Google "book marketing agency". But be very, very careful. Self published authors rarely make much money, and you're likely to spend more money with them that you'll make. And do your research on them. There are plenty of scammers out there ready to take the money of naive authors.
Doesn't Amazon have a category for historical fiction? Ancient Rome novels are a dime a dozen these days. I tried one that I bought at a train station (I'd been watching Rome) and it was bloody awful.
You'd think so ...but when I check Historical Fiction on Amazon I usually get tons of Romances as well as a few others. Annoying, because Romances are not what I want. I'm also not interested in WW2 stories, Civil War stories, the wives of Henry VIII, etc. It's very hard to find what I'm looking for. And I am always in the market to buy what I'm looking for. I like good historical books about the Roman Empire, actually. You could do worse than the Robert Harris trilogy about Cicero, or the stand-alone book Pompeii. Bad ones abound, of course ...but there are lots of good ones as well. Including The Eagle and The Dragon, written by our own forum member Lew McIntyre. That one is a total treat.
I actually don't read a lot of historical fiction - mainly because I find real history more interesting and I haven't finished learning all about that yet. I'm not all that interested in European history, outside of Victorian Britain and the 20th century. Although the Cold War is a period of interest for me, I dont count James Bond as historical fiction. I loved the Flashman novels though, and I read through all the Hornblower books I could get my hands on. I'm one of those people who would sit through a historical film and point out all the inaccuracies until I came to the realisation that it was entertainment, not a documentary.
I would like to clarify what I meant by some self promotion. I meant only that personally, I'd probably do a few posts a week about my upcoming book, especially in a traditional publishing agreement, because my expectation is that the publisher takes the majority of the responsibility for promotion. Self publishing is where I think it'd be the most challenging in terms of promotion because of how oversaturated with self published material the markets are.
I highly recommend you set up a facebook page, NOT your personal profile. Advertising there is prohibited by FB. Lower left hand corner of your profile, home page, is CREATE PAGE. Just follow the yellow brick road, then invite all friends to like your author (or book) page. From there, you can do paid advertsing (boosted posts) on FB which have worked well for me. See https://www.facebook.com/TheEagleAndTheDragon/ and https://www.facebook.com/ComeFollowMePilateAndJesus/ for my books, and https://www.facebook.com/LewisMcIntyreAuthor/ for my author page. Any apparently low cost site for advertising is https://oltobooks.com/home.php, $10 to list your book for a year. Just joined, can't tell you how well it works. Good luck
I'm actually gunning for conventional publishing through an agent and publisher. Their first question to me when I engage them is, "How many followers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter do you have?" and ultimately, "Let me have a look at your ABI and Press Kit." So this is the specifics I'm exploring right now. Marketing is pretty vague, I just need some industry specific pointers to get bootstrapped. Fortunately, I have time, as my transition date isn't until 2023, this is just me trying to learn several skills in parallel. (author business specific skills being writing, market research, positioning, sales channel, accounting, &c) I'm confident that's true. It's just at this point, nobody seems to be offering anything that specific. I've spoken to a few *publicists* who would be happy to take me on when the time comes, ie: when I have books printed in stacks somewhere that I need to unload, they can use their contacts to get me on local radio shows &c. Traditional media, I have options.
Seems odd that a traditional publisher would put the burden of publicity on you. Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing for their cut?
increasingly they (especially smallhouses) are more interested in people who have a following already... this is one reason I chose to selfpublish... if you're going to have to do your own promo anyway, what exactly do you get for 90% of your royalties?
If you're making Buckets o' Cash(tm) you can always pay someone to run your social media for you. Or rope a younger family member into it.
there is the flip side that if you self publish you have to pay for your own editing and cover design... and trad published work gets more exposure in bricks and mortar shops, plus there's sometimes an advance so you have less risk. its not a one size fits all game
This is what I am trying to sort out... it seems publishers are a mix now. The Big Five will probably take on most aspects of marketing the book itself, but smaller publishers don't seem to offer this much, and I've been reading feedback from customers that suggest a lot of the ones who do offer it, don't do it well so the author is picking up the slack anyway. And publishers aren't going to promote the author's brand in general, by the sound of it.
In my case, the answer is 'distribution power' and 'international expansion' &c. Publishers have great access to the marketplace. Potentially also less need for capitalization on the part of the author - they pay an advance and take on risk for future sales, instead of the author being out of pocket and flogging the book on streetcorners. The importance of this is proportional to expected sales volumes. Personally, I think authors are in a good position because we can choose among more strategies than ever before. There are tradeoffs, we can make choices.
if that's you aspiration the absolute key is to find a publisher who can deliver on it - not all will. Taking access to the physical market place as an example - everyone (self pubs included) can get into the same catalogues that book stores use to order stock.. what matters then is getting those book stores to actually order the stock. There are two routes to that a) public demand - any author can develop a following of people who go into their local book shop and say "Have you got the new Kevin McCormac good sir? and if not prithee tell me why?" b) proactive sale - this is mostly the preserve of the trad industry, although self pubs can often get local bookshops to order stock through shoe leather and perseverance... if you are published by a big 5 publisher, or one of the key niche indies, they have reps who proactively sell a chosen portion of their catalogue (chosen new stars and big names) to the procurement managers of the big stores... they don't however go on selling the same book for long unless it achieves break out status. it is a mistake to assume that Joe Blow books of Podunk Iowa has the same market access as Random Penguin, and a mistake to assume that just because you get a random Penguin deal you'll be one of the chosen ones who is proactively sold
Aside from this page and group, I keep my writing life separate from my social media life. I have a couple of writer friends on my Facebook page. One of them I found completely at random... I happened to order her debut book for my library, read her bio and found she had graduated from my university and we had a professor in common. I contacted our professor through Facebook, saying i found one of his students, and through him, she reached out to me.... so now we are Facebook friend 4 of my other Facebook friends, we took the same writing classes in college, however, they went on to attend the MFA program and I did not. We don't talk about our work but I'm always happy for them when they post about their successes. It doesn't hurt me because I know we all write for different reason, and in different genres. Also, I am not "close" enough to them to share my work with them and they are not "close" enough to me to share their work either. I feel that social media is a wonderful way to keep connected and network among other authors, if you are interested in that sort of thing. But like @jannert said, it all depends on what you want to use it for. I only use my Facebook for personal stuff, not for work, not for promoting my writing, not for anything where its in the public and I have to be "professional." If I were to publish big, I would make another account. Social Media presence is more important these days- my university even offers classes on social media presence, live tweeting events, and marketing via social media. but these days, people can hire someone to run their professional facebooks.
Those guys, I know. There are some I trust and would happily engage, so that piece of the puzzle I consider kinda solved. I'll describe one as an example - not an endorsement or advertisement - the current president of the Canadian Authors Association is a retired PR manager with something like 45 years' experience in various verticals. She has a package for book launches that has a good reputation and seems to have good value for authors either self publishing or with a smaller publisher that doesn't have lots of media leverage. But that is way, way, down the production flow. What I'm trying to build is a model for getting that publisher's attention, and it's the usual vicious circle: I haven't published anything and none of my friends and family are on social media, so why would I have even one follower?
Even for marketing - and the example functions I can think of at the moment are author branding and stimulating the marketplace during a new book release - I'm struggling to find proof that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter specifically have any value. Everybody tells me it does. Nobody can prove it, it's just a vague 'everybody knows' or 'this is how it's done now' kinda thing. Becca Syme, for example, estimates that anything more than 10-20mins/day is a net cost. For context: I spent years on technology marketing at my current employer, which included wasting probably seven figures on a Second Life store. This made us more cautious about new platforms and so far FB, IG, and TT haven't made the cut, ROI is negative. This is obviously industry specific, but I want to identify an appropriate strategy before I invest time and resources.
Assuming you don't want to self publish a book to build traffic (since your intention is trad pub) could you use a blog to build that attention ? That's what Andy Weir did with the Martian... his following was built off a blog about the difficulties of surviving on mars... other options include an active fb page, fb group, or potentially a you tube channel but for all of these content is king and it takes a lot of work. Tbh it may be more productive to forget the social media angle and focus on polishing your manuscript and querying agents - a good agent will be key to getting a good pub deal, and will have the contacts to get you in the door without having to demonstrate a social media following. The absolutely essential point to bear in mind is that neither agents nor publishers get paid up front - if anyone asks you for cash to agent you or to publish you book, don't walk away, run.
At the moment I'm confident I will use a website and mailing list. It's the social media (FB, IG, TT) that I'm not sure about. I've had a personal website for over a quarter century, and I guess technically a blog since before they were a thing. The complication with website+emaillist at the moment is that KM is an author pseudonym, not my real name, so there's nothing under that brand yet. I'm not clear on the correct approach to having a 'personal' blog for a fake person.
If you want to go the mailing list route you also need an angle for your newsletter, you won't get by with just saying buy my book, - if you are going that route i'd suggest using facebook adverts to bring potential leads to your landing page - mark dawson has a free course on the subject https://selfpublishingformula.com/courses/
I'm pretty sure "Jenna Solitaire" is a fake name, but after reading 4 of her books (written in first person) about travelling the world, hunting down magical runes and dealing with the occult, in middle school, I was ready to go to her blog and do as it said at the end of the last book and "keep up with my adventures on my blog! [insert blog address]."
My expectation right now is that yes, I'll have to do something like that. In a way, even social media, blogging, as an author, in my real name might be fake anyway. I had this discussion with one of my writers' groups last month. I was given the good advice that having a social media presence can be really easy if I 'just be the real me.' Sound advice except for one problem: since I'm not a 'sharing' kind of person - very private by nature, my wife works with violent criminals, my friends are similar so I can't really share social stuff - any social media use is explicitly *not* 'the real me' by definition. So, if it's going to be a fake persona so be it, I may as well go to town. There's also a full disclosure approach that I'm warming up to. "This is the site of Kevin McCormack, which is a pseudonym for an author who prefers to remain anonymous. However! Rest assured that everything in the posts is true." And I can do that. I have a colleague whose pseudonym is *also* the name of his series' main character, and he posts in character. So, lots of possibilities, but what I'm trying to do is quantify the value in terms of ROI. There's another thread where a poster suggested joining a subject specific conversation board (eg: if your books are about classical roman court intrigue, join facebook groups, online fora, &c) and participating in the convos with a small percentage of the posts designed as sales. So, basically keep it respectful and don't spam. Where this comes into my thinking in terms of ROI is that if I want to earn a living at this, I'll need to be making maybe $25/hr. What's the odds that this manufactured participation is going to pay off this way? If it's improbable, then I'm going to reject it in favour of something more productive. Social media activity - be it brand reinforcement, market stimulation, whatever - comes into the calculation as a problem through its questionable real returns compounded with crowding out of actual writing. Yes, I might sell the occasional book, but a lot of midlisters I've corresponded with kinda admit the biggest boosts to their sales are new book releases. Diverting my most scarce resource (time) away from writing a) delays the release of my next book, and b) produces fewer books per year and thus diminishes production of a back catalogue, and c) slows down my skill development with writing as a craft that benefits from hands on practice. These results are bad, bad, and bad, in that my business model is to create high quality product (which means I need to write as much as possible to get better faster), and an expansive back catalogue (which also means I need to write, write, write). ETA: Here's another complication... I have other side gigs. I do session work as a voilinist, for example. I am experimenting with performance art that has a technical angle. This is part of the rationale for an author-specific pseudonym: brand focus. My octogenarian music fans would not only get utterly confused by my afrofuturism novels, they might actually be offended and it would impact my ability to land contracts for stuff like Robbie Burns Night dinners.
One of the other reasons I'm avoiding the social media platforms like FB IG TT is that I am concerned about building a business dependence on somebody else's tech. This is part of the attraction of building a website+mailinglist as centerpiece to the marketing model. Matthew Boyd (The Oatmeal) learned this lesson the hard way a couple of years ago when he was getting x hundred thousand visitors from FB... and then suddenly he wasn't. FB changed their algorithm. But hey, they offered to 'boost' his ads for IIRC something in the mid six figures. I've been skeptical about too good to be true since I was a kid and the pusher in the schoolyard told me the first one was free.
