Author marketing tips from someone who likes data.

Using the marketing advice you find online

The internet has an oversupply of indie author marketing tips and an undersupply of guidance on which ones apply to you. That gap is the real problem this blog exists to close. A tip only means something in context: “start your ARC campaign six weeks out” is right for a wide release and useless if you’re going KU on a rapid-release schedule; “post daily on Instagram” suits a visual romance brand and wastes a horror author’s energy. So before you act on anything you read anywhere, ask whether it fits your genre, your release plan, and the capacity you actually have. A tip that fails any of the three isn’t a tip for you, however confidently it’s stated. The posts here are written with that context built in, so you’re never left guessing whether the advice was meant for a situation like yours. Then there’s sequencing, which is where most authors come unstuck. They don’t fail for lack of tips; they fail by doing the right things in the wrong order: pouring weeks into daily social content before there’s a website to send anyone to, chasing followers before there’s a newsletter to convert them. Good advice applied out of order still burns your time. That’s why so many posts here circle back to the same sequence, which is written out properly on the services page. Hold the individual tips inside that order and they compound instead of scatter.

Why I write strategy instead of hacks

There’s a whole genre of author marketing content built on the one trick, the growth hack, the secret that changes everything. It performs, because it promises a shortcut, and it usually disappoints, because marketing rarely has shortcuts that survive contact with a real book and a real algorithm. I avoid that register on purpose. Tactics matter, and there are concrete tactical posts here, but a tactic with no reasoning underneath it can’t be adapted when your situation differs from the example, and can’t be trusted when the platform shifts. Strategy is slower to read and much harder to write, and it ages far better, because understanding why something works lets you keep making good calls long after the specific tactic goes stale. When a platform changes its rules overnight, the author who only had the tactic is back to square one, and the author who understood the mechanism just adjusts. That’s the bet the whole blog makes: you’re better served understanding your marketing than collecting tricks for it.

The questions I keep answering

Scan what authors search, and the same handful of questions surface again and again, so the blog is built to answer them properly rather than restate them. When should I start marketing my book? Earlier than most authors do, because the highest-value pieces (an owned audience, a clear website, a warmed-up ARC list) all take time to build and can’t be crammed into the final two weeks. How do I build an ARC team that actually leaves reviews? By running it as a structured campaign with the right readers, clean delivery, and well-timed reminders, not a spreadsheet of names you hope will come through. How do I grow an email list from zero? By giving readers a real reason to subscribe and a welcome sequence that sells your backlist, not a bare sign-up box you hope fills itself. Do I even need social media? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the useful answer depends on your genre, your energy, and whether you have anywhere to send the attention it earns. None of those is a trick. Each is a small reframe that changes what you do next. It won’t hand you a to-do list. It’ll change how you think about the decision, so you can make good calls even in the cases a post never specifically covered.

Reading the blog is a long, honest audition

Some of you will read here for months, apply what’s useful, run your own marketing well, and never hire anyone. That’s genuinely the goal for a lot of readers, and it’s exactly why the thinking is given away instead of gated. Hoarding your best ideas and rationing out teasers signals that the value is scarce and has to be pried out of you; giving it away signals there’s plenty more where that came from and that I’d rather be useful than protective. In a field crowded with hard sells, being specifically helpful for free is the clearest proof of competence I can offer, because a reader who applies a post and sees it work has learned more about whether I know my job than any sales page could tell them. Others will read enough to realize they understand the strategy but would still rather not be the one executing it, that they’d get more from writing the next book than from building the newsletter sequence themselves. For those readers the blog doubles as an audition: everything I believe about author marketing is written out here in the open, so by the time you get in touch, you already know how I think and whether it fits how you work. It’s a slower way to earn a client than a slick funnel, and it produces far better-matched working relationships, because both sides already know they’re aligned. If you’ve reached that point, the next step is simple. Tell me what feels messy, and we’ll start with the one piece that will move your career the most.

Turning a post into a real change

The failure mode with any marketing blog is the growing archive of things you meant to do: pieces you nodded along to, bookmarked, and never touched again. The fix is to read each post as a prompt to inspect one specific part of your own setup, then make one concrete change before you move on. Read the piece on welcome sequences, then open yours and see whether it introduces your backlist or just says “thanks for subscribing” and stops. Read the piece on Amazon categories, then pull up your live listing and check whether yours are specific enough to surface you. Read the piece on launch timing, then map your next release against a real calendar. The value compounds when reading turns into a small, finished adjustment rather than a fresh item on a someday list. It’s also how the blog serves both kinds of reader it’s written for: if you’re doing this yourself, it’s how the free thinking improves your marketing, one applied post at a time; if you’d rather delegate, working through a few posts is the fastest way to find out which parts of your marketing you understand well enough to hand over with confidence and which you’d happily never touch. Either way, the blog is doing its job when it changes something in your real marketing. Your reading history doesn’t count.