When Should You Work on Marketing as a Self-Published Writer?
If you’re self-publishing, one of your “givens” is that you’ll have to jump in the deep end of the marketing pool at some point — it’s rare to have a book just show up on Amazon and catch everyone’s attention with no posts, events, or networking efforts.
But when should you get your marketing assets ready?
In this post, I assert that you’ll ideally tackle marketing requirements well before your release date. I recommend doing just a little bit at a time as you work on the the last few rounds of draft edits so you’re not overwhelmed. Then you’ll be able to focus on finalizing and formatting the draft and working with your designer or others on your team with no distractions.
Is it possible to just wait and do marketing at the end? Of course! If that’s more suited to your personality and circumstances, you’re not “wrong.” Plenty of authors opt to hire a professional to create and schedule their marketing assets, too, which leaves them free to focus on the draft.
But assuming you want or need to handle the assets yourself, finishing marketing ahead of the book allows you to generate some excitement around the release as you get the book perfected. It’s a little bit of strategic multitasking. Otherwise, if you put together and use all your marketing assets when the book is waiting, your release date will have to push out further (usually up to two to three months). For many authors, that’s not desirable, often because they are looking to bring in income from the book as soon as possible or have to ensure that the release date is strategically set for primary visibility in a season.
When have you done your marketing (or when are you planning to)? Leave me a note in the comments.
[Transcript summary]
Hello, everybody. Wanda Thibodeaux of takingdictation.com here, and today, I want to talk to those of you who are doing some self publishing, maybe even a little bit on the hybrid side. And the idea today is the marketing versus getting the draft finalized.
And the mistake that I see a lot of writers make is they try to do both at the same time. Please spare yourself the misery if you can. What I want to recommend is that you get all of the marketing stuff as much as you possibly can in advance.
And the reason is, when it starts coming closer to that release date, you are really going to be wanting to focus on that draft, getting those final reads in, you work with your designer on the cover, those kinds of things. You don’t want all of the marketing stuff to be pulling you away. You really want your attention to be on making sure that that draft is ready when it needs to be. And if you have selected your release date, you can do a lot of that marketing in advance. You can pull quotes. You can do some videos. A lot of it can be done ahead of time so that your brain is clear and that you are relaxed when you are looking at that draft for the last couple of times.
Take care. Everybody. Bye.