Category Other Issues

My 10 Rules for Writing and Marketing My Novels

Gary Nilsen Leave a comment

Since the time my first novel was released in 2016, so many things have changed. Finding ways to market against a tidal wave of new releases daily, considerations for AI usage, and which social media platforms to create content for. I’ve had a lot to think about over the last year or so. I’ve decided the way I move forward will be guided by a set of rules I’ve made for myself:

1 – Anything with my name on it will be written exclusively by me – AI will never touch any aspect of what I write.

2 – My developmental editor will be a human with knowledge and experience.

3 – My line editor will be a human with knowledge and experience.

4 – My proofreader will be a human with knowledge and experience.

5 – My cover art will be created with the help of graphic artists based on the information I give him/her in what I’m looking for. The person I hire will be directed that AI should not be used in creating their art.

Artwork by Tanvir Tareq

6 – I will resort to the creation of advertising images utilizing AI for situations that would be impossible to create from real photography – imagery that was imagined by me in writing settings.

AI Generated scene from my novel Flashback

7 – Whenever possible, I will hire actors in costume to populate characters in my advertising imagery to limit the use of AI.

Both models full length
Altered by my graphic artist

8 – Audiobooks of my work will be narrated by me or by professional voice actors – I will not use AI generated voice-overs.

9 – Going forward, I will not pay for reviews or “collaborations” with Book Influencers

10 – As I write in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres (so far), I will selectively create book trailers with AI assistance as it is not practical to hire actors to work in settings that don’t exist.

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Got My Newest Scam Attempt…

Gary Nilsen Leave a comment

So here is a new version of a scam that came at me over the last week or so.

Before anything else, I must state that a writer by the name of Sarah Moss is a real author with many published titles all of which are well reviewed.

A short time ago, I received a message on TikTok from Sarah Moss with the handle sarah.moss182 claiming she had come across my novel Flashback and wanted to connect – one writer to another. Naturally, I looked at the details of her profile and, like most writers, I thought it would be nice to connect with her. I looked up her author profile on Goodreads and Amazon and saw that Sarah Moss is a well-published and respected writer.

We messaged back and forth a couple of times. She asked me to exchange book links (Missed Clue #1 – if she was interested in Flashback, all she had to do was look it up on Amazon). She gave me hers – a link to Ghost Wall on Amazon. Then I went to paste my link in a message, but TikTok blocked it because they had to review it as it might be in violation of their TOS (Missed Clue #2 –  that had never happened with any other message exchange). I found that odd and tried to question TikTok what that meant – but admittedly their customer service is pretty poor and that got me nowhere. I told “Sarah” about it and she opened a group chat so we could correspond.

She showed me a graphic she’d ordered mine and it was in her cart. I then did the same for Ghost Wall. A few days later the book arrived and I posted a picture of it and sent it to her as proof that I’d purchased and received her book on the private group chat. She apologized for not having followed through on buying mine.

She mentioned my book didn’t have many reviews (Missed Clue #3 – I don’t think that would generally be a topic one author would talk to another author about). This was followed by her asking if I were open to suggestions. What was I going to say to a successful, well-published and reviewed author while I’m struggling to get my books out into the world?

Now I waited for an email from her book guru, Herbert. By next morning, there it was – Gmail address and all plus “Sarah” wasn’t even copied on the email, nor had “Sarah” copied me on her email to Herbert as would be normal for an email introduction.

I responded:

Guess what happened…

Screenshot

Result?

1 – Now armed against a different form of scam,

2 – I’m out $18.36,

3 – I own a copy of a very good book.

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Early Impressions on Marketing in 2026 – First Four Months

Gary Nilsen Leave a comment

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

Instagram

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

Facebook

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.

Sorrows to the Stones

Gary Nilsen 1 Comment

 

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Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones;

Who, though they cannot answer my distress,

Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes,

Titus Andronicus, Act III, Scene I

Sorrows to the Stones is a work in progress, novel title, but the quote from which it derives best defines the place for where my understanding of humankind has landed.

The late Dr. Karen Erickson, former Dean of the school of Arts and Sciences at Southern New Hampshire University and advocate of the Master of Fine Arts program once said the job of a writer is to observe and become the spokesperson of what those observations reveal. Writers hold the mirror of humanity, of society, and permit the reader to focus on what it means to be a participant of life.

I’ve had ample opportunity to observe over six and a half decades. I watched John Glenn launch in 1962, felt the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis, experienced the emotional shock of the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations. Observed the unfolding civil rights movement as integration and school busing blurred the strict segregation of African-Americans, the landing on the moon, daily reports from the battlefields of Viet Nam on the evening news. The freedom marches of 1963 and yet we succumb to riots like that in Los Angeles three decades later and now again with the murder of George Floyd.

I’ve seen the widening divergence of our two-party political system. Where a Venn diagram once showed the majority of red and blue dots in the center, now has solid white space between red and blue balloons. Gay rights and LGBTQ issues finally made it to the table of discussion, yet it seems even more dangerous to be anything other than a male or female heterosexual. Society had forged inroads to acceptance, but like a failed launch, the rocket has come crashing back to earth.

I observed the Islamic world through five years in the Middle East, seen unrelenting poverty of third-world nations where Philippinos, Yemenis, Pakistanis, and Asians made the equivalent of pocket change in comparison to their western counterparts. I’ve seen children in Africa with only a single outfit of clothing, herding flocks of goat and camel down barely paved roads. Soccer balls were the currency of youth on the streets of Asmara.

Then there was the election process of 2016, a turning point – my observations now hyper-focused with a clearer imperative. The simple act of writing stories faltered in the context of relevance. The stay-at-home version of existence thanks to Covid-19 allowed more time to scan posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram where the conduct of argumentation performs from the platform of absolutes. There is a tendency toward a lack of attention to perspective and the breeding of over-simplification. Smart phones provide the means by which bad behavior proves the point but also becomes a weapon to brand anyone and everyone with a scarlet letter. Someone is offended in one way or another at every moment. We live with daily character assassination, some warranted; many questionable. Civil wars of all issues, no matter the magnitude, rage and divide. Leadership tears at the fabric of our country and feeds the virus of disease that diminishes all progress. Worse, the creation of a permissive environment where racist and supremacist attitudes projecting hatred and narrow-mindedness are tolerated with tacit encouragement at the highest level.

I was fortunate not to be born in a time or place that would have subjected me to the likes of Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini. I have not been starved or suffered the threat of horrific death by bombings, political purges, or prejudice. I have faced many issues and difficulties, but for all that live a decent life. It doesn’t mean, however, my observations are any less accurate, nor is my perception of where we are heading, and it’s scary.

The brief respite the planet has enjoyed from human interaction has demonstrated some remarkable changes. Fish can be seen in the canals of Venice, carbon emissions are down, air quality is up, water is cleaner, animals stray farther from their limited habitats. It paints a clear picture of the damage we do and what we’ll continue to do once the pandemic passes. The DNA of human nature is rife with destructive tendencies. The media does a good job in demonstrating this with every article, news report, breaking headline, and interviews with every talking head imaginable. One cannot experience a half hour news program without feeling doom, even with the occasional uplifting story designed to restore a sense faith and hope eroded by our steady diet of reality.

I don’t know where we go from here, but from my observations and conclusions, it doesn’t look like a very good place. So, I share my woes with the stones…for their concern seems more genuine than that of my fellow man.

 

Photo by Nikhil kumar on Unsplash