Quarterly Blog(Q325): Marketing my book ...

Publishing the book had been tough but great fun, however it is only 50% of the work, the other 50% is marketing which I had parked up until now. I had started this whole process without a marketing strategy!

Having zero marketing experience, I could have outsourced the work to a marketing 'expert' but decided I wanted to take up the challenge myself. I self-published, so why couldn't I self-market? More importantly, I wanted to retain control over how I represented myself and my brand.

The first place I started was my nearest and dearests. I told a lot of my closest friends and family that I had published a book on Financial Freedom and the overwhelming response was positive. You get the odd person who questions why or goes quiet, but most were encouraging and positive. This was just a starting point, it gave me a huge amount of feedback and ultimately confidence. However, friends and family are limited and bias!

I next placed my book in selected Indie Book Shops. I wasn't sure how I would be received, as I was an unknown author and this was my first book. And let's face it, Finance is important but isn't particularly exciting.

I managed to get my book on the shelves of the iconic Notting Hill Bookshop (featured in the Hollywood Movie Notting Hill starring Julia Roberts & Hugh Grant), they were very receptive to helping a local author. I love this little bookshop and visit it regularly.

I was successful in getting my book on the shelf at Pitshanger Bookshop and Paperbacks Coffee Shop in West London. However, these were local, I needed to go online and global.

I created my own website and then took to social media. Again having literally zero experience on social media, I experimented with different platforms and found Instagram the most suitable. Within a year, I have built up a following of 3,500 followers and rising! Not bad as the average number of followers people have on Insta is about 250.

I found my book reached new audiences and starting building sales around the world - USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, India, France, Holland, Belgium and so on. It was a surreal feeling that my little book was sitting on a bookshelf half-way around the world, and it was helping them achieve their dream of becoming financially independent.

As the sales picked up, the reviews started to trickle in. Currently I have an overall rating of 5 on Amazon and 4.9 on Goodreads.

This gave me the confidence to submit my book for a couple of international literary competitions.

I was delighted with the feedback I received from friends and family, readers reviews. I now needed to put myself out there to be independently judged by experts in the literary world... this would be my acid test.

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