Purgatory

The three days between uploading the final file and the publication day were relatively relaxed. There was literally nothing I could do – the book was coming out! We came home from holiday and I started to think about marketing and advertising. Things that are totally outside my comfort zone.

Self-publishing and Marketing Courses

Udemy: I bought some courses on Udemy about Amazon marketing and Ads. If you don’t know Udemy, definitely check it out because there are some brilliant courses on there, and you can get all of them for around £13.99. I’ll add some links to the courses I’ve taken.

Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/home/

Alex Genadinik: Bestseller Book Marketing

https://www.udemy.com/share/102eF03@B1e77MIpSbsFMltS0z3khOyaeWdvy5IC-_SilTFhn_ro62jgL2Vt-noOJR8f1YNlmA==/

Sumner Hobart: Amazon SEO Reviews and Listing Optimization Strategy

https://www.udemy.com/share/101O0d3@2As9meQWxWB0jXnd7qj1_lMZHrLqoDeZ0jARKv7eS0oQiFQcmsXzLR4MhhMC-z7IJw==/

Non-Udemy: Most self-published authors would probably say that the gold standard for courses are the Mark Dawson courses. Mark Dawson is a very successful self-published author, and he runs a number of very popular courses. I decided against taking one of his courses mainly because I was swayed by a few self-published authors on another forum to ‘spend the £600 on advertising rather than a course’. This seemed like good advice at the time. I’m not so sure now.

SPF Community Facebook Group

I am a member of Mark Dawson’s SPF Community Facebook group. There is a lot of helpful free information and experienced people on this site. There are also some people who are less helpful, but that’s life in a Facebook group. You need a thick skin.

Anyway, so I started stepping up watching the Udemy videos, and trying to learn as quickly as I could. I also found another tool that is fairly good for marketing, and very good for procrastination: InVideo.

InVideo for Advertising

https://invideo.io

Most traditionally published authors seem to have a book trailer today for their books. I don’t know if these actually sell books, and my publishers never bothered to make one for my other books, but I decided to have a go at doing it myself.

InVideo has a limited free service, and if you pay for a subscription you can use stock video footage. I made my first trailer with free footage only, and then for the second one I subscribed and paid for some stock footage. Alternatives to InVideo include Canva and BookBrush. I’m sure there are many others.

I had a lot of fun playing around with InVideo, and I like the two videos I made. I ended up using the videos I made for Facebook marketing and on Twitter. I want to make another video to keep trying to create engagement, but I just don’t have time at the moment. I easily spent one solid day making my two video trailers. In the end, I think they are too long and I spent too much time.

Lessons learned:

1. There are a lot of things I don’t know. I need to find people who can help me.

2. Udemy is a great place to start. You can get a lot of good information relatively inexpensive.

3. Facebook forums are good sources of information, but sometimes you need a thick skin to interact with people there.

4. InVideo – This is a relatively easy way to make a book trailer. There are templates there and also thousands of stock footage clips and music clips. You could literally spend days there, so manage your time wisely.

5. InVideo – Next time, I will make more use of the templates to save time.