Many indie authors are under the impression that you must have a lot of money to market your books. This just isn’t true. It is possible to effectively market your books on a small budget.
Think about what you can spend each month on marketing. Maybe you are just starting out and only have 2 mystery books published. You can only afford to spend $50/month on marketing. Believe it or not, you can still plan an effective marketing strategy with that budget
CraveBooks, for instance, has many options at varying price points. To get started, sign up for a free CraveBooks account. Here are some options with CraeBooks for your 2 mystery books and your $50 budget.
- A newsletter is a great way to reach readers who already enjoy your books. One idea is to sign up for a Mystery List Building Giveaway for $50. This would be all you could do for the month, but when it is over you will get at least 200 new emails to add to your list.
- Another option is to sign up for Daily Deal newsletters like Book Lemur ($32) and an Ebook Island (mystery specific $8) promo. Discounting your books (even if it’s only a dollar or two) for these promos can help with sales. Your book gets featured in these emails sent to readers who signed up to be on the lists. Then with the remaining $10, you can sign up for a Social Influencer campaign.
- Look at setting up a few social promotions. Sign up for the $20 CraveBooks social promo that gets you 1 tweet/day for 30 days and the $30 Contentmo promo that gets you a daily pin on Pinterest for 30 days.
These are just some of the paid options you find on the CraveBooks platform, but there are many variations on how to get the most out of your book marketing budget.
Free options can also be a great addition to add to what you are doing with paid marketing.
Here are a few ideas:
- Newsletter swaps with other authors (they share your book in their newsletter and you share theirs in your newsletter). You can find lots of other authors in your genre on the CraveBooks website.
- Social media posts
- Write a guest blog post for an established blog
- Reach out to book podcasts about being a guest
Regardless of your marketing budget, there are plenty of options for putting together effective strategies to get your book in front of new readers and increase your sales.
