Promote Your Indie Book – Yourself.

a) Time. Be prepared to devote, say twenty minutes, every day, to self-promotion. Keeping things going is the way to get your book noticed and that is the only aim you have in life for that twenty minutes.

b) Do not follow the crowd as if you are a sheep. Yes, you want a wide audience and that is good, but things trend and everyone jumps onto that latest bandwagon and they can be guilty of disregarding the social platforms that they seem to abandon. Here is a for-instance;-

At the time of writing, Twitter (X) is in turmoil. Personally, I see no difference but writers elsewhere say it has become toxic and I see no signs of that toxicity. Many have abandoned Twitter because of a dislike of Elon Musk and that to me seems weird. Anyway, donkey’s years ago I was into buying and selling shares in a very small way and learned that you shouldn’t follow trends. If you bought when the market was selling, and sold when the market was buying, you would make money over time. What I am saying with regard to book promotion is that I have kept my Twitter account, it is growing in numbers of followers daily, I know from other sites (see later) that most of my book sales come via Twitter, and the hope is that someone else will buy the site from Musk and the trend will then be to return to this successful platform.

c) How to get followers on any platform. Nobody wants to follow you because they love you or love your books, (maybe your family and friends?) they follow you because they want you to repost their book advert. Start by finding and following authors with large personal followings who repost other authors. There are many out there including myself (on Twitter anyway, not so popular yet on Threads or Bluesky and I don’t have the time for Facebook and Linkedin). You will find some authors on various platforms telling you that it is stupid for a group of authors to repost to each other but that is wrong. All authors, if they are wise, also follow other artists of music, photography, jewellery making, crafts, etc. These people are readers and their followers are readers so if your post is reposted by an author with many followers, there is a chance that one of these readers will buy your book.

d) Repost the posts of your chosen authors. Repost and then repost again the high-follower authors and they will soon see you and will repost your posts. Keep doing this, every morning, or having that important twenty minutes while sat in front of mindless TV in the evening, and keep adding authors to your list. Now start adding others mentioned in the last item, the other artists. You are now smoking. If you find that you’ve already reposted their pinned post and the ones under it are by other authors, and you particularly want to only repost the posts of your chosen author, there is a way of doing that on TwitterX, maybe on other platforms also.

On Twitter, look at the handle of your chosen author starting with @ and now go to the search bar. Ignoring capital letters and without any spaces, type in ‘from’ followed by the author’s handle, so from@stephensonholt in my case, or whatever the author’s handle is. Listed now will be the posts that they have sent on their own, not their retweets. Maybe it’s a pretty basic thing but needs to be said anyway, to pin a post in your feed, go to the post you like the most (this will change with time) click on the dots, usually in the top right-hand corner, and choose ‘pin to your profile.’ That post will sit at the top of your feed now until you decide to change it.

e) Shorten the links to your book’s Amazon Page. I use Bitly but there are other link shortening sites. With Bitly there is a free service and, from memory that isn’t that great (the memory not the site), you get ten free links shortened a month, which when you are starting off should be sufficient. Remember that this blog is about promoting for free so if you want to spend zero money then disregard the paid options coming up.

There is also a paid scheme for 100 a month which I subscribe to. Why? Because I have over twenty books and they are bought throughout the world and I want someone in, say India or Australia, to be able to go straight to their countries Amazon site without faffing about with going to the wrong site to get a message of “do you want to return to your own site?”. Incidentally, with Bitly, all the shortened links to books on Amazon start with “Amazon.to” so the person clicking can see that they are going to an Amazon site.

f) Using Buffer to post for you. Rather than posting whenever you have five minutes throughout the day, you can load Buffer and the site will do it for you. Again, from a very poor memory, there are free schemes where you get maybe ten posts into the future (so do it all for free again) and then there are paid schemes for 100 posts or a scheme for unlimited posts. I have the unlimited one, stack it up to around 200 posts and then I’m able to go on holiday and relax without individually posting. Whichever Buffer scheme you use, you pay per channel and I have three channels, Bluesky, Threads and Twitter. My Twitter feed has each of my twenty-odd books in rotation (so people don’t get bored with seeing the same one all the time) and each has a synopsis and links to Amazon in various countries. I’m able to do this because I have that blue check thingy that means nothing other than I pay a small monthly fee (to Elon if you can stomach that) which gives me a greater reach with my posts and lets me have each post as long as I want it to be.

I have to then cut these posts down to fit Threads and cut them down even more for Bluesky. Once loaded though, you can go into your ‘sent’ pile, click on the dots, duplicate the post, and then choose to ‘add to schedule.’ This should form part of your twenty-minute time slot for your book promotion. I’ve mentioned above about links to various Amazon websites from throughout the world and a Twitter post for me will typically link to six or seven sites. The joy of buffer for someone like me in the UK, is that I can time posts to be sent throughout the twenty-four-hour clock. This means that my posts are being seen freshly in Australia and the far east, in Europe later and then in the US and South America later on again, no matter at what time of day folk look at their feeds, or whether I am awake or not.

g) Use any Analytics available to you. The analytics I use are on my website hosting platform where I can see any links to StephensonHolt.com and also where they have come from, but more importantly to me is the analytics given by Bitly. These analytics tell me firstly where my links are being clicked (on Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, my website, from Amazon directly etc.) and also which links are being clicked, because when you form a link you give it a name. Therefore, my top link click for the month might be “Germany-What Katie Didn’t Know.”

The number of clicks from each country is also given and this is usually pretty steady and logged by me each month to be able to spot any trends that should be taken advantage of. For instance, as I write, in past months my top country for links has been the USA followed by the UK, but over the past two months Spain has come into the equation and this month Spain is top by a long way. I know that this is probably because I have started following book promotion sites that are in Spanish, so to add to this success, I am going through each post, sat there ready to be delivered by Buffer onto Twitter (the other social media sites are too small in character allowance) and adding a Bitly shortened link to every one of my books to Amazon Spain (amazon.es). Are these Spanish folk wanting to increase their English language knowledge, or maybe ex-pats? I don’t know but as long as they are buying my books, I'm happy.

h) Use book promotion sites, but to your advantage, not theirs. You will come across sites that will tell you that if you join them, they will spread your post to 10,000 people for a cost, and often these sites will only have 500 followers. Fear not because you can use them. Firstly, never pay for their promotion, it’s not needed. Follow these sites, do not repost their pinned post which will invariable be ‘come and join me at a cost’ and instead, move down and repost one or two of their reposts of other authors. This is what these sites want and have promised their paid followers that they'll do, that they will get reposts for their subscribers. Once they see that you have re-posted, they will want you to repost again and so they will follow you and repost your pinned post, and will do it for free.

i) Repost your own posts. It sounds a bit like a cheat to get more exposure, but hey, you are there to get more exposure. Reposting your own posts though needs to be done at certain times and the top authors know this and are clever at doing it.

Say, for instance, that like me, your twenty-minute self-promotion time is first thing every morning. The last time you will have self-promoted will have been the previous morning and since then Buffer will have posted for you five or six times at the various times you’ve asked it to over the twenty-four-hour clock. You open your social media platform and it tells you that you have 20+ notifications and you look at them all and go through them one by one. Where the notification is that someone has followed you, you look at their profile and their posts, choose to follow them back or not, and then go back to your list. Where the notification is that someone has reposted your post, happy days, go into their profile and repost their pinned post or one of theirs lower down. You want to keep this person. (see above for how to find posts that they have sent out by them, and not their reposts).

At the end of this exercise, all the reposts that you have made will be directly under your pinned post with all your Buffer-sent posts way behind them. Is that what you want? Do you want followers to come to your feed to repost, find out that they’ve already reposted your pinned post so they have to go to the next one down and repost a fellow author’s post? No. This is why, after reposting all your fellow re-posters, you run down your personal feed, find the posts that Buffer has sent out since the previous morning, and then you like and repost each of them. You now not only give those posts a second life but you also give your potential re-poster the chance to repost any of your latest posts easily. Fear not about re-posting to authors, and them reposting to authors, remember that you all have artists, jewellery makers, photographers etc who read books on your feed and so do your re-posters so you are all happy.

j) Anything else? I have tried to list above, all that I have learned over the years but I’m sure it isn’t perfect or complete. If you have any comments to make, please do not hesitate to let me know by emailing me at contact@stephensonholt.com Thanks. Oh, and while you are on my site reading this blog, why not go to my home page, for free again, and take a peak at all the books I've written along with the links to Amazon in many countries.