30 things I've learnt from 5 years being published: no 10 – the best marketing you can do for your book is write a new one
September 6 2023 marks 5 years since my first novel was released 😲
I’ve now published 6, and have 2 more under contract.
To celebrate, I’m sharing a new post about what I’ve learnt from being published EVERY DAY throughout the month. This post is part of that series!
Click here for the rest →
NB: the advice in this post is intended for authors with traditional publishing deals! If you are self-published then I appreciate that marketing is going to be a key part of the job 😊
I believe it was novelist Tracy Buchanan who first told me that the best marketing you can do for your book is to write another one. It really opened my eyes and made me reconsider the hours I spent on social media, desperately trying to break through the noise and drum up some kind of interest in my book.
The point is that your frontlist helps sell your backlist - ie, the more books you write, the more books you sell, and that there’s a snowball effect as you publish more. And it makes total sense!
I almost always see a spike in my older books whenever a new book is published. Not a dramatic one, but a small, yet significant, one.
I also often get messages from readers (who’ve read my latest book and enjoyed it) telling me that they’re off to seek out my older books next.
When you have a new book out it draws people’s attention not only to the book but also to you as an author, and people who may not yet have read any of your books will be exposed to you anew.
I think authors get very, very caught up in the idea that they must spend as much of their time marketing their books as they do writing them.
I’m not the greatest fan of it and so I’m probably going to be a bit biased here, but social media is basically the perfect distraction from writing. It’s quick, it’s fickle, it’s pretty meaningless, it’s chatter, it moves at a pace - it’s catnip for our attention.
It’s the literal opposite of writing, which is slow, lonely and requires deep and careful thought.
So it’s no wonder that we flock to social media like moths to a flame the second our focus on our writing begins to waver. The next thing we know, we’ve lost an hour of our working day to, well, getting annoyed with strangers or worked up about things we can’t change.
I really don’t believe, unless you are a major influencer with a gigantic online following, that social media makes much of an impact on the number of books you sell. However, that post is for another day so I’ll save my thoughts on that for later!
I want to focus on the positive message in this post.
Namely that it’s important not to put your writing aside in order to spend time marketing.
The writing should ALWAYS come first.
If you’re trying to build a long-term career as an author, you should always be writing something. Or thinking about writing something. Or brainstorming ideas, or looking to the future and what you’re going to write next.
The more books you publish, the more money you earn.
Keep bloody writing people - it’s the only thing you have any control over!
This strategy has been proven to work by some of the newer, highly successful digital publishers: they like their authors to publish two books a year for the first few years of their contracts, to ensure that there’s always a new book available for readers who have enjoyed their previous ones to pre-order.
Some of my friends who’ve published with this strategy have sold millions of ebooks. And they’re making a good living from it.
They literally have people waiting for the next book to come out and downloading them on the day of publication - the dream!
Traditional publishing works to a different (often much slower) model, but even so, the more books you write, the more chances there are of people finding your backlist.
Your backlist is one reason I think authors should weigh everything up carefully before they move publishers.
I have had the same publisher for my suspense novels since the start and I know they are actively interested in promoting my backlist as well as my frontlist in a way a new publisher wouldn’t be.
Obviously, there are tons of caveats to this - if you’ve had a terrible experience with your existing publisher, then writing a new book for them is unlikely to change things.
But if you’re reasonably happy with your publisher, don’t be afraid to bring up your backlist from time to time, and ask what they’re doing to continue promoting it.
My key point here is not to get caught up or bogged down by the feeling that you MUST be on social media talking about your book all the time. Especially if you hate it!
You are far better off spending that time working on a new book 😊
