When you’re not making the book sales that you want to make, or you’re struggling in general with the action of marketing and promoting your book, it’s very easy to come back to the logical question of “How do I sell my book?”
But let me tell you why this actually isn’t the best question to ask.
There are usually three phases of building a business, and before you really get into a selling phase, you need a building phase.
What happens in the building phase completely depends on your strategy for building your business. Some people focus on networking and referrals, other people focus on branding and content strategy. But ultimately, the building phase is what sets you up to be able to sell and actually convert people to buy your product as a result, because it builds pieces like trust, connection, problem awareness, etc.
(By the way, I get that these are all marketing terms and you may not understand how this applies to fiction books, but stick with me here.)
The best question you can ask if you’re struggling with sales is: how do you build your foundations?
Because if you’ve built your foundations and you continue to practise at your foundations, the sales will come much easier.
What do foundations look like in business?
Foundations chalk up to what’s working really well to grow your business (be it your audience, your engagement, your retention rates, etc.)
Once you know what’s working, the key is to keep doing it, and this is where people can also tend to drop the ball once they see some success.
For example:
Let’s say you reach your first 1,000 readers through content strategy and sending out ARCs.
You see some great success after doing this for 6 straight months suddenly, you want to jump into a scaling phase of your business. So you start focusing on other efforts like doing events, organising paid partnerships, or even running paid ads.
And you drop the ball on your content strategy and ARC outreach strategy.
So then, 3 more months down the track, you start to see a dwindle in your audience growth, your engagement, and even sales are dropping off because there’s less readers talking about your book.
That’s an example of a foundation. Your content strategy and ARC outreach strategy was a foundational effort that was working to get you a result. As soon as you broadened your focus without being able to maintain that effort, you saw a dip in the result.
So often, the solution to a lack of sales comes down to either (a) not having a foundation in the first place, or (b) not being consistent enough with your foundations and forgetting to ‘go back to basics’ (so to speak).
What foundations should indie authors aim to build?
In my opinion, there are some really important foundations to focus on. You may not choose to adopt or focus on all of these, but I’ll explain why I see value in each of these below:
1) An audience of ideal readers – having the right audience in front of you is a really important foundation, and knowing how to bring these people into your world and retain their attention and loyalty is equally valuable.
Why? Because without an audience, you have nobody to buy your stuff, share it, or tell others about it. If you’re not selling books and you don’t have the right people in front of you, it’s no surprise why.
2) A known brand – your brand is such a huge asset in your marketing. It contributes know factor, builds memorability so that people who are just discovering you for the first time can remember who you are, and it also lays a foundation for credibility and trust in the purchasing process.
There’s a reason why known, household name authors get easy sales (like Sarah J Maas with ACOTAR) and why indie authors can sometimes feel like they’re pulling teeth just to get new readers to take a chance on them. Brand is a huge piece of this, so brand is definitely a foundation I’d focus on.
3) A launch sequence – the reason I recommend developing a launch sequence for your books is because this acts as a sort of ‘sales process’ for you.
When done right, the act of launching requires you to:
a.) Command the attention of new readers and bring them into your world (e.g. audience building)
b.) Warm people up to buy your book through tactics such as posting content around the book, sourcing early book reviews, or even partnering with established creators. And this helps to build your brand and social proof.
By the time you start selling, you’ve already built a foundation in a sense that you have people in front of you, these people know who you are and what your book is about (plus, why they would enjoy it), they have social proof to build trust in their purchasing decision, and they’re ready to buy from you.
As opposed to dropping your book randomly one Sunday afternoon and asking people to buy, you’ve laid foundations and taken them through a process to get them interested and committed. And it’s a process you can rinse-and-repeat for every book (so with a consistent launch sequence, you won’t accidentally drop off and see a dip in your income either).
P.S: Found this article helpful? Dive deeper in my podcast episode where I expand on this topic and share more examples and insight on building your foundations as a fiction author.
