Marketing an Indie Romance Novel: Week 01 Process & Results
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I’m taking a completely unknown author (Christine Mayfaire) and building an audience for her a contemporary romance novel series, starting with releasing her debut novel a chapter at a time on Medium.
Here’s how it’s going.
On August 01, I dropped the first chapter of Christine Mayfaire’s debut novel, “Better Than Fate”, on her Medium account.
Full disclosure: Christine Mayfaire is the combined pen name for me and my bestie Ami. “Better Than Fate” is our first co-written novel.
When I started, we had two followers and zero posts on Medium, and one of those followers was me. I had three followers on Instagram, and two of them were my other accounts. The third was a friend.
I was pretty much starting from nothing. I didn’t even have all the bots that had originally followed my Instagram account when I started it almost two years ago in anticipation of this day.
If I hadn’t already done so, that would have been step one for launching a new pen name you’re intending to use for a while:
1 Set up all of your social accounts and grab your URLs. I recommend you only work on growing one or two accounts at a time (in this case, Medium and Instagram), but lock down your handle on all of the major social media platforms.
Why? Two reasons.
- It keeps anyone else from stealing the handle you want to use
- It allows consistency between platforms should you want to use that handle in the future. From a marketing perspective it’s annoying when Instagram is under your name but Twitter is different.
Oh, and don’t add punctuation to your usernames if you can avoid it.
If you can afford to grab your URL (which will cost you less than $15/year), do that, too. It’s a small price to pay to be able to direct people to your author name… or your name in general.
You don’t have to do anything with it right away — I’ve been a digital marketer for well over a decade and I haven’t even set up a homepage for mine yet , it just redirects to Medium—but you’ll be glad you have it later.
