when I self-published my first book fires of the dead I didn't really understand anything about book marketing and as a result it wasn't so surprising to think that it didn't really sell in any great quantities but three years on from that book coming out I feel like I have really understood a lot more about what it takes to actually make a book sell and I've seen this pay off with my most recent book Siege of treblem which sold over 3 000 copies in the first week and it's now bringing in several hundred dollars in monthly
royalties on top of the original advance that my publisher choice of games paid me so in this video I'll be covering the six most important book marketing tips that I have learned over the years the first piece of advice I have is to follow what I call the momento rule so Memento one of my favorite movies I can't believe I only watched it for the first time this year basically it's about this guy who has no ability to form new short-term memories he is on this quest to kind of hunt down his wife's killer but
he can't form new memories so what he has to do is he has to kind of like tattoo notes on his body he has to take polaroid pictures and write notes on those and kind of basically like set himself down on this course to catch his wife's killer and I think that's a really cool way to think about book marketing the approach that I have found best is when I actually kind of start doing the marketing before I even begin writing a book so in my case with Siege of Travelin that was a case of
like okay what is a type of story that I know readers are going to really respond to and they're going to really enjoy that I will also really enjoy writing myself you kind of have to find this Venn diagram intersection of these two different things because if you just focus on what you want to write then you might write something you really enjoy which is great but it might not sell instead I found it's really cool to actually try to find an intersection between something I would really find fulfilling to write and something that other
people are going to find really interesting to read so in the case of sage of treblin which is an interactive novel but still I think has a lot of similar principles to regular books I wanted to write a sage story I'm very interested in kind of the psychology of what it's like to you know be holed up in this walled City while an enemy Army assails you from outside and how do you kind of deal with that as a as a leader of this city but I also knew that that kind of classic Epic Fantasy
setting and that sort of Trope if you'd like would be something that a lot of readers and players of choice of games and stories would find quite enjoyable to go through and with the current book that I'm working on Kingdom of Dragons I know that sort of classic Epic Fantasy with dragon Riders and Magic schools and all that sort of good stuff is a very popular genre has been for many decades and hopefully will be for many decades to come and it's also something that I've never really explored before I've never written about so the
whole idea behind this sort of memento rule is that you sort of scout the terrain out in front of you you get your marketing approach sorted before you start writing the book so in the case of Kingdom of Dragons which is what I'm working on right now I sort of already had an idea of the title the cover and I even wrote the whole blurb before I started writing the actual book and what that means is that once you've got that marketing approach locked in and sorted you're kind of knowing where your destination is on
the other side of you know the terrain you're Crossing and then you can just focus on covering that terrain you can just focus on the writing knowing that when you finally reach the end of your many drafts you will have reached a destination that is hopefully going to be filled with readers you're going to reach a destination where not only did you write a cool story but oh thanks to this planning that my earlier self did that I sort of forgot about now I've set myself up to hopefully sell quite a lot of books and
that brings me to kind of the second piece of advice here which is to really know your genre in his classic writing advice book on writing Stephen King basically talks about how there's only really two things you need to do as a writer you need to to ride a lot and you need to read a lot and I think that's good advice but I think it's worth unpacking a bit what he means by read a lot the way that I've sort of interpreted and kind of learned from that over the years is that you really
need to understand and deeply be reading within your genre so if you just read like romance novels all the time that maybe won't suit you to be the best thriller writer for example but if you are a thriller writer and you love Thrillers and you're reading them all the time you probably will actually be a pretty good thriller writer because you understand that genre you understand what readers like because you are one of those readers you're not having to sort of guess or you know fake it within that genre and I think that within fantasy
writing that same thing is very present as well you've got to read a lot of fantasy books and it's only you know in recent years that I feel like I've sort of read enough fantasy books read different self-published fantasy books to understand what sort of genres are out there and what readers are wanting and then where my own kind of interests lie within that this is not something that I had with my first couple of books fires of the Dead was sort of like oh yeah it's a bit Joe abercrombie-esque I guess in the sense
it's really Grim dark and you know lots of characters die and that sort of thing and it's also sort of a bit Brown and sanderson-esque because you know there's this cool magic system where people basically you know drop their blood into a fire to link themselves to that flame and then they can shoot fires out of their hands by you know transferring Flames from that link kind of through to them and that on the surface sounds like I know who my story is for and I know what the genre is but then I ended up
writing it as a novella like 20 000 words long takes you maybe two hours to read which I thought was really cool because it meant that I didn't have to like spend years and years working on this project and also readers could just pick it up and read it in you know a lunch break potentially but from the sense of trying to Market this book that's not really a kind of genre that is super marketable within Epic Fantasy people want Epic Fantasy to be epic they want it to be long they want it to be
fully immersive and to be this experience that they're sort of in for you know many many days and weeks and sometimes even months so as I kind of progressed in my old career I sort of understood okay I need to be thinking about knowing what genre of fantasy my story is in in other words knowing who this story is for because if you can't really concretely say this is a story for these type of readers it's going to be very hard for you to Market your book if you just say that your book is for
everyone then it's probably for no one another big mistake that I made early on with my publishing career was I ignored the critical three what is a critical three well the way I kind of think about it is that there are hundreds of different marketing activities you can do to try to sell your book you could go on podcasts you could write guest posts on blogs you could just send out your book to as many reviewers as you possibly want you could run ads on Amazon or another advertising service there are all of these options
and it can be quite overwhelming and I've tried probably just about every single one of them but when it comes down to one of the most critical marketing activities that really move the needle and have the biggest outsized impact what I found over the years is that it's your cover is your book's title and is your books blurb and it makes sense because if you're thinking about it from the experience of a reader they might hear your title being said they might see the book cover I think that looks kind of cool that looks kind
of like a genre or a book that I'm interested in and then your blurb is the thing that is kind of having to make that Final sell and hopefully hooking them enough to be like yeah this looks great this has a sick cover this title sounds intriguing tapping into something I'm interested in and this blurb is really making me want to know what happens in the story and with my first book fires of the dead I didn't really get this and I did a horrible cover I just designed it myself um it was sort of
based on some of Joe abercrombie's covers because I really liked him as an author I still do I think he's amazing and I was like oh yeah this is sort of gritty like Abercrombie book I'm just going to copy what he did for best serve cold and yeah it wasn't a very good cover and what I learned from that is that no amount of you know advertising spend and all these other promotional activities is going to make up for a bad book cover and you're going to need to spend you know 10 times more dollars
on book advertising to compensate for having you know a bad cover it's far better to spend that money up front and create a really really good cover at the start and then the kind of impacts you see from that are so much more leveraged throughout this there's an author called Philip cuant Trail I hope I'm pronouncing his name right who basically talks about this with his series that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies on Amazon and he basically says that all the marketing I did for this was spending like several thousand dollars on these
beautiful covers which a glorious and that was basically it like the covers and the positioning you know with the title and the blurb instantly told readers that this is a classic Epic Fantasy adventure and therefore it really took off and it sold lots and lots of copies I think with cover design I now have a much better understanding of what it takes to actually create something that is compelling to read this because the important thing with your cover design is to remember this is ultimately a marketing asset first so you don't need to worry about
like cramming all the different characters on there and making them look as accurate as possible you know pretty much every successful fantasy book cover is going to have like some very distinct elements in it and kind of talking about cover design is a whole different thing to what I have the availability to talk about in this particular video but if you are interested in that I will link in the description down below to a podcast episode I did with Felix Ortiz who is probably like the most in demand Indie book cover designer within the fantasy
space at the moment and I'll also link down to a resource where I basically kind of go through my entire cover design process for my artist for the Thunder Heist and basically that resource just looks at like every single step in that so my initial email that I sent out to him the contract that I sent through to him how much I paid him all of that I'll talk about that a bit more at the end of the video as well the next tip is to build an audience so you know this YouTube channel that
you're watching my wizards warriors and words podcast which um wearing a chef or at the moment my email list which has I think like about a thousand six hundred readers on it at this stage all of this stuff makes it so much easier for me to launch Books now than it did when I was starting off and I think this is probably if you're just going to take one thing away from this video it's that you should try to start building up that audience now you know start that email list so you can start getting
people who are interested in your books get their emails so that you can tell them when your book is out so they can go and buy it and try to build up you know a bit of an audience and a bit of a platform for yourself within the Indie Community a really easy way to do this and we're sort of Lucky in this space that we have this option it's simply to just start like reviewing books by authors that you love and posting on a YouTube channel like this or on a podcast because what that's
going to do is it's something going to draw fans of those books to come in hopefully form some sort of connection with you and then when you eventually get around to you know hosting or publishing your own book rather you will hopefully have an audience of people who are kind of into the same things that you're into that will hopefully support you and I know this works because this is literally what I've done like back in 2018 I started up this show called the novel analyst podcast where I'd literally just analyze my favorite fantasy books
book key writing lessons out of it which really helped me as a writer but it also kind of started growing my I guess awareness within the fantasy reader area and then with Wizards worries and Words which I do with a couple of other great authors as well that has continued to kind of help me have a sort of I guess bit of a niche within the fantasy writing space and I know for a fact that that podcast has helped to sell a lot of my books and a lot of the other books from my co-hosts
and the other authors that come on there so the most important thing with this is that you really have to enjoy doing the audience building activity for its own sake if you are just creating this podcast just to sell books it's probably going to be very hard for you to sustain it and it's also going to be kind of obvious to people who are listening or watching people can really detect inauthenticity a mile away and the only reason I've been able to do that podcast for like over 120 episodes now even though it is difficult
at some times usually I have to record pretty late at night because of time differences the only only reason I've been able to sustain that is because I make sure that I'm doing the episodes about stuff that I'm genuinely interested in like just the other day I got to chat with Joe Abercrombie on the podcast which freaking blew my mind like this guy is one of my favorite authors of all time I've read probably 12 of his books and the fact that I got to chat to him on a podcast about writing it's awesome it's
like a win-win for everyone you know he gets to promote his books and sound smart and intelligent which he doesn't need help with because he is very smart and intelligent I get to chat to one of my favorite authors people readers like listening to that get to learn more about him and also like it kind of Associates me with this guy who's writing I aspire to be like so it probably helps sell a couple of books along the way fifth tip is to get reviews so ultimately humans are you know looking for kind of social
validation and social proof when they are buying products online which is what the majority of book purchases look like particularly if you're self-published and you can talk until the cows come home about how great your book is and how amazing your writing is and people are going to take that with a grain of salt because you're biased what they are going to take with more Authority is a review by someone else so what I would encourage is why once you have kind of finished your book you've locked it and you're kind of getting it ready
to be published I would kind of try to give yourself like a three month window even more if you can and basically in that window in the first couple of weeks of it just try to Hammer as many different reviewers as possible create a list of you know fantasy book reviewers who talk about books similar to yours and just reach out to them via email now it's very important that you do this in a nice way like you don't want to just be spamming these people multiple times just send one very short like very polite
email try to make it as personalized as possible so for example you might say like hey um you know I really liked your review of this book uh because the book that I'm publishing in a couple of months time has some very similar themes about this thing and that thing I was wondering if you would be interested in having a free review copy of my book in exchange for just leaving an honest review you know on the day at launches or the week before or whenever and if you're not interested and you too busy feel
free you don't have to respond totally fine with me it's really important that you give them that app because like I get hammered with book review Quest requests and like requests for people to come on my podcast all the time and I wouldn't even say it's a massive podcast but it's like really draining sometimes when you just have a lot of people reaching out with these asks so I would say that particularly if you're starting off and you don't really have too much of an audience try to aim for some smaller reviewers who don't get
as much like inbound attention and just be like super polite give them an out like don't put any pressure on them to respond or anything like that because counter-intuitively when you say you don't actually have to respond to me you'll probably get more responses because they can see that you're a mature person who values their time and really as a new author this is going to be a tremendously difficult and probably disheartening process when I was reaching out to get reviewers for Flyers of the Dead I probably sent out like 70 review requests to different
reviewers and I got maybe like five people who said yes um and like some of them were my friends so they probably felt obliged but as I have kind of progressed I've seen that with every subsequent book I've gotten more and more reviewers who've said yes and when I started reaching out to reviewers to get uh kind of reviews on Sage of treblin probably like every 9 out of 10 reviewers that I emailed they were like an instant yes and that just comes I think mostly from showing that you actually consistent in this thing that
you have a bit of a track record and also what really really helped coming back to my earlier point was that I had a bit of an audience from this YouTube channel from my podcast and actually I had one review I think it was bookbourne who said in her review video now if you're around the self-published community you'll know Jed hearn's name and I was sort of sitting there watching it going like I am that's that's news to me I wasn't expecting that at all but it just goes to show that if you are kind
of a consistent presence and you're giving something that's really beneficial to the fantasy community over the years you can actually build up a bit of a reputation that does help you in ways that you might not necessarily expect and then lastly the most difficult tip to kind of internalize but probably the most important one is to remember that this is a game of attrition you just have to keep going it's going to be hard when you're releasing that first book fires of the Dead was such a difficult experience to get like any exposure for it
because I was just starting from zero but you have to just keep going and in this sense I kind of feel a lot of parallels between riding and bouldering I published my first book around the end of 2019 and I started bouldering regularly at that same time as well and in both disciplines you just have to sort of keep showing up whether it's to your writing desk or to the gym day after day and you know really work on those small aggregate gains and it won't look like much at first but eventually as you progress
you'll find that like the writing is coming easier the marketing is coming easier the climbing is coming easier but it just comes from that consistent effort so the kind of short of that is that your first launch will probably suck and that's okay like my first launch sucked probably like most authors who talk to their first launch sucks unless they get really lucky but you just have to keep going and you have to remember that that first launch you're going to learn so many lessons from that and the next launch will most likely be bigger
and one after that'll be bigger as well and it's just kind of like exponential curve that goes up but the only way for it to kind of get that growth is you to keep showing up to keep launching and to keep learning from your previous mistakes and try and do it better next time so in the middle of the video I mentioned a resource to help you with your book cover design um basically what this is is this is a PDF that I put together showing my complete email correspondence with my artist for the cover
of the Thunder Heist which really happy with the cover it's super nice and basically I just put together a PDF that shows like my initial Outreach email and then all the other emails as we went through that process so you know basically if you're wondering like how do I actually reach out to a cover designer to get a cover done with my book what should my contract say with them like how much should I be paying them like what do I do if I'm not happy you with the work that they're sending through and I
want them to do changes all of that is covered in this PDF I'll link to it down below and you can check it out and yeah I hope it's useful I'll see you in the next video cheers [Music] [Music]
