Most book marketing advice is written by people who have never marketed a book.
Marketing gurus who decided book marketing was a niche worth dominating. Bloggers repeating advice from other bloggers who repeated it from somebody else. Consultants who have never published anything and somehow believe they’re qualified to tell you how to sell yours.
Most book marketing advice is written by people who have never marketed a book.
I’m not a marketing guru. I’m an author who worked out how to market books by doing it badly until I got better at it. Over a decade in the indie trenches, books across multiple genres, thousands of dollars in ads, email lists built, launches that worked and launches that flopped spectacularly. In 2013 I quit my job running computer operations for a major national retailer, packed up, and moved to Florida, having decided I was going to be a professional writer. I had no idea what I was doing.
My first book was on cybersecurity. I published it, told a few people, and waited. It sold maybe a dozen copies. The book was fine. The waiting was the problem.
Sell Your Books is the book I wish somebody had handed me that year, and I’m prouder of how blunt it is than of any single tactic in it.
How did Richard Lowe first get a self-published book selling?
I stopped waiting and went to where the readers already were.
I had a cybersecurity book. LinkedIn had an audience of professionals who worried about cybersecurity every working day. Those two facts had been sitting next to each other the whole time and I hadn’t connected them. The book didn’t get better. Its distribution did.
The eBay book worked the same way and did five thousand copies on the same principle. Find the readers. Go where they are. Make it easy for them to find the book. That’s the thing almost nobody does, because it requires admitting that finishing the manuscript was only the beginning.
The book on this: Sell Your Books is thirty-six chapters on marketing as an indie author, from covers and descriptions through advertising, platform decisions, and revenue beyond retail.
What’s the Wall of Marketing?
The moment you realize writing the book was the easy part. You finished it. Maybe it took six months, maybe three years, maybe it came out in stolen hours between a day job, your children’s soccer games, and trying to remember what sleep felt like. You typed the end, revised until your eyes bled, hired an editor, sweated over the cover. Then you have to get strangers to read it. People who have never heard of you, who don’t care that you poured yourself into eighty thousand words, and who have seventeen thousand other books available instead.
That’s where most authors freeze, burn out, or give up. Build it and they’ll come is a lie told by people who have never published anything. Being a good writer and being good at marketing are entirely different skills, and you only signed up for one of them.
I hate what that wall does to good writers. A book that deserved readers ends up buried on page forty of its category, and the author decides they weren’t talented enough, when the writing was never what failed.
Why is book marketing advice so blunt?
Because the indie space is drowning in encouragement and short of accuracy. Authors get told to write more books as though that were a marketing strategy. To build a platform, with no explanation of what that means or how to do it. That success is around the corner if they follow one weird trick. Marketing is work. It’s running ads, writing descriptions, building lists, reading data, testing, failing, adjusting and going again. It’s boring, repetitive and necessary if you want money from your books. Many fail. Most books don’t sell. That’s the actual situation and softening it would waste the reader’s time.
The authors who succeed are willing to do the work everybody else won’t do, spend money they’re frightened to spend, and continue when they want to stop.
What does Sell Your Books promise?
Less than most books in this category, deliberately. It won’t make you a bestseller, because no book can do that. It isn’t promising easy, or overnight, or ten thousand dollars a month within six months.
What it promises is that if you implement the strategies consistently you’ll sell more books than you’re selling now, build an audience, make more money, and have a real shot at turning writing into a career. Only if you do the work. That qualifier is the operative clause.
Why does Sell Your Books have a chapter on marketing with ADHD?
Because almost every marketing plan assumes an executive function some authors don’t have. The standard advice assumes you can sit down, make a plan, and execute it consistently for months. That you can track dozens of metrics. That you’ll remember to post three times a week. That you have the executive function of a corporate project manager. If you have ADHD, that’s nonsense. You can’t do consistent, because your brain doesn’t work that way. You hyperfocus on something for three weeks and then forget it exists. You start fifteen projects and finish two. You have excellent ideas at two in the morning that are gone by breakfast. So the chapter is about building a marketing approach that survives it. That’s a different problem, and nobody in this category has written about it.
Where should a reader start in Sell Your Books?
Not at chapter one, unless chapter one is where they are. Thirty-six chapters is a lot to hand somebody, so the front of the book routes you. Publishing your first book means Part One, then chapters seventeen, eighteen and nineteen before you upload anything anywhere, because wide against Kindle Unlimited, IngramSpark and ISBNs are decisions that follow you permanently. Published one or two books that aren’t selling? Covers and descriptions first, then the chapter on what to do when a book simply won’t sell.
Launching within ninety days? Part One for strategy, then cover, description, launch team and launch event, with the advertising and reviews chapters alongside. That routing exists because the most common failure with a book this size is reading none of it.
| Your situation | Start with |
|---|---|
| Publishing your first book | Part One, then chapters seventeen to nineteen before uploading anything |
| One or two books that aren’t selling | Covers and descriptions, then what to do when a book won’t sell |
| Launching within ninety days | Part One, then cover, description, launch team and launch event, plus advertising and reviews |
| Marketing with ADHD | The chapter on a marketing approach that survives it |
| No marketing budget | The small five-minute tasks, starting with your email signature |
| Basics already working | Audiobooks, selling direct, special editions and Kickstarter |
| A title that won’t find its audience | When to stop marketing it and write the next one |
Which small book marketing tasks add up?
The tasks authors skip because they look too minor to matter.
Most advice concentrates on the large moves. Run ads. Build the list. Do a podcast tour. Write more books. Those matter and they move the numbers.
Underneath them are dozens of things that take five minutes, cost nothing, and compound like interest. Individually none of them will make anybody a bestseller. Together they build a layer of visibility that makes everything else work better.
I’m fond of this chapter because it respects the author with no budget. Somebody told that author marketing means spending money they don’t have, they believed it, and they did nothing at all. Five minutes on an email signature is a real place to start, and far too few authors ever hear that. A reader who finds your book through your email signature is still a reader. That’s the whole argument and it’s why the chapter exists.
Where can you sell books besides retail?
The revenue most authors never build. Audiobooks, including production through ACX, AI narration, and going wide with them. Selling directly from your own store, with the delivery mechanics and how to drive traffic to it, and the real threshold underneath that. That’s at least five books and an email list before direct sales makes economic sense.
Then special editions and Kickstarter, and the promotional tools that shift numbers.
Those chapters are placed last deliberately. They’re what you build once the basics are working, and starting there’s a common and expensive mistake.
When should you stop marketing a book?
That’s a chapter, and it’s the one most marketing books would never include. Sometimes the correct decision is accepting that this title won’t find its audience and putting the effort into the next one instead.
A book of marketing tactics that never admits the possibility is telling readers that every failure is theirs. Some books don’t sell because they were the wrong book, and knowing when you’re in that situation saves months.
My take
Books that get published and then left alone sell about a dozen copies. Mine did. Use the routing at the front of this one and read the chapters that match where you are, because reading none of it is the usual failure. Then do the five-minute tasks everybody skips, starting with your email signature. None of them will make you a bestseller. Together they make everything else work better.
What does Sell Your Books cover?
Thirty-six chapters in four parts, and the length is the point. Strategy first. What you’re building, how the game works, who your reader is when it isn’t everyone, platform, pricing and positioning. Then tactics. Covers, descriptions, launch teams, launch parties, reviews and surviving them, social media that doesn’t suck, Amazon advertising, newsletters, podcast tours, speaking. Then the platform decisions, including wide against Kindle Unlimited, IngramSpark, ISBNs, libraries and bookstores.
Then the situations nobody writes about. Marketing with ADHD. What to do with a portfolio of many books. What to do when a book simply won’t sell. When to stop marketing this one and write the next instead. And revenue beyond the obvious. Audiobooks, selling direct, special editions and Kickstarter, promotional tools, with a step-by-step appendix on setting up direct sales through print fulfilment and watermarked ebook delivery.
The book is long on purpose and I’m not sorry about it. Authors have been fed short, cheerful answers for years by people who never had to move a single copy, and the result is a lot of good books nobody bought. If thirty-six chapters of work is what it takes to change that, I’d much sooner hand writers the whole job than one more trick.
Most book marketing advice is written by people who never marketed a book. Sell Your Books is what I learned from over a decade in the indie trenches, without the hype.
