My first novel was published in 2016, and I had some success with marketing and sales. Fast forward ten years to March 2026 when two more of my novels were released: one, a sequel to the first book and two, the introductory novel of a new series. I made sure listings were available on my website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-a-Million plus having them accessible on IngramSpark. I even went so far as to find a local printer to produce my paperback copies.
Then it was marketing time. My, how the world changed in a decade. All the old advice came home to roost along with a bunch of new things: build an email list, get subscribers on Substack, join promotions on Bookfunnel, Increlo campaigns, Goodreads profiles and Giveaways, post on Facebook, Instagram reels and posts, TikTok (to access BookTok) videos, Threads, and of course a solid, professional, and attractive website. There is also X (formerly knows as Twitter) but since it’s owned by Elon Musk, I won’t have anything to do with it. And these are just platforms; then there are ads: Amazon ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Kindle Book Marketing…the list goes on.
I don’t even want to delve into the vast number of emails I’ve received from would-be marketing experts promising to lead me to the promised land of best-seller lists – virtually all from a Gmail accounts with no credentials to speak of.
As a finance professional for the past fifty years, I tend to use numbers to measure traction. It’s how I came to find my nose plastered against an impenetrable brick wall. Yes, it was and is painful. Why? Conversion rates. So far, I’ve touched on every one of the outlets I mentioned above and am continuing to do so. The results, in the aggregate, serve as denominator and the numerator being the number of copies sold. Mathematically, the results so far can be stated as a number beginning several places to the right of the decimal.
So, I thought I would demonstrate for my fellow writers some of my disappointments for comparison.
Goodreads
This is the premier social platform for all things books. I’ve had an author profile since 2011. I have utilized Listopia by including my novels on various lists, and I turned to the Giveaway program. I set up two in May 2026 offering a print copy for 10 winners for each of my new books. Goodreads says that when a winner is notified, it’s accompanied with a gentle suggestion to write a review. The winning copies were mailed on June 25th, including several to Canada (beware of the postage rates – the cost of mailing a single book is nearly 6x the cost: $29.05 versus $5.22 for the USPS media rate). One of the books featured in the Giveaway was the sequel to the novel that was published in 2016, so I went the extra mile and gave the winner of the sequel both books. I suppose my biggest disappointment with Goodreads is that since the books were won and mailed only one reader has offered a review. Here are some stats:
Book 1
3,694 people requested it,
3,087 people have it on their to-read pile,
0 people currently reading
1 new review
1 sale
Conversion (1 ÷ 3,684 non-winners = .00027%)
Book 2
3,130 people requested it,
2,640 people have it on their to-read pile,
1 person currently reading
0 new reviews
0 sales
Conversion 0%
My total cost for printing, the Giveaway fees, postage, mailing supplies, and thank you cards from Vistaprint – $741.76
Bookfunnel (website says – Essential Tools for Indie Authors)
For this platform, you upload copies of your eBook and then create a landing page for the book listing where the book is available for sale, the cover art, a tag line, and a description of the book. The basic monthly cost to belong to the platform is $20. From there you can join promotions geared towards the genre of your book. Promos come in two forms: one to promote your newsletter to gain subscribers or one to promote the sale of your book. Once you join a promotion, you advertise the promo on your newsletter or blog using the hyperlink created when you join the promo. Currently, I’ve completed two promotions and have three more ongoing. Here are some stats:
Newsletter Promo
Offered 20 free copies of my eBook in exchange for a subscriber’s email.
Book views – 52
Free book claims – 25
Downloaded – 19
Subscribers – 24
Cost of promo – $0
Sales – 0
Sales Promos – to date
To promote the sale for 3 of my novels based on my genres criteria
Book Cover views to date – 1,099 vs 11,189 for all authors in the promo or 9.8% of the promo views
Book Cover clicks – 79 vs 1,998 for all authors in the promo or 3.95% of the clicks
Cost of Promo – $0
Sales – 0
Annual cost to belong to Bookfunnel – basic plan – $240
Increlo
This platform is geared towards getting reviews. There are Standard reviews, Pre-Release / ARC reviews, and Beta Read reviews. One must be careful in obtaining reviews in order to avoid any Amazon TOS violations. I created two campaigns, one each for two of my books, with a goal of 15 reviews for each in exchange for free copies of the book. The key point here is that no influence to ensure the review is a good one is mandated. Both campaigns were successful with reviews being posted to Amazon and/or Goodreads. For me, this was a good test for how well the books would be received. I was pleased that virtually all the reviews scored a 4 or 5 star rating.
Amazon Sales during the period – 7 books
Cost of the two campaigns – $198
TikTok
The social media platform for creating, watching, and sharing videos and images. A subset of TikTok is BookTok, supposedly a resource that might help authors promote book sales. I’d never made a video in my life, but I personally know a couple of people who have been very successful with their TikTok accounts to the point of them becoming income streams. I wasn’t necessarily looking to monetize the account but was hopeful I could gain a following by “branding” myself and promoting my work. So, I spent about $60 for a mini-mic, a cellphone stand, and a portable selfie light along with a subscription to CapCut, the software to edit the videos I would upload to TikTok. There is a learning curve here, but it’s kind of fun. Here are some stats:
Video 1 – 1:20 minutes
Views – 750
Retention – 1% to the end – approximately 7 or 8 viewers
New Followers – 35
Video 2 – 2:32 minutes
Views – 24,000
Retention – 0% after 49 seconds – approximately 240 viewers made it 1/3 of the way through
New Followers – 10
Video 3 – 0:59 minutes
Views – 2,300
Retention – 1% to the end – approximately 23 viewers (3% made it 13 seconds)
New Followers – 6
Remember – a view simply means the number of times a video starts as a viewer scrolls past.
Conclusion: I’ve gone down the rabbit hole several times on TikTok. What I see is a great deal of white noise – a gazillion content creators who are full of advice or with something to sell. The general attention span of a viewer is about the length of how far a gnat’s fart will travel. Oddly, it seems that a very significant number of new followers generally show profiles of a young lady with multiple pictures in different sets of clothing. I haven’t figured that out yet. Are they bots or real people whose goal is to become future content creators or influencers?
Am I giving up? No, I’ll keep posting here with hashtags to BookTok, and I will explore the effectiveness of boosting more posts. I had hoped those who viewed my account would have gone one step further to check out my website, but according to my stats, there has been no traffic from TikTok.
Total Cost of TikTok ads to date – $152
Sales – 0
Website views – 0
Owned by Meta (as is Facebook) as a platform to post photos, reels, and videos. After creating a video and editing it on CapCut, I can post it on Instagram as well as TikTok. It will also post over to Facebook. Here to, I have gone down the hole watching reels, but I am more captivated by the content here.
I posted two of the same videos as the ones on TikTok, unfortunately they don’t record how long someone spent watching them.
Video 1 – 2:32 minutes (post boosted)
Views – 5,295 (4,239 views resulted from the boost)
Reach – 3,636
Likes – 238
Saves – 69
Shares – 6
New followers – 78
Video 2 – 0:59 minutes (post not boosted)
Views – 38
Reach – 0
Likes – 0
Saves – 0
Shares – 1
New followers – 0
Instagram is also good for photos. To continue working on branding, I have been uploading pictures for “Throwback Thursday” and other fun stuff. My publicist also used this platform to post images attempting to market one of my new books. Some of these were AI generated so I’m conflicted about leaving them up. AI will NEVER touch a piece of my writing, but I’m on the fence as it relates to marketing.
Unlike many of the profiles of followers on TikTok, those who have followed me on Instagram all have actual profiles.
Conclusion: I think my effort will skew toward posting content on Instagram since the followers seem more legitimate and I garnered more traffic to my website from there.
Total cost of Instagram ads to date – $37.52
Sales – 0
Website views – 11
I think I’ve been on this platform forever. Actually, I have two Facebook pages, one that is my personal account and one that is my author account. Ironically, though my personal account has less followers, it gets more positive traffic, both in terms of views and viewers of my video’s and photos and website traffic. I look at Facebook as the OG of social media, but I think it still has some teeth, and I’ll probably explore doing more Facebook ads to test that theory.
Cost of Facebook ads to date – $110.58
Sales – 7 during the period
Obviously, there are many more ways to approach marketing, but I thought it might help some to share what I’ve experienced so far on my own. I will be seeking events such as local bookstore signings and book fairs to create opportunities for face-to-face engagement with readers.
One of the principal reasons we’re faced with the current difficulties in successful marketing is due to the environment created by Amazon. It’s original existence was to serve as an online bookstore as envisioned by Jeff Bezos, and it sold it’s first book one day after my 40th birthday in 1995. Today, anyone with a computer and an Amazon account can publish their writing in minutes. Self-published titles with new ISBNs stood at 3,500,000 in 2025, that’s almost 9,600 titles per day. Ergo, it’s increasingly difficult to make a new book stand out despite what marketing avenues are followed. It’s like adding a half cup of precious stones into a large salad bowl and then mixing in two pounds of cats-eye marbles. Good luck in trying to find the gems.
The next wave, thanks to AI, is the certain dilution of audiobooks. Just scroll through Facebook and you’ll encounter numerous AI companies offering gernerative AI voices, script to audio, or “studio-grade audiobooks quickly and affordably” all of which circumvent the real work that goes into creating one. Instead of saving up to hire real human voice talent and an engineer to ensure ACX quality or even doing the work yourself with training and equipment (mine cost a mere $465) I expect anyone with a manuscript to create an audiobook.
As always, I would relish hearing of your attempts, successes and failures, and your thoughts on AI for marketing purposes. Feel free to comment here or email me your thoughts to gary@garynilsen.com.
Gary's Writing Blog 