Orna Ross, director of the Alliance of Independent Authors, introduces ALLi’s new guidebook, Sell More Books, now available for pre-order. The book focuses on practical, sustainable book promotion and challenges the idea that promotion is only for loud authors with big budgets. Ross explains how authors of all styles and temperaments can design promotional strategies that suit their work, their readers, and their energy. From direct sales and crowdfunding to newer AI-assisted tools, she looks at what’s changing in book promotion and why, even in an AI-driven landscape, human connection remains central.
Listen to the Podcast: ‘Sell More Books’: Sneak Peek and Pre-Order with Orna Ross
Show Notes
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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. It's me, Orna Ross, Director of the Alliance of Independent Authors, and this is our marketing stream. I'm here today to tell you about the latest ALLi guidebook, which is called Sell More Books.
If you're a regular listener, you'll remember that at the end of last year we published a marketing guide called Reach More Readers. That book is about laying the proper foundations for a marketing setup in your publishing business — the real-life things that really matter: your promise to the reader, building your author platform, looking at all the different aspects of marketing and how to set them up.
So why this new book, Sell More Books? This one is all about book promotion. At ALLi we split the two. Reach More Readers lays the groundwork for marketing. Sell More Books is about promotion, and the difference between those two is important. Marketing is long-term and ongoing — it keeps happening whether you're actively measuring it or not, working for you in the background through systems like your reader magnet and your discoverability journey. Promotion is time-based: it has a start and a finish date, it's focused on a particular book usually, and it's very measurable. You have a clear goal and you know whether you've reached it or not.
Sell More Books will be available soon — it's with the editor and going into indexing, and in a few weeks the print edition will be on sale. It is already on pre-order, half price, at selfpublishingstore.com. Today I'm going to talk through the introduction to that book and take a look at what has changed in book promotion in recent years.
The Changing Promo Landscape
The promo landscape is changing rapidly, shifting under our feet. It's much noisier, much more open, AI is very much in there — and all of that can make authors feel like it's too much for them. I want to say first that that's not a logical or necessary response, and it's not the response we would encourage you to have. I'm hoping the introduction to this book will change your mind a little.
On the plus side — and as authors we do tend to worry, and we worry each other — it's really important to say that indies have more ways to sell and reach readers than ever before. More now than just a few years ago, and infinitely more than when I started out as an author. We can sell wide, sell direct, sell in bundles and boxes and series. We can run launches that are full events, crowdfunders and Kickstarters. We can partner with other authors, use audio and video, run live sessions and reader groups, and hand-sell in person. These are all available to us, and we have very good tools to do them.
That's not to say you should do them all. The first thing to say is that you need to choose. Even when it comes to promotion, it's not scatter-gun. It's not a matter of running Amazon ads and setting up email marketing and going to your local market on a Saturday. You really need to get selective. The same things we talked about in Reach More Readers — truly understanding yourself as an author and understanding your particular readers, and creating a bridge between the two — you're building on all of that. You don't suddenly start firing off in all directions when you get to the promotion stage.
Promotion That Fits You
The other important thing to say is that even when it comes to book promotion — which can be a lot more targeted, managerial, and commercially driven than the general marketing ideas in Reach More Readers — it's important as we head into 2026 and beyond, with everything being so AI-powered, that we understand readers are not necessarily looking for more and faster from us. They're looking for depth, meaning, and connection.
That's easiest for those who use the creator business model of direct sales and multiple streams of income. We saw a big rise in that model in our latest author income survey relative to the one two years ago. Incomes are rising in the direct sales world, and things like signed copies, special editions, and subscriptions really ignite readers. Crowdfunding in particular gets to the heart of that — we've seen many of our members run very successful crowdfunding campaigns over the last year or two. The authors gaining traction right now are the ones who get personal and a bit quirky and creative.
Price is always a factor, but the old way in which indie authors were in a perpetual discount race — where pricing was our USP — is well and truly gone. Most authors running a good business know they have to invest in their promotion, and that if they price their books too low, they won't have the margin to do that.
I have had authors say to me: why bother promoting? I'm doing all this work on marketing, I have my reader magnet, my email list is growing slowly — why not just stick with marketing and skip the promotion? That is a valid choice if you're not trying to build a commercially successful publishing business. If you're happy to slowly build and focus mostly on the writing and your base marketing, that's a really valid decision. But if you want to grow your business and be a bigger publisher in two years than you are now, you do need to layer in the promotional work.
What happens is that a series reaches a tipping point and stops selling as well. Other people rise and your books become more invisible. Promotion is the act of keeping your books out there, investing time, attention, and energy to make sure they don't vanish into the great digital drift of invisible books. Marketing is like the steady flame, and promotion is like the bellows — for those who like fire metaphors, as I do. Your flame will burn without the bellows, but it will burn more fiercely if you add the promotion in.
There's an idea sometimes in the community that promotion is only for certain kinds of authors or certain kinds of book — the loud ones, the fast ones, the genre ones, the visible ones with big budgets, or those who like performative social media. When authors don't fit into that picture, they can feel awkward or exposed or even queasy, and conclude: promotion's not for me. That can be a mistake. I think the discomfort is probably not telling you that promotion is wrong — it's telling you that this particular style of promotion you're attempting is wrong for you. In Sell More Books, as in Reach More Readers, we explore what happens when you try to force yourself into a marketing or promotion identity that doesn't match you or your work.
The idea is that promotion can be quiet, elegant, conversational, even scholarly. It can definitely be playful and intimate — just you and the reader. It can be strongly seasonal if you find that promotion stirs you up too much to write deeply; you can build it around a yearly plan rather than having it happen all the time. It can be in physical bookstores, libraries, schools, and festivals, or it can be online through podcasts, ads, or direct sales.
What's in Sell More Books
Sell More Books is structured to take you from understanding promotion to designing a promo plan that suits your books and your temperament. It explores lots of different promotional approaches, helps you think about what assets you need to build, which partners you want to work with, and how to map out a plan you can follow.
After the introduction, which covers these various issues and questions, we start in chapter two with the prerequisites for book promotion — what you need to have gathered, what you need to know, and what you need to have in place. Chapter three then looks at designing your actual promotional campaign, covering your targeting, your budgeting — time as well as money.
Chapter four starts with the basics: the easiest entry point, which is promoting to your email list and growing your email list. That's the bridge between marketing and promotion. Building your list is an ongoing marketing activity, but each promotion you run will also help build it — every time someone buys a book from you, particularly if you're selling direct, you'll have their email address.
Chapter five is all around the creative business model — multiple streams of income, the different ways you can sell not just your books but other things beyond the book as well. That ends Part One.
Part Two sets up different promotional strategies depending on what kind of publisher you are. In Reach More Readers we spoke about three different kinds: the craft publisher, the engagement publisher, and the volume publisher. Now we look at promotional strategies that suit each of those. Chapter six covers literary influencers — bookstores, libraries, event organizers, review teams, critics. Chapter seven is a close look at your street team and ARC team — once you've begun selling some books you'll develop followers and fans, and the keenest of those can be organized into street teams and ARC teams who will go out and tell the world about your books. That's much better than you going out and telling the world yourself.
Chapter eight looks at author collaboration, because other writers are actually one of the strongest resources you have as an indie, and one that too many overlook. An author in a similar genre telling their readers how good your book is is a much better sell than you telling your own readers. Chapter nine is all around PR — traditional PR, mainstream media publicists, and marketing services. The chapter goes into whether they're right for you and how to get the best possible results, because there are very few services in the world that say: I have no idea if this is going to work, but I need you to pay me thousands of dollars to find out. If you're going to go the publicist or PR route, you need to be very clear about your desired outcome.
Chapter ten looks at in-person and physical events, and chapter eleven is the absolute opposite: promoting through algorithms. How the online bookstore algorithms work, how to nudge them, and how to understand whether they'll be your friend or your enemy before you set off on a promotion. Chapter twelve returns to direct sales and how it's different in that context — how you educate your readers about what you're doing and what you're trying to make happen. Then there's a section on ads on different platforms, including video ads, which are very active in the book space right now. BookTok has driven a lot of that, and one of the most recent trends is authors selling their books live on platforms while readers are actually buying during the live session — like a shopping channel, but for books and with the author selling directly to readers. That's a new trend for 2026.
Then we look at comparable authors and comp titles — how you organize around other authors in your genre, understand what they're doing, and see how you can learn from and work alongside them. Chapter fifteen is all about pricing, which has an important role in promotion — not just straight price promotions like the pre-order discount on Sell More Books right now, but understanding how price feeds into promotions more broadly. Chapter sixteen is for those who want to use social media in their promotions, covering what's happening in the social world right now and how to best take advantage of it.
Part Three: Putting It All Together
Part Three is about putting it all together — creating a promotion plan, looking at things like book tours, and then analyzing: did this promo work? Was it successful? What did I learn? What am I taking into the next promotion? And the final chapter, chapter twenty, ends with encouraging you to have a quarterly promo strategy.
So that is Sell More Books. We're delighted with the title and delighted that we managed to get it out so quickly behind Reach More Readers — the two were written and devised together. We'll probably bundle them at some point, but for now, if you're interested, go to selfpublishingstore.com and you can pre-order it there at half price. It will be out towards the end of February.
Thank you as always for listening, and I hope I've made you as excited about the book as we've been to put it together. Until next time, happy writing and happy publishing. Bye-bye.
