Book Marketing Doesn't Have to Cost BIG $

How I used Substack (and many other platforms) to keep selling my book

On May 18th, I’ll be teaching a class called Marketing on a Shoestring, as part of the San Diego Writers, Ink, Spring Into Writing weekend. The weekend is three days of great classes about every facet of writing, and it is all “pay what you can” (it is a fundraiser so we instructors all donate our time). Find out more about the weekend and my class here.

I’m qualified to teach this class because I’ve been doing just that—marketing my book on a shoestring—for about two years. No, not “about two years.” Exactly two years ago (May 10, 2023) I began in earnest; I posted The Perfect Summer (Beach-and-Poolside) Read: "Most Hated" by Kara Alloway, and included a plug for my upcoming memoir to be published later that year, by my fabulous Canadian publisher, Re:books.

That is to say, I gave my readers something of value in the form of a piece about what a summer “beach read” is, a short book review of a book I enjoyed reading that fit the beach-read genre, and even dropped in a bit of celebrity gossip about Alloway herself, the self proclaimed "villain protagonist of the Real Housewives of Toronto." Along with this “spoonful of sugar” (aka info that might be of interest to my readers), I gave them a drop of “medicine” in the form of a short plug about me and my book.

My next post was about book bans, something I thought that my readership should care about, because I do. I started the post like this: “Recently, I was writing the Acknowledgements for my upcoming memoir, Honeymoon at Sea: How I Found Myself Living on a Small Boat. Before I got into the myriad people and groups who helped me, I wrote this: ‘My first and last gratitude is to my parents, who taught me to love reading and writing. They read a lot. They read widely. Most important, they never forbid us to read any book.’” I went on to write about what to do about book bans.

The next week was my first official Substack post (I had been blogging on my site, www.jennyredbug.com up to that point) where I welcomed everyone, told them a little bit about who I am and what I’d been doing for the previous 25 years (editing a lot of really great books and teaching at writing conferences) and invited them along on my “marketing my first book” voyage. I shared an image of part of the book cover, talked about my hubby and our sailing life and travels in Baja.

The next week I started with some current events in our life—talking about Russel and I sailing up in the San Juan Islands that summer, so people would be able to glimpse who I am now, and how we live, work, and travel on a small sailboat. I mentioned that we were headed for Seattle, in order for me to record the audiobook of Honeymoon at Sea. Then came my two book reviews; one, The Skinny was about anorexia, so I shared my own experience with diet culture and the craziness I’d experienced around my weight, as an aspiring actress.

That was how it went, each week, for the next two years—cover reveals to book events, book awards to struggles with online categories, on-line sales to distributors to Zoom classes and more. I also did plenty of podcast appearances, radio shows, and interviews in newspapers and magazines (some set up by my publisher’s publicity person, many by me) and each one sparked a few book sales. The book sales resulted in online reviews and as the 5-star reviews piled up, that prompted more book sales. I asked other Substackers about appearing on their ‘stacks. And each week, regardless of how much I’d done that particular week, I gained a few more subscribers—most came from recommendations from other Substacks and some from new subscribers.

That is when the magic began to happen—I actually got invites from other Substackers to do interviews—people like

Sari Botton

of

Oldster Magazine

, Alicia Dara of

Womancake Magazine

, and the

SUSTAIN INITIATIVE by Jennifer Newton

, and some who I asked agreed to run book excerpts, like Josh at

Small Craft Advisor

.

And then Alicia asked me to be the travel columnist for Womancake. Which has been amazing, because not only do I always gain a new subscriber or two when one of my travel posts runs on her page, but she gets more coverage from my posting a link to it on my page as well as on my other social media. I can’t prove that I get a boost in sales from those posts, but my latest column for Womancake, My Last Resorts (and Spas) ran just the other day, and this pleasant surprise greeted me on Amazon the next day:

That’s right—Honeymoon at Sea was in the top 20 in all three of its ebook categories. And it was ranked in the top 35 in paperback categories. I’ll post the book cover image listing of that one below because I like to see my little memoir ranking above a book by Paul Theroux, one of my all-time favorite travel authors!

I have written a few posts in the last two years in which I listed all of the many podcasts, interviews, events, classes, appearances, etc that it took to get me to this point—it is not a big success story when compared to major book sales, but for someone who dreamed of people reading her book, it is incredibly satisfying. Here are just a couple of those book-marketing-focused posts: Book Marketing in Ten (Thousand) Easy Steps and My 18-Month Book Marketing Round-up.

I have learned so much along the way, and I look forward to sharing it with my editing clients and in my classes and workshops. I hope to see some of you at my Marketing on a Shoestring class, as part of SDWI’s Spring Into Writing weekend, May 18th.

Next week I will have a couple of book reviews—see you all then.

Hasta pronto!