Getting Ready to Promote Your Indie Book
Ready to launch your Christian indie book? Discover essential book marketing strategies to grow your readership and successfully promote your work.
Promotion is the hardest part of Indie publishing and the most time-consuming, but it is an absolutely necessary part of selling your book. In the old days (long ago and far away), if you got a book deal with a traditional publisher, the publisher did most of the promotion. Of course, you paid for it by receiving a small royalty rate, and the company charged off all the expenses before you saw a dime. But all that has changed. Even if you publish with a traditional Christian publisher, most of them require you to do your own promo, so you might as well learn this now. It is something that you cannot put off. You must do something every day if you want to sell books and get your readership built up. This article is about laying the groundwork so you can start promoting. So before launching your promo, you need to take some baby steps.
First, you need to have some basic items already put together.
Promo Photos
You will need at least two professionally done photos. You will use them on everything from the back of your book to guest spots on blogs. Get a formal photo and a more casual one so you have a choice depending on the situation.
Author Bios
You will need one or two author bios; I use a short one for my book covers and a longer one I use everywhere I promote, from KDP to Facebook and Goodreads, to advertisements and guesting on blogs and podcasts.
Here are two samples, a short bio and a longer one. Your bios will change as you publish more and get recognition for your work, so keep them updated.
Short Bio:
Best-selling author Patrick E. Craig has published with Harvest House Publishers, Harlequin Books and Elk Lake Publishers and his own imprints, P&J Publishing and Islands Publishing. He has written eleven novels, including the award-winning Islands series with Murray Pura and two best-selling Amish series, Apple Creek Dreams and The Paradise Chronicles. He also has written two novellas and an award-winning book of contemporary fiction short stories and two Young Adult paranormal books. His work is included in two anthologies of Amish stories. Patrick lives in Idaho with his wife, Judy.
Longer Bio:
Best-selling author Patrick E. Craig has published with Harvest House Publishers, Harlequin Books and Elk Lake Publishers and his own imprints, P&J Publishing and Islands Publishing. He has written fourteen novels, including the award-winning Islands series with Murray Pura and two best-selling Amish series, Apple Creek Dreams and The Paradise Chronicles. He also has written two novellas and an award-winning book of contemporary fiction short stories and two Young Adult paranormal books. His work is included in two anthologies of Amish stories.
His books have won many awards including The Chanticleer International Book Awards First Place and Finalist Awards in the Hemingway Division for 20th Century War Stories, A CIBA Semi-Finalist Award for Historical Fiction, A Finalist Award in the Word Guild of Canada Contemporary Short Stories Division and The Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Selah Award for Contemporary Anthology. Patrick lives in Idaho with his wife, Judy.
Book Blurb
This is the descriptive paragraph that tells your reader all about the book. It goes everywhere—from the back of your book to all your sales channels and proposals. Here is a sample:
Rachel Hershberger’s life in Paradise, Pennsylvania, is far from happy. Her papa struggles with a terrible event from the past, and his emotional instability has created an irreparable breach between them. Rachel’s one desire is to leave the Amish way of life and Paradise forever. Then she gets an answer to her prayers. Rachel discovers that the strange, key-shaped birthmark above her heart identifies her as the heir to a vast fortune left by her Englischer grandfather, Robert St. Clair. If Rachel will marry a suitable descendent of the St. Clair family, she will inherit an enormous sum of money. But Rachel does not know that behind the scenes is her long-dead grandfather’s sister-in-law, Augusta St. Clair, a vicious woman who will do anything to keep the fortune in her own hands. As the deceptions and intrigues of the St. Clair family bind her in their web, Rachel realizes she has made a terrible mistake. But has her change of heart come too late?
Spend a lot of time on your Book Blurb. Go on amazon and read the blurbs on best-selling books. Take a class from Alana Terry on writing blurbs. A good blurb is critical, since it is the first taste that the reader will get of what’s inside your book.
NOTE: Don’t use AI software to write any of your promotional materials or any part of your books. Amazon will ask you if you did and ding you because of the possibility of copyright infringement, since AI does not create but only copies out of a vast database.
Amazon Author Page
Before you sell your book on Amazon, it is important to set up an author page with all your books and extended bio and pictures. An Amazon Author page is your face on the world at Amazon. It is where people can learn more about you, see and buy your books, find your website and blog, see your social media presence—all in one spot on Amazon. The Author Page is crucial. If you are an Indie Author, 70% to 80% of all your sales will be through Amazon. This page helps you sell ALL your books by grouping them on one page. Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur, the creator of Publisher rocket software, has a great article on setting up your Author page.
Websites
A presence on the web is critical to an independent author. And that presence comes through your own website. You can build your own or you can hire a professional. If you want to build your own website, the easiest way to build is through the WordPress.com website. They have hundreds of free themes and the learning curve is not that hard. The problem is that most authors do not have the skill set to build their own, and… if you use the free website, they reserve the right to post ads on your pages. There are many other companies that offer free websites (Wix, GoDaddy, etc.) but the same thing applies—free means they get to post ads.
I am a web designer who has been working with WordPress software for many years, so I downloaded and learned the software. If you decide to acquire the WordPress software and learn how to use it, you will need to purchase a domain name and you will need an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who will host your site. Namecheap.com is the most reasonable domain name provider I have found and they also do very inexpensive hosting. However, managing a website can be time consuming, so if you just want to post and punt, use the free website. There are also hundreds of web-design companies that will help you for a reasonable fee—many of them offer hosting.
Social Media Presence
You must dedicate a certain amount of time every week to updating your social media accounts. But don’t get stuck there and don’t get overwhelmed. Let’s look at the kings of social media, Facebook and Twitter, and their usefulness in order of importance.
Most people think of Facebook as a place where you meet up with friends, share things about your life and fritter away your day. But Facebook can be one of the easiest and most profitable ways to get your books before a vast audience (millions).
Two Kinds of Facebook Pages
Facebook allows you to set up different kinds of pages. The most common is the personal or profile page. This is where you can talk about that wonderful cup of coffee you had this morning or complain about traffic on the way to work.
But there are also several business-oriented pages and you, as an author, will want to set up the page known as the Artist, Band or Public Figure page. This is where you will do most of your book promotion on Facebook.
The difference between the two pages is that you cannot “boost” a post on your profile page or put up a Facebook ad, but you can do an amazing amount of promotion on your fan/author page. I have five Facebook pages—Patrick E. Craig (my profile page), The Writing Home of Patrick E. Craig (my personal fan/author page), P&J Publishing and Islands Publishing (my fan/publishing company pages), and The Men of Amish Fiction, which promotes the books I write with other Amish authors. My “fan” or “author” pages are the ones I use to do extensive ads.
There are also literally hundreds of book promotion groups on Facebook you can join and post advertisements about your books.
From my experience, Facebook is the place where you can gain the most visibility for your Indie Books. When I post on Facebook, I use those same posts for Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Linked-In and my website.
Facebook Ads
I also have found that Facebook ads are the best investment for selling your books by far. They are one of the simplest and cheapest ways to promote your books. You can target your audience, set a budget, add graphics and links and set the length of the ad campaign. Your target audience can be worldwide or local. I send ads to potential readers in all the major English-speaking countries that are aimed at people who read my kind of fiction.
I recently took a course in click-testing your Facebook ads, and after completion I began a daily run of ads for my current mystery series and both my Amish series. Since November, I have quadrupled my book sales and am looking at a year where my Indie Book sales will be in the thousands, not the hundreds.
Here’s a link that will give you a basic understanding of how Facebook ads work:
https://www.Facebook.com/business/learn/Facebook-ads-basics
There are also some great courses available on setting up and running Facebook ads. Do your homework.
Other social media sites are X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads. They can be useful, but if you want to concentrate on one, focus on Facebook.
The Mailing List
The mailing list is the most effective promotional tool you have. Building your list gives you the best return for time invested. Along with your mailing list, you will need email blast software like MailChimp or Constant Contact.
I use MailChimp and have found it to be a very useful program that lets you build your list while creating beautiful HTML emails. The disclaimer here is that MailChimp is free until you get 2,000 subscribers. Then they charge a monthly fee based on the number of subscribers. The upside is that if you have over 2,000 subscribers, you should make enough money to pay the tab. I can send my MailChimp email blasts to my Facebook fan pages and boost them (turn them into ads), as well as my Twitter page and my LinkedIn page.
So, now it’s time to get to work.
All this preparatory work may seem daunting but thank goodness for the internet. There are thousands of helpful articles on setting up and running each of the items I have enumerated above. I have included a few links to help you, and the rest of the information is just a search away.
About the Author:
Best-selling author Patrick E. Craig has published with Harvest House Publishers, Harlequin Books and Elk Lake Publishers and his own imprints, P&J Publishing and Islands Publishing. He has written eleven novels, including the award-winning Islands series with Murray Pura and two best-selling Amish series, Apple Creek Dreams and The Paradise Chronicles. He also has written two novellas and an award-winning book of contemporary fiction short stories and two Young Adult paranormal books. He has published several lessons on setting your book up on the various Print-On-Demand sites: KDP, Draft2Digital, and Ingram Spark. If you would like more info, contact him at pec@patrickecraig.com.