No Bull Self-Promotion for Indie Authors (preview)

Ah, the life of an indie author! You spend countless hours writing, researching, revising, self-editing, gathering feedback from willing participants, seeking out professional services, and then finally... your book is published!

But now what?

You watch your sales like a hawk in anticipation, wondering how many copies you might sell on the first day, hoping and praying and following a number of superstitions to the letter to encourage the people of the universe to buy and enjoy your book....

And the next day, you’ve sold a measly 21 copies. Oh, lord.

There are a lot of book marketing “gurus” out there, all with tips and tricks and habits that worked for them but may or may not work for you. For example, you wouldn’t use the same strategies to market a children’s book that you would use to market poetry or a horror novel, right?

There is an overwhelming amount of information out there about marketing, all of which acted as a sort of invisible barrier between me and even trying to market my books. Why? Because each and every niche strategy, marketing plan, or individual marketing tactic makes promises about what it can do without telling you exactly how to do it or what exact tools to use so you don’t wind up spending $2,000 or more. Oftentimes experts in the field will promise the world and give away “free” training just to upsell you to buy their coaching sessions without any actual business guarantees. These are often promises that people will make to sell you their book or product, but then you try to use their strategies and it just doesn’t work as well for you or for your book as an indie author.

And that sucks. Because now you’re out the money you spent on the book or class, the time you spent reading/taking it and taking notes, and the time you spent testing whatever strategies were presented to see if they would actually work. That is IF the how-to was included, which it often is not.

Yea, that doesn’t sound like fun to me, either. It could mean weeks or even months of your time invested with minimal results.

So what do you need to do in order to reach the best marketing results?

I have no idea. And neither does anyone else. And anyone who claims to know may have developed a strategy that works for them but is faced with the opposition of about a million other experts, specialists, gurus, and marketers who have their own strategies, their own systems, and their own tools.

Once I realized that, my invisible barrier started breaking down and I gathered the courage to just start trying things. I’m still trying things. And the fact is I will probably continue to try things for years to come, but that doesn’t help anyone else NOW, namely YOU!

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Like what you've read so far? Stay tuned for more excerpts and tips on marketing! For more info, please visit my other website: www.NoBullSelfPublishing.com.