give your Social Security number out under any circumstances. And I was curious, is there something similar to that for you guys?

Sacha Black: We've got a national insurance number, which I think is equivalent of the Social Security number. And that can track your tax paid, your employer's, your national insurance, which becomes your pension when you're older. So I think that's what that number is, but I really don't know. I know that we have UTRs, VAT numbers, company numbers. But what would happen if we don't do any of it? Well, if you get caught, you're going to be in trouble.

Michael La Ronn: What happens? Do you go to jail or do you get fined?

Sacha Black: I don't know, 'cause I stay on the right side. Probably a fine, probably. I mean, if you don't pay your tax, they'll just come and seize your assets. So I would imagine it's something along those lines.

Michael La Ronn: Oh, wow. That's way worse.

Sacha Black: Oh, yeah, no. They won't mess about here in the UK. They will just go into your bank account and take money.

Michael La Ronn: I mean, here, if you mess up your taxes, you end up usually getting a big bill at the end of the day. I've heard of people, it's enormous. And obviously if you evade your taxes then you go to jail. And I'm sure there's probably some other things that can happen.

Sacha Black: Yeah, so generally speaking, as long as you're open with them, they will allow you to negotiate, and if you need a payment plan or something, they'll often do things like that. But yeah, they will issue fines, and maybe I'm being dramatic and they don't actually come into your bank and seize money, but I think they probably do attempt to take money from you. But yeah, it's a serious business, taxes, in the UK. You don't want to get on the wrong side of the tax system.

Michael La Ronn: Yeah, if you take anything away from this, it's just, stay safe out there, kids. It doesn't cost you any money here in the States to get an employer identification number. You can get it in, like, five minutes after you create an account. It's easy. It's easy to go create a bank account. All of these things don't cost you anything. Well, a bank account, sometimes they'll charge you per month, but it's still a very, very low fee, and I think it's worth it to stay protected and just make sure you're doing this the right way.

Sacha Black: Yeah, and if you can't afford to pay an accountant or pay somebody, we have these organizations in the UK called Citizens Advice Bureaus. So that would be my then suggestion is if you can't afford an accountant, whatever you do, go to a Citizens Advice and just get an opinion from somebody who is paid to give opinions.

Michael La Ronn: Exactly. And when in doubt, talk to other authors that are a little bit further down the path than you as well. ‘Cause I think taxes is one of those things that people seize up when they hear that. It takes a very unique mind to be able to navigate that world, and most authors are not of that mind. Some are. I can think of a few who are accountants who are probably listening to us and saying, “Man, you guys should go to school for accounting. This is not good advice. What are you doing here?” But most of us, I think it's fairly common to say we're not accountants, but it's really not that hard. To do what you're supposed to do, it's not that hard. And that's why these tools exist like QuickBooks. I know some authors that do their own taxes. Now, I wouldn't recommend that, but it can be done if you're willing to invest a little bit of time and energy. And the Citizens Advice Bureau, that's cool. Talk to other authors. You'll figure it out. There's a lot of information online as well on YouTube and social media on how to do things the right way.

Sacha Black: Yeah. The last thing that I'm going to say is don't be afraid to get a quote from an accountant, just reach out, because quite often the accounting fees are proportionate to the business. So my first set of accounting fees were less than £400 to have somebody else take the pain. The prior year it had taken me 18 hours to do my taxes and two crying tantrums. And then it cost me, I don't know, 350 quid or whatever it was the following year, and there was no crying and no tantrums. So it was like the best money ever. I mean, now I don't even know how much I pay, well over four grand, but it means I don't have to deal with it. I don't have the worry of getting stuff wrong. They tell me when I've missed something. But also my business is over 10 times bigger, so it makes sense that that amount goes up.

Michael La Ronn: Yeah. And it also may be more expensive not to hire an accountant. That's the other thing you have to think through. I always recommend hiring an accountant, and the fees are generally pretty reasonable. But they can help you save money, put it that way. There's a lot of creative loopholes in accounting and in the tax code that you can take advantage of, and an accountant can help you do that.

Which AI Tools Should You Use for Book Marketing?

Michael La Ronn: All right. Let's move to the next question, and it's from Hugo, and that's, “If I was to do my own book marketing, what AI company should I use? It needs to be simple to use.” So if you were to use AI for book marketing, Sacha, I know it's a hot topic, but do you have any recommendations?

Sacha Black: Do you know, it's a real cop-out answer, but I feel like you could run a couple of tests. So you could put your book into GPT and put your book into Claude, say for example, let's just use those two. And you could ask it the same question, you know, read this book, create me a marketing plan for, I don't know, Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever. Or create me a PR campaign, do some research, find out who I should be targeting, et cetera. And then you could directly compare the answers for the reports that it creates.

I use Claude a lot in my business admin, so like putting stuff in my calendar, handling emails, setting up spreadsheets for me, analyzing data in my Shopify. I will use it typically to find things in my book, like if I know that there's a quote somewhere and I roughly know what it says, I'll ask it to go and find it 'cause I need to know what page it's on or whatever. But I don't use it massively for marketing, so I feel a little bit under knowledgeable on this. My gut instinct is that it's probably a mix and match of Claude and GPT. I feel like GPT might have a better sense of sort of strategy for marketing, but Claude might be better on writing captions and copy for you. I don't know. It's really hard 'cause I'm not really using it for that. I'm using it for business administration mostly. What about you?

Michael La Ronn: I use Claude to kind of help me come up with taglines and things. It helps with book descriptions. But in theory, I have to speak very theoretically here, 'cause during the day when I'm not working on writing, I do work in the tech space now, and we work with AI quite substantially and I do have an interesting insight. What I haven't been able to do yet is think about what this would look like in writing, but what I can tell you is that in theory, and again, this is acknowledging the AI elephant in the room and we don't have to spend a whole lot of time on this, but in theory, it would be possible to create a Claude agent or a series of agents that could accomplish a task in a loop.

So for example, if you wanted to use Claude to manage your Amazon ads, right? You could in theory do that, and it could learn what is working, optimize what is working on a loop, like a continuous loop that you monitor on a regular basis just to make sure it's not doing anything wrong. And in theory, it could be possible to create a series of agents that do things that maybe you don't have time to do, like revise your book descriptions or look at the market, keep tabs on the market on Amazon on what's happening in your genre, and monitor that and give you daily reports or make recommendations. It is, in theory, possible to do all of that automated.

Sacha Black: Okay. So now we've talked about that, I've actually got three examples. I completely misinterpreted that direction. I got Claude to run my ads. I've also got it to update all my metadata in IngramSpark. What was the other thing that you said? ‘Cause I think I've done that as well.

Michael La Ronn: Like book descriptions, I think I said. Weekly reports. So that you stay in control.

Sacha Black: I also get it to troll TikTok weekly and bring me trends and things like that. What I will say is that I got it to do my Amazon ads, but not successfully. So I do think that, you know how you were saying you need to monitor and sort of keep tweaking and stuff, I tried and failed to do that. I think it has potential there, but I'm just not sure. But you can get it to do a weekly task, like bring you the weekly trends, really well, and it absolutely smashed out doing my metadata. It first of all did the research to suggest what the tweaks should be, then it did the tweaks. It was pretty token heavy, but it was excellent.

Michael La Ronn: Yeah. Well, okay. So everything you just said, agree 100%. I think you can take it a step further, and if you were to go up to the next level, right? You could, in theory, create an agent that could do all of that on a continuous loop. So it does something, it gets the results, you provide feedback on whether the results were correct or not, and then it gets better. So it does all of this on a continuous loop that you only have to monitor. ‘Cause I think what a lot of people are doing is they're using these tools to accomplish a certain task, but I think you can start… We're moving into the era where you can start using these tools to essentially do things automated 24/7 and start taking actions on your behalf. You know, the advice we give on this show all the time is 50% of marketing works, nobody knows what 50%. That adage may be a thing of the past, you know? Because it's expensive to hire somebody to market your books, right? And it's less so to do all of this with large language models. Regardless of how you feel about it, I think the economics are pretty sound. I think we're moving into an era where it may be more cost-effective to do what we've just described than to pay multiple thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars to a marketing agency who's probably just going to do everything I just described. So again, we're not advocating for anybody to lose their jobs, it's just interesting what people are doing in this space right now. That's all. So maybe there's some ideas you can take away.

Are Goodreads Giveaways Worth the Money?

Michael La Ronn: Okay, next question is from Chaz, and Chaz said, “I recently wanted to try a Goodreads giveaway, but—” Okay, this is a very specific question. I guess let's answer this just more generally. If you have some specific questions, Chaz, around Goodreads giveaways, I would encourage you to repost your comment in the member forum. There are some folks that might be able to help you. I don't know that we're going to be able to give you the expertise that you're looking for with this particular question. So I want to ask it more generally. Have you ever done Goodreads giveaways, Sacha, for e-book and/or print, and how's it worked, and would you recommend it?

Sacha Black: I haven't. Sorry. I was going to right at the point that they became, like, 400 pounds or something. I know they're back down at, like, 100 or something now, but no, I haven't. I'm a bit rubbish today, aren't I? Not good at accounting questions. Not good at… Oh, dear.

Michael La Ronn: Hey, you win some, you lose some. It's the question lottery. But we still have something to offer. It's been a long time since I've done Goodreads giveaways. I've done both. I did it when they were print only, back in the day, like 2012, 2013, when it was a lot easier to run the giveaways. Although, really back then it really wasn't that easy to run them. I don't know how effective they've really ever been for some folks. But it ultimately boils down to what you're willing to pay for, and what you're willing to experiment with.

Sacha Black: And what you're hoping to get out of it. Like, do you know the goal?

Michael La Ronn: Exactly. If you have a goal and you're willing to spend the money to give away 10 copies, and you're okay with not hitting that goal, then I say go for it. It certainly can't hurt. But I think that the question is, is the money that you're going to spend and the goal that you have better and more easily accomplished elsewhere? For some writers, this may be the thing that will help them. Is this going to revolutionize your career and allow you to quit your job tomorrow? Probably not.

Sacha Black: I'm pretty confident in saying definitely not, let's be honest.

Michael La Ronn: Hey, anything can happen.

Sacha Black: No, well, that's true, but now I'm feeling spicy.

Michael La Ronn: Yes. Well, okay, so it's funny because there was an author for a long time, I don't think she does these anymore, so I won't say her name. But she used to do webinars on how to use Goodreads giveaways to be successful, and she was incredibly successful at it. So I just never say never because you just never know what's going to do it for you. But I think chances are pretty high, I think you're right, Sacha. I've got to concede that it's probably not. And we're just talking about print. I don't know if Goodreads still allows e-book giveaways. I would imagine they do, but it used to be that they were a lot more expensive.

Sacha Black: Well, I think it's still somewhat expensive.

Michael La Ronn: So you have to weigh your goal with what you want to accomplish. If you've got a book that would be really popular on Goodreads… I think I've said this in the last show and I'll continue to say it, having a book that is in a clear genre that is easy to market with a really, really good cover, I think works really well. Or I shouldn't say works really well. I'm just saying will work better than something that is like a genre hodgepodge. And that's just my two cents. If you've got a brontosaurus romance, I think that's harder to be successful in marketing in general than something that is a very clear romancey, like cut from the cloth of ACOTAR, right? So I think that money is a precious resource for writers, especially when you're starting out, and if you're going to spend 400 pounds, I think that there are way more effective things that you could spend your 400 pounds on. Maybe it's a little bit cheaper for Goodreads now, but that's just my two thoughts. Just look at the things we've talked about before on this show just in the last 35 minutes. We talked about creating a bank account. We talked about an accountant to hopefully save you some money for taxes. We talked about Amazon ads. Those are things that you could spend 400 pounds on and probably get a better return for your investment.

How Long Should You Market a Book Before Publication?

Michael La Ronn: Okay, next question is William. How do I list my book in the ALLi bookstore?

Sacha Black: Have you got the instructions there?

Michael La Ronn: I'll see if I can. Maybe we'll go to the next question while I pull that up. And then the next question is from Idell. “How long do authors market their books before publication? I recently read an article that it should be from six months to a year.”

Sacha Black: I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I think it depends on your business model and your goals. Do you have a pre-order goal that you're trying to hit? Well, then the more pre-orders you get, the closer you're going to get to the goal, and therefore, the longer amount of time you have the book on pre-order, the better. Are you exclusive to Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited? Then your pre-order period matters considerably less because none of those pre-orders count towards rank on launch day. And obviously, nobody who is likely to borrow your book through KU is going to pre-order. They're going to wait until it's in Kindle Unlimited. So therefore, pre-order period is more or less irrelevant for that purpose. However, if you want to raise awareness of your book, if you are trying to gather a huge sort of support street team, or let's say you want to run really big PR campaigns with book boxes and influencers and stuff, well, then the longer you have, the better.

So for me, on my personal website, I know for a fact that between 30 and 36% of my turnover is pre-orders. So pre-orders is a big chunk of money for me, and I try and have my products on pre-order for as long as I possibly can. So much so that I put them on pre-order on my website before I put them up anywhere else. So I have pretty long pre-order periods, anything probably from six months to a year. But equally, when I've been in KU, I have only done a month or two. So it really depends. What is your goal? Do you want more rank visibility, and therefore wait until you've actually launched? Are you just trying to drive up awareness? Do you have a big backlist? If you've got a big backlist, then sometimes pre-order campaigns are good because you can drive people to your other books whilst they're waiting. It really depends on what are your goals and what is your business model. And that's how you determine the pre-order period. Also, there are no right or wrong answers, and the market changes, and therefore, continuing to experiment is always really important too because your data is only as valid as the day that you measure it.

How to List Your Book in the ALLi Bookstore

Michael La Ronn: Agree 100%. So in terms of the bookstore piece, back to the previous question, I would encourage you to just give it a shot. If you run into trouble, please reach out to us at [email protected]. I don't know if you've used it, Sacha, but I've uploaded, like, 30 of my books and it worked really well.

Sacha Black: Someone on my team uploaded them for me, so I don't know exactly how.

Michael La Ronn: Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. And honestly, it didn't take me very long. So we're not asking you to do rocket science, but certainly if you run into any issues, we're very open to updating the platform and making it easier for members to upload their books. And for those who don't know, we have a member bookstore, and the bookstore essentially allows you to upload your books so that they can be discovered by readers. It's an additional distribution platform for our members that we are able to provide. And you can find that by logging into your ALLi dashboard. And if you're not an ALLi member and you want to learn a little bit more about this bookstore, it's bookstore.allianceindependentauthors.org.

Send Us Your Questions

Michael La Ronn: Okay. Well, hey, that's the end of another episode, Sacha.

Sacha Black: Excellent.

Michael La Ronn: Why don't we go ahead and wrap. So thank you for listening. This has been Self-Publishing with ALLi, Member Q&A podcast. Thank you so much for listening and we will be back next time to answer more questions. Have a wonderful month.

Sacha Black: Please, please give us your questions is the last thing that we want to say.

Michael La Ronn: Oh, yes, please give us your questions. We're almost at the bottom of our queue currently, so we've got some availability. So if you want to submit your question, we'll answer it, hopefully on the next show.

Sacha Black: Thanks. Bye.

Michael La Ronn: Thanks, all. Have a good day.

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