I’m sure I’m not the first indie author to struggle with the Octopus Syndrome. What should be a joyous time (the aftermath of the first self-published book) was among the most stressful periods of my life.

Marketing a self-published book involves a number of steps that make one wish for: 1) Available time doubled…no, quadrupled, or 2) A return to writing for a client, leaving the marketing end up to them!

First step: Create an author’s website. Done. Problem is, when the author has only one or two books to promote, it’s a challenge to flesh the website out into something worthwhile visiting. I did after numerous attempts manage to get Amazon’s links and widgets to work on the website. This first website, which I named Amish Writing, was a Joomla website, and after disabling the WYSIWYG editor, I finally discovered after several hours of hair-raising stress that there is a setting I needed to change in the global configuration to allow public HTML coding. The Amazon Associates site made it sound so simple – copy and paste, copy and paste; it may not be quite that simple on some websites! I was so proud of my success with the links and widgets, I may have overdone it! But at least they provided more content.

Second step: Create a social presence. This, of course, primarily translates into Twitter and Facebook, with Pinterest and Google + also competing for attention. It means following as many Twitter members who seem to have anything to do with writing and publishing as possible, hoping that some will follow you back. Facebook is even more time-consuming. Joining writing and publishing groups, liking writing and publishing groups (especially those with a Christian focus), sending out a zillion friend requests to writers and publishers. I did at the start try posting work-related posts to the new writing/publishing groups I had joined under my own Facebook account, and some of those posts were accessible to my social friends. Being a private person, I didn’t want the people I had gone to elementary school reading my publishing posts. So I would recommend creating an author Facebook presence – adding your own page and group if you like. Be cautious of joining too many new groups at once, though. This process seems to trigger an alert in the Facebook security system. My account was temporarily suspended until I could prove I was a real person, not a spam robot. So it is best to intermingle friend-gathering with group-joining. Sound exhausting? You bet. The worst part is you know that all of these people you are befriending are mainly interested in promoting their own work, not yours. It is similar to a school of male fish swimming in a pond looking for an available female. But what can you expect? We each have only so much time in a day. We all love writing but want to (need to) make a little money from it. Hopefully one way or the other, we can help each other!

Third step: Create a blog. I did this on Tumblr but have had zero time to add anything much to it.

Fourth step: Write articles and create your own subscriber email list on your website. Submit articles to article directories such as ezinearticles.com, mainly to build backlinks to your website but also to provide others with interesting information that will benefit them. Working on it!

Fifth step: Write and publish lots more books. More books will link back to previous books, building sales. Yes, I have lots of ideas for new books – but I need time to write them. Are you like me wondering how some indie authors do it? They publish a new book on Amazon or Smashwords every couple of weeks. Do they ever sleep? Do they have anything else going on in their lives?

Sixth step: Ask people (champion reviewers) for reviews of the books you do have published. On Amazon, to have much weight, they ideally should be verified purchasers – or have been given a book through a verifiable purchase. This is much easier to do in the United States than Canada, where I live. On Amazon.com, an author can send his or her eBook as gifts to prospective reviewers. I have yet to figure out how to do this on Amazon.ca. (If anyone knows, please let me know.) So the only other option is to make the book free for a limited time for everyone and promote like crazy during the promotional period to hopefully get a few of those critical reviews. Failing that, there is always the rather mediocre method of emailing MOBI or PDF versions of your book to your prospective reviewers.

There are a few more steps after this, but I need to catch up on some writing!

The bottom line: Self-marketing ain’t easy! Self-publishing may be a breeze in the age of digital, but you pay for it on the marketing end.

As the saying goes, “I’d much rather be writing!”

A few resources on Amazon that may help you if you are in the self-marketing boat:

Self-Publishing Marketing Tools