Gain More Writing Time, Spend Less Time Marketing & Still Make Money

The writer’s guide to selling books on (semi)autopilot

There’s little better for a writer than spending long blocks of time deep in flow-state, writing thousands of words for the people who love our work. When I get these opportunities I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do. The writing happens. The time flies. I don’t have to force the work. The words fly from the keyboard, as if I’m little more than a transcriptionist.

I’d love to create in this state all the time.

But there’s a cold truth to being an indie author. Not only do we have to do the writing, but we’re also responsible for selling our work. If we don’t market our writing, there will be no sales.

There’s a trusty piece of indie wisdom that’s flown around for years, “only worry about writing the next book.” I’ve always had beef with this phrase. Like our work will sell just because it’s great work. Nothing is further from reality.

I also get frequent comments from my clients, saying “all I want to do is write. I don’t have time for all this marketing garbage.”

I’d love to reach through my phone and shake them. All I want to do is write too, but as they say, want in one hand and put an apple in the other (at least that’s how I remember it — wink), see which one fills up faster.

If we want to be commercial writers we’ve got to spend a portion of our time marketing our writing.

Marketing doesn’t have to be a chore

Self-promotion doesn’t have to be gross. Your marketing and sales efforts don’t have to eclipse your valuable writing time. I get it. Marketing isn’t my favorite either. But I know if I don’t sound the horn, no one will do it for me.

No one’s coming to help.

If all you want to do is write, more power to you. I get it. But if there’s even a flicker of hope that someday you’ll sell your work, it’s time to start marketing. I’ll show you how to do a lot of it automatically, so you don’t feel like you’re wasting time.

There’s much work in the initial set-up, but once it’s done, you reap the benefits of steady sales.

Instead of spending a bunch of time trying to build a social following of passive participants, we’ll grow an email list we own. We’ll create an automated welcome sequence where each new subscriber gets a prescribed treatment — so everyone gets the same story, delivered in the same fashion.

Instead of worrying about what we should say in our weekly emails, all we need to do is write a single automated email and add it to the queue. Our main job becomes enticing more readers onto the platform, where they’ll get their own customer experience.

It doesn’t matter if I wrote the email last year, for today’s subscriber, the email feels new.

Try not to write anything that can’t be re-purposed multiple places

If you write content to grow your reader-base, there’s nothing saying you can’t later turn that content into a book, a podcast, a video, or a blog post. You can post your content on social. Break large posts into smaller sound-bites.

But no matter what you do, try to avoid one-off content creation. This will save your writing time.

Instead of writing one-off Tweets we push our multi-use content. We repackage our work multiple ways so we don’t have to spend so much time writing our marketing content.

I try not to write one-off emails either.

Unless I’m launching a product or asking a time-sensitive question, I try not to send any one-off emails to my list. I don’t like to repeat my writing efforts. I’d rather be in the zone creating, versus writing just to bring in new readers.

Marketing is a careful balance of time.

The more pre-work you do in the beginning, setting up your automated platform, creating a welcome sequence, developing and opt-in offer your readers will value, and writing emails that keep your readers coming back — the more time you’ll have to do your treasured writing.

Every time you write a piece of marketing content think of ways you can re-use it later.

We use social to bring readers to a list we own

Every social platform has a different set of dos and don’ts. But the main goal of all social sites should not be to build a following on their platform, but to siphon those followers to our own platform.

One of the biggest mistakes writers make, is spending all their marketing time puttering on social media without trying to build their own list. Social followers can be taken away overnight, with no recourse.

If we want to be indies, we’ve got to own our customer platform.

Social media is a necessity. We’ve got to hang out where our readers hang out, but social can be a black hole with little return for the time spent if you don’t recruit your followers to join your list.

Use the immense size of the social platforms to you advantage. Your people are already there. But don’t be fooled into spending all your time growing your following, while begging for likes and comments. Bring them to your world instead.

Schedule a little marketing time every day

Just as we write daily, we should also market daily. Try to budget at least 25% of your time for promoting your work. When this daily practice becomes a habit, the marketing portion of your work doesn’t feel so difficult.

When you market daily you don’t have to spend long, frantic days desperately trying to find an audience once your book comes out.

I like to give myself daily marketing goals. Whether it’s a number of articles I want to write, social posts, or emails, when I make a simple, daily marketing to-do list, I know I can stop when my marketing chores are done.

Without a daily list it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. We feel like we’ve got to do everything all the time. But it’s not true. If you can create evergreen content and an automated email list, most of the selling will happen for you, automatically.

Marketing doesn’t have to be hard, but we’ve got to do it if we want to be successful indies.

We’re waiting for you.

(Enroll in My Free Email Masterclass: Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers)

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.

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