Marketing shouldn’t have you questioning your sanity!

The real reason your marketing feels like a second job

Nobody selling you a course will say this out loud: most author marketing advice is designed to be endless. Post daily. Be on every platform. Chase the new app. Make the trending audio your personality. It keeps you busy, it keeps you buying, and it assumes your time is free. It isn’t. Your time is the thing your whole career is made of, and every hour you spend making a graphic that goes nowhere is an hour you didn’t spend writing the next book. That’s the real cost, and it’s the one the advice never puts on the invoice.

An author marketing strategist exists to shrink that job, not grow it. The work starts with a boring, powerful question: what is this specific book trying to do, for which readers, at this point in your career? Everything else, the posts, the newsletter, the ARC campaign, the website, is downstream of the answer. Get the answer right and marketing stops being a pile of unrelated chores and starts carrying a reader from “never heard of you” to “pre-ordered the next one” without you personally dragging them the whole way.

What a launch looks like when it isn’t a scramble

Picture one reader on one ordinary Tuesday. She sees a post that names exactly what your book delivers, the trope, the feeling, the promise, not a vague “out now.” She clicks to a website where she can tell in three seconds which book comes first. She joins your newsletter for a bonus scene she can’t get anywhere else. Over the next two weeks, a welcome sequence walks her through your backlist one book at a time. Before your next release, she hears about the ARC and turns up on release day ready to review. Nothing about that is flashy. Every step is just clear.

Compare that to how most launches go: a frantic week of posting into silence, an ARC list that ghosts, a newsletter you’re too nervous to send, and a quiet panic that you’ve done something wrong. You mostly haven’t. You’ve just been handed a strategist’s job on top of your own and told to wing it. The scramble isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when there’s no structure underneath the effort, and it’s fixable.

Who I’m for (and who I’m not)

I work with independent fiction authors across genres, romance, romantasy, fantasy, thriller, horror, women’s fiction, historical, and everything in the messy middle. The common thread isn’t genre; it’s the author who’d rather have a thinking partner than a task rabbit, someone to hand the marketing to who’ll treat the whole career, not just this one book, as the thing being built. Debut authors who want the foundation laid properly before launch pressure hits, and multi-book authors whose marketing works in scattered pieces that never became a system, are both exactly right.

I’m probably not your person if what you want is a guaranteed bestseller, a viral hack, or someone to run ads at a book that isn’t finished. No honest strategist can promise reviews or sales, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I can promise is that we’ll build the right things in the right order, run them consistently, and give a genuinely good book the fair shot it deserves. If you’ve been holding all of this together alone and questioning your sanity, that’s not a sign you’re bad at marketing. It’s a sign you’re a writer doing two jobs. Let’s give one of them back.

The order I’d build things in if your book were mine

Authors ask me this constantly, usually braced for a list of twenty things. It’s shorter and more annoying than that: it depends on where a reader can currently land. Before anything flashy, the floor has to be standing. A place readers can find you that you control, even a single clean page. And a way to capture the ones who show interest, which means a newsletter with a real reason to subscribe. Skip them and you spend the next year paying to introduce yourself to people who then wander off. Only once the floor exists do the louder things earn their place. The full sequence, and where to start depending on the stage you are at, is written out on the services page.

What the first little while looks like

Fair question, because “strategy” can sound like a document you pay for and never use. Here’s how it works in practice. It starts with me reading your book and your existing setup, the website, the list, the listing, the socials, not a questionnaire you fill in for me. From that, I can usually see what, once fixed, would make the rest start connecting, and I tell you what and why, in plain language, ranked by what will move your career most rather than what’s easiest to sell you.

From there it’s build, not talk. Depending on what you booked, that might be an ARC campaign taking shape, a website going live, a newsletter finally doing something other than existing, or a launch plan with actual dates on it. You’ll know what’s happening and roughly when, because I’d rather over-explain than have you wondering whether anything’s getting done. And if at any point what you actually need is “fix the cover first, this isn’t the thing to spend on yet,” you’ll get that too, because sending you off to solve the real problem is worth more to both of us than billing you for the wrong one.

The numbers I watch, and the ones I ignore

Because I came up in data before I came into books, I have opinions about which numbers deserve your attention, and most of the ones authors obsess over aren’t on the list. Follower count is the big one. A feed of fifteen thousand people who will never buy a book is worth less than a newsletter of four hundred readers who open every email, and chasing the former usually actively costs you the latter, because content built to go viral attracts a crowd that isn’t yours. Likes, reach, impressions, the numbers the platforms show you most prominently, are the numbers that flatter you and predict nothing. I glance at them and move on.

The numbers I care about are the boring, career-shaped ones. Newsletter open rate and sign-up rate, because the list is the audience you control, and it forecasts every launch. Read-through from book one to book two, because that single number tells me what a new reader is really worth to you and whether the problem is marketing or a positioning gap between the books. Whether traffic from a given channel does anything once it lands, not just how much of it there is. Conversion on your Amazon page, because all the traffic in the world dies there if the blurb and categories are wrong. None of these produce a satisfying dopamine hit, and all of them predict whether you’ll still be doing this in five years. Part of what you’re paying me for is to watch the unsexy numbers so you can stop refreshing the vanity ones at midnight.