In this Self-Publishing Advice Conference highlight, Orna Ross revisits classic book marketing must-dos and updates them for 2025. Grounded in ALLi’s Reach More Readers guidebook and the organization’s Ethical AI policy, the session cuts through content overload, shifting algorithms, rising ad costs, email deliverability problems, and growing concerns about reader trust. Ross offers a human-first, values-based approach to marketing that helps author-publishers make clear, ethical choices without burning out. Writers leave with a simple mini-audit of their current marketing and a short, realistic upgrade list to help them reach more readers on their own terms.
Listen to the Podcast: New Takes on Marketing Must-Dos
This is a post from SelfPubCon (The Self-Publishing Advice Conference), an online author event run free twice yearly in association with the Alliance of Independent Authors.
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Read the Transcript
Orna Ross: Hello, hello everyone and welcome, welcome, welcome to this session on New Takes on Marketing Must-Dos. I'll explain a little more about what we'll be doing here in a moment, but for now just come on in, settle down, and get ready to enjoy this session. I hope you're having a good conference so far. Any feedback, please do drop it into the chat. Similarly, I'll be going through a presentation that will ask you to do a little bit of thinking about your own situation, so if you have any questions about things I'm discussing, just drop them into the chat.
Good to see everyone. Hello — people coming in from all over: Phoenix, Arizona, San Bernardino, Ontario, Texas, Florida, London, the Netherlands. I never cease to be delighted and excited by the fact that we can all connect across borders. I'm old enough to remember when that wasn't possible, and it really is very advanced magic. Andrea says she's loving the presentations but it's growing her to-do list and bringing up so many new thoughts and questions to process around marketing. This session may help a little with that.
When you come to a conference like this, you hear so many things — so much advice, so many services, tools, techniques, and different ways of doing things. In this session we're going to focus in a little more on who you are and what suits you and your books and your marketing.
What This Session Covers
This session is called New Takes on Marketing Must-Dos. After all these years of watching so many different authors, seeing books sell and do well, and seeing authors create platforms, I believe there are certain things that cross over — things we all need to do. That's what this presentation is going to focus on.
The presentation draws a tiny bit of information from what is a very definitive guide to book marketing that we've just released — Reach More Readers. It's not even available in print yet, just released for our members in the member zone, and it's on sale at 50% off for conference attendees at the moment. I'll explain at the end where you can get it. It's certainly our most requested book and it's just been completely updated and revised in the light of all the changes that have happened in the last year, particularly around marketing and marketing services.
In this presentation I'm going to dip in just slightly to some of what you'll find in the book, very much at a high level. The presentation is going to focus on what is new at the moment, so we all know what we're talking about; what I mean by must-dos and which ones specifically those are; what never changes — what's evergreen and always has to be thought about; and how AI can help in marketing. Don't send any hate mail if you don't like AI — that's absolutely fine, you can skip those bits. We completely respect people who are trying not to use it. But we want to make available to our members who do use AI tools, and who want to expand that use where it's useful to them, information about how those tools can assist. Very much within a context, though, of how to be more human.
The Marketing Must-Dos
So what are the must-dos? First: positioning your book in the marketplace. I have my own tale about this. When I was trade published, my first novel was marketed by a corporate publisher to reach as many people as possible. When I took my rights back and repositioned the book myself, within a year I had sold more books than that corporate publisher had. I fully believe that was down to positioning. They positioned it to reach as many people as possible. I positioned it to reach those people I felt would really love it. If there's any single thing to take away today as a must-do, it's finding out who your reader is and what they like about what you do. That's positioning — genre clarity, understanding what part of the books ecosystem you fit into, and reader promise: what expectations are you setting, what are you promising the reader, what kind of book are they expecting from you?
Second: metadata. Boring, but super important. Titles, keywords, categories, and optimizing these all the time. When you get a title and subtitle and book description you like, you go with them — but you keep optimizing. A year or so later you look again: are these categories still the most relevant for me in the stores? You keep optimizing.
Third: platform. Building your presence — not your social media platform, but your platform as a writer, your presence in the right ecosystem for your kind of book.
Fourth: discoverability — understanding your reader journey. How does a reader find you and move from seeing your book for the very first time to picking it up, to becoming an advocate? That's the reader journey, and understanding how you bring readers through it through partnership and collaboration — with comparable authors, with literary influencers, booksellers, librarians, events, festivals, organizations, depending on the kind of publisher you are.
Fifth: connection. Your personal values as a person and as an author are embedded in your book, and they are the key to presenting your story to the reader in a way that the reader understands the value in it — in terms of their time, their money, their investment in you.
And finally: creativity. A lot of authors say, I don't want to market, I just want to write. I was one of those — my personal preface story is in the book. I came to realize that's nonsense, because marketing is writing.
What Never Changes: Evergreen Marketing Principles
Now, what never changes. One of the most important distinctions — and one that will send you into overwhelm if you haven't already made it for yourself — is that marketing is not the same as promotion. They're two different things.
Marketing is general, everyday, overall. It's your promise to the reader. What does the reader expect when they see your cover, your book description? Where does the reader find you? What does your author platform look like? Those things we were just talking about. Promotion is a short-term thing. It's focused on one book around a particular timeframe. It might be an ad boost, an email blast, it could be anything, but it has a beginning and an end. You can set a goal: I want to sell X number of books, I'm doing this promotion. It's a very definable thing. Marketing is much more nebulous, everyday, evergreen, ongoing.
This book — Reach More Readers — concentrates on marketing. We will be releasing Sell More Books, the next book in the series, shortly. That will cover promotion. But everything we're talking about in Reach More Readers is about marketing. You get your marketing set in place, and your systems and processes around marketing in place, before you do promotions. Otherwise you can find yourself running around like the proverbial headless chicken.
Second evergreen principle: genre clarity. Until you understand your genre — where you fall in the books ecosystem, what shelf you're found on in online retailers or in a bookstore — not just ‘fiction' but your genre, your sub-genre, your niche, what's different about your book — you're not ready to market effectively. This is where you go deeply into your own personal story and extract the values embedded within the book, so you can communicate them to your reader in your marketing.
Third: your reader's journey. How does a reader find you? What is their first point of contact likely to be? If you're a direct-first author, their main way of finding you may be search — AI search or traditional Google search. If you're Amazon KU only, Amazon is your first touchpoint. Those are completely different strategies.
Fourth: professional standards in everything you do. Editorial quality, design, and delivery of your books need to be to professional standards for your marketing to work. It's not quite a marketing thing in itself, but if it's wrong, the marketing has gone bust.
And fifth: values, which I've mentioned already and will probably mention again because it's my obsession. Your values as the basis of reader value, and your author's story as the connector between you and the reader.
What's New and Why the Book Was Updated
So what is new, and why the update to the ALLi book? First, AI tools. They can help with all sorts of things — I've listed three: metadata, audience research, and content creation. I fully recognize that some of you may not wish to use these, but they're there and so we mention them.
There are also lots of new marketing services — and alongside them, lots of new marketing spammers and scams. Caution is needed. If you're thinking you'd love to hire somebody to do your marketing for you, we would say firmly: until you fully understand your own marketing — your values, your reader journey, your position in the marketplace — you're not in the right place to hire somebody to help. But there are lots of new services out there, so let's address that.
Direct sales and direct-first. We just got the results of our most recent author income survey — thank you to those of you who took part. One of the things we've found is that what we call the creator model, where authors are going directly to readers using crowdfunding and different income streams beyond just one constrained channel, is on the increase. We definitely see that at ALLi and we expect it to continue. More and more authors are taking advantage of what is our great advantage particularly in the world of AI: we are human beings. We have hearts. AI doesn't. We have souls. AI doesn't. And as machines and AI take over people's lives and workplaces, the more readers are searching for heart and soul. That is absolutely our advantage as authors going directly to readers, cutting out the people in the middle.
Another big trend at the moment: it's now easier than ever to reach out at a global level — to make things available globally and to do things really well. These tools help us shortcut a lot of processes. But we have to do it in the context of that humanity and of being very much who we are and where we are. The reader is looking for local resonance even when they're on the far side of the world. Cultural texture of the book itself sometimes, but sometimes it's about you — who you are, what you look like, what you sound like, where you live, what you're doing. All of these things can be used in your marketing when they connect to the themes or settings of your book.
And finally, another big thing we're seeing — not entirely new, it's been there since the start of the indie revolution — is collaborative marketing. In the old days marketing was aimed at the mainstream, you aimed at the middle. Now we break it up, we go niche, and we work with individuals: influencers, whether online through social media, or in the literary world — librarians, booksellers, reviewers — people who can take your book and bring it to far more readers than you can reach by yourself. Top among those are other authors in your genre. That is definitely a big and growing trend right now.
Where Are You in Your Marketing?
I want you to have a think now about yourself. Marketing's hard. Book marketing is not easy, and there are all sorts of reasons for this. Even big corporations with massive budgets have books misfire and flop. People think something's a sure winner and it doesn't work out. Nobody knows exactly why. It's not a science. So yeah — there's a lot to learn, it can be really overwhelming at first, and a lot of authors either bow out or do it sporadically and it's hit and miss.
The measure of whether your marketing is hitting the mark is sales. Marketing isn't like promotion where you're driving a particular bunch of sales on a particular book, but you should be seeing some general turnover of sales if your marketing's in the right place.
So the first question I'd like to put to you is: which of these types of person are you? Are you somebody who just doesn't know how — you've just begun, you haven't started marketing, you just published your book or maybe you published it five years ago but never got going because you didn't know what to do? You lack the information. You don't understand your genre, categories, the reader journey. Or are you somebody who does know it, you've done research, maybe taken courses, but you're overwhelmed or indecisive and you just can't get going? Or maybe you did have momentum and results, but now it's stalled — you didn't integrate your marketing into your creative routine and you're finding it hard to restart? Those three are all versions of not doing any marketing at all.
Then there are those who are doing some marketing but it's not going all that well. The stop-starters who go for a while and then stop. Those who jump from tactic to tactic but never settle and find the right one. Those using the wrong tactics — tactics that aren't right for their book. We're seeing that in the community because there's been a very vocal movement around volume sales, writing a lot of books, and authors who are different to that are using volume marketing tactics for a book that is a completely different kind of book. It doesn't have the volume, it's not going to work. Then there's the wrong target — you're speaking to the wrong niche and while you're doing everything right, you're not actually reaching the right readers. Or underdeveloped marketing — you've got your mailing list in place, done all the things people told you to do, but the execution isn't persuasive enough, the voice isn't there, whatever it is that makes a reader decide to part with their money and their precious time isn't in your marketing. And finally, doing too much — too many channels, no focus, results are thin.
Just make a note of which one you are. The first part of fixing something is seeing where you are.
Three Types of Publisher: Which One Are You?
Let's look a little more closely at the kind of publisher you are. If you've read Creative Self-Publishing, you'll have come across this division of authors into three different types of publisher. We've seen over the years that authors fall into one of these three categories.
The engagement publisher really likes to be around people, to deal with people. They're very much about community and they do well with events. They often operate through crowdfunding for their launches and they're seen a lot on social media. Their dream would be to have readers who want them to customize the book. They love long chats with their readers and put a lot of time and effort into bringing the reader very close.
By contrast, the craft publisher is much more about the book. They still want readers, they're still interested in what attracts a reader, but their focus tends to be on the quality of the writing and publishing. Their joy is in creating beautiful objects and beautiful words — or very effective words in their genre if beauty isn't what marks their niche. Quality is really important, and they get more of a sense of reward from prestige and people valuing the book and hearing from readers about the effect it had. For the craft publisher, that's a higher value than sales, generally speaking. Their marketing tends not to be social media — they may have a presence, but they're not going to drive social media engagement in the way an engagement publisher will. They're going to be looking at editorial reviews, reviews in journals and magazines and newspapers. They'll want to be part of book festivals, on panels talking about their work and motivations. Their marketing will largely be done through pitching other literary influencers — people who are going to love their book and take it to the readers who will most value it.
Then we have volume publishing. This is the one that the indie author community has, until very recently, almost exclusively been talking about out loud. At ALLi we've always thought about three different types of publisher, but in the community the voices around volume publishing have been very loud — largely, I think, because of the role Amazon plays in the marketplace. But shifting a lot of books through Amazon is not necessarily right for you and your publishing. If you are a volume publisher, though, that's great. You'll be focused on algorithm marketing, understanding what makes your book visible on Amazon and the other retailer platforms, using advertising — retailer online advertising, click advertising on social media or on Amazon. You'll be looking at promotions and you'll have automated processes. You write a lot of books. It's volume publishing, so you're on a rapid release schedule.
Now, because of the new technologies, volume publishing is being affected by AI more than craft publishing or engagement publishing right now. No human being can keep pace with AI. So the rapid release model — getting the benefit of having more books — is being challenged a little by AI. Our survey does show that the more books you have, the more income you get. That's natural, that's obvious — you've got more to sell, so you're multiplying your sales. But the idea that more books faster equals better results is being challenged.
I'd like you to take a moment to think about what kind of publisher you are. Are you an engagement publisher? A craft publisher? A volume publisher? Or have you never thought about this and need more time to work it out? Please pop into the chat and share — it helps me get a sense of who's in the room and what kinds of things we need to be talking about.
Okay, I'm seeing responses. Engagement, craft and engagement mixed, never really tried volume, craft focus of marketing. Really interesting. Tracy says mix of craft and engagement — please choose. Lean into one or the other. We all do a bit of all of it: we all want to write more books, publish as well as we possibly can, and engage with our readers to some degree. But understanding which one you primarily are and leaning into that means you're going to choose very different types of marketing. Kerry says she's a hybrid and will touch on a little of each. It will be good to think about which you are more. Andrea says she doesn't fit any of them entirely — and nobody does. But this is a major decision. The kind of publisher you are will decide the kind of marketing you do.
There are things we all do — we all need an email list or a way of contacting our readers, we all ideally have a website with a transactional facility so that if a reader arrives, they can actually purchase a book. But knowing the crossover for everybody is the point. Choose the one that is likely to give you most joy.
Do you love to hop on social media and talk to people and engage with them about your book? I'm not talking about being on social media with your family or friends, I'm not talking about connecting with other writers — I'm talking about using social media well as a way to present your writing to readers and get them to actually buy it. There is a skill to that. Some authors do it extremely well and others don't. I don't. It does not give me joy because I never feel really comfortable in that situation.
If you're going down the craft publisher route, you need to be thinking about entering for awards, getting reviews, exposing yourself to the kinds of people who can bring your book to others. Does that sound like a joyful journey for you? Janet says she'd love to be more craft-focused but doesn't know how to get reviews and awards as an indie — and yet there are ways. Lots of ways, and lots of indies are doing it. Not knowing how to do something is something we can always address. But going against the grain of the kind of person and publisher you are is going to lead you into a marketing mess.
I'm seeing some resistance in the chat, which is expected — people tend to hedge the exercise by saying they're a bit of everything. But the exercise is: if you had a gun to your head and had to choose one, which would it be? Estee Livingston says a key is to realize which type you are based on your instincts versus what your genre calls for. She says her natural liking is craft but she writes technical thrillers, which is a genre that will be drawn towards engagement like Comic-Con. That's a really good example. If you know your natural liking is craft, that doesn't mean you don't go to Comic-Con. It means you realize craft is your number one, and when you go to Comic-Con your concentration is on your craft outshining others. It doesn't mean you don't do the others — it means you really lean into the one you love to do.
Andrea says she doesn't care about prestige or reviews, loves quality writing and publishing, dislikes social media intensely, and loves automating processes and breaking things down into systems. From a marketing perspective, that sounds like a volume publisher to me. She writes a series, releases one after another while writing the next. That's the key — from a marketing perspective, volume-driven. That doesn't mean you don't care about craft. But how she's described herself makes her sound like a volume publisher. Very often the craft publisher writes standalones; series writers often are volume or engagement publishers.
Tony says he's bad at all of them. Okay, pick one. Choose one and get good at it. If you don't know which you are, you will be bad at all of them. Heather says failing to win awards doesn't sound like much fun. True, but awards are not the only thing. Awards, like every other aspect of publishing, have democratized enormously over the last ten years. There are awards that are right for your book, and understanding which ones those are — we're not talking about entering for the Booker Prize if you're writing your first or second novel — but understanding how a craft publisher engages readers.
Gloria says she's new, still figuring this out, but she thinks it explains why some authors' marketing advice resonates with her and others don't land — based on the type. She thinks she's engagement. That's a great way to decide which you are. What's resonating with you? When you hear something and think ‘oh, that sounds like a good idea,' or you see another author in your genre doing something and think ‘I'd like to do a version of that' — those things give you clues about which type you are.
Questions and Answers
I've barely touched on one tiny piece of all of this. We go into it in much more detail in the book. For now, I'd like to take some of your questions specifically about your own marketing problems. We have about 10 to 15 minutes.
Someone asks: I'm struggling to find awards my book is eligible for. Does ALLi have a database of self-publishing-friendly awards? Of course we do. It's in the Self-Publishing Advice centre at selfpublishingadvice.org — Kay has already put the link in the chat. The awards page is run by the team and also by Hannah Jacobson from Book Award Pro, who some of you may know. Book Award Pro is an ALLi partner member, which means they've been vetted by our watchdog desk. Awards can be so tricky, and I'm sure a number of you have those awful spam emails telling you that you won an award and just sign up here. Email spam around awards is a huge problem at the moment. So take a look at that page and if you have follow-on questions we can look at those.
Larry asks: what if you're crushingly shy and find it hard to engage with people in selling your words? Great question. We do address this in the marketing book. The first section is all about mindset and getting your head into the right place. Very often craft publishers are particularly shy and don't like to say ‘please buy my book.' Engagement publishers tend to handle it with aplomb, and volume publishers are much more focused on the algorithm than on going out there to talk to people. There are ways of getting your book out there while remaining in your comfort zone. Take a look at the book and you'll see lots of different options. Heather kindly points out that Book Award Pro has a free level — the free level will tell you good awards for you to enter for your niche and sub-niche. The paid level will actually enter you and pick out the right awards and make it happen.
Tony asks: do you recommend a type of website, who best to work with? There are lots of website services springing up. I still feel very strongly that you should keep your author website independent. For me, WordPress is by far the best — it's a little bit of a learning curve, but once you've learned it you have it forever and it's yours. The problem with having your website connected to a service is that if that service goes out of business, your website goes with it. Another very good option for transactional capability is a Shopify store, which can be built out to look like a website or integrated with your WordPress. A lot of people who want to sell direct are going down that route. Jeffrey adds that owning your domain is also important for having a professional-looking email address — completely agree. Gmail addresses are increasingly associated with spam, and a lot of people will just delete something from an unrecognized Gmail address. Having your own website and a related email address tells people you are a real person, which is one of the biggest concerns readers have right now.
One of the big trends at the moment is video marketing, precisely for that reason. We can't hide on video — you see the whole person, you hear their voice, you see all of that. People look for that to know they're not in the presence of something that is effectively an AI. People hate being fooled by AI. So the more human, authentic, real, and you that you can be, the better.
Helen asks: how long should I give before assessing if my strategy is working? Currently I'm writing articles for magazines and journals. I give everything a quarter. It might take one quarter to prep, a quarter to actually put it out there, and then maybe a quarter or a month after that to assess: did it work, why didn't it work, what might improve it? I use a method some of you will be familiar with from my workshops — wearing different hats, the maker, the manager, and the marketeer. The marketeer tries a particular strategy for a quarter and the maker supports that by making what's needed. Each time you decide to do something in your marketing, you need to give it the time it actually takes. Marketing requires attention and you need to allocate time in your working week for actually engaging with it. For writing for magazines and journals, which can be very slow to reply, you might want to give it two quarters if you're seeing some kind of bite. But if you're getting absolutely nothing, it might be time to either change who you're approaching or change the strategy entirely.
Carol says: having books across genres is so difficult. Absolutely right. I write across the three macro genres — fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Terrible, terrible idea. Do not do that if you can avoid it at all. The best thing from a publishing perspective is to get into your lane and stay there and get better and better at doing it. That's what trade publishers want you to do, and there's a reason for that — it's what the reader wants. They want to know that if they read a book by so-and-so, this is what they're going to get. Genre that crosses over is difficult, and what you have to do is segment — divide up and have a whole strategy and machine behind each type of book. You might even find you're an engagement publisher for one type of book and a craft publisher for another. It just makes more time, more effort, more friction. Not recommended, but some of us just can't help it.
Gary asks: if you're marketing an ebook series, is it worthwhile to combine a group of titles and market them as one? Absolutely. I think you're talking about bundling — a tried and tested route to sell more books. How you write a series matters in that regard. Is it the kind of series you have to read from one to seven in order? Or can you pick up book six and still have a satisfying experience? You'll market differently depending on that. And definitely each book should show all of the series at the end so readers can go and purchase the next one or a previous one.
This is also a good place to mention direct-to-reader. A shift we're seeing in the community is using retailers as discovery rather than as the end destination. With a series, an author might put the first book on Amazon or across wide retailers to be discovered, but to get books two, three, or four, readers have to come over to the author's own website. Using retailers not as retailer-first, but as discovery, with direct first being the primary goal.
Biggest mistake an indie publisher makes at the beginning? I'll ask those of you who have moved on and are marketing reasonably well to drop your answers in the chat. My biggest mistake was not engaging deeply or strongly enough with the marketing. When I came into self-publishing it was enough to put a good ebook up — we didn't have the oversupply in the market that we have now. Relatively easy. Then that all changed. We hit an oversupply of books in the marketplace since at least 2016. When I hit that point I had to realize: what kind of publisher am I? What do I like to do, what don't I like to do? What's my sub-genre? I had vague ideas but hadn't engaged enough and hadn't really got a marketing plan. So I would say the biggest mistake people make at the beginning is not having a plan that fits into their weekly or monthly rhythm as a creative.
Closing and Resources
I can't believe an hour is over. Before I leave you, just a quick word on how ALLi helps our authors with marketing from an advice perspective. We have guidebooks — like the Reach More Readers guide I've been discussing today. We have webinars, a podcast and blog at selfpublishingadvice.org. We list and vet marketing services, so if you're pondering a service and you're not sure, check in with us. We have SelfPubConnect — here at this conference, but also a members-only space that's available 24/7 where you can hop into the member forum anytime. We also do things that help highlight our authors, including the new indie author bookstore that we're very excited about, where we'll be showcasing members' books and bringing in influencers and different people to see the great wealth of books our members are producing. And we have our members showcase, which we've had for many years now.
Don't be alone. Don't stay in the place of not knowing what to do next. The team, our advisors and expert board are all there for you. So don't act as if you're on your own when you're not.
The book: Reach More Readers. If you go to selfpublishingstore.com, it's 50% off until the conference closes on Tuesday — normally $9.99 US, currently $4.99. For ALLi members it's already free in the member zone. As ALLi members you receive all our books in ebook format free of charge as part of your membership. For those who aren't members, selfpublishingstore.com and 50% off until Tuesday.
That's it — we're out of time. Thank you so much for attending and being here, being part of SelfPubCon. Let us know how we're doing, let us know what else you'd like us to be doing for you. We're here to help. We are the self-publishing ally — that's our aim. You're not alone, so don't act as if you are. Alrighty. Thanks for being here. Take care and happy writing and publishing. Talk soon. Bye-bye.
