How Marketing Actually Started for Me

For my first book, what did I actually do to market it? Nothing. It just kind of existed, out there, unmarketed, for anyone who happened to stumble onto it, which was almost nobody.

So when did that change? Not until my third book, when I opened an author TikTok account and started marketing there for the first time.

I'm not naturally good at marketing, and that's okay

Here's the part that surprised me: I'm not particularly good at marketing. I don't have a strategy, and I'm not naturally persuasive online. But just telling people about my books on TikTok was enough to get me my own selling stand at a local event. After that, word got passed around on its own. Now people locally actually know about my books and ask me about them all the time.

Why did one small, unpolished step lead to something bigger? Because marketing doesn't have to start polished or strategic to work. It can start as just telling people what you made, out loud, in public, without a plan behind it. One small, low-stakes step, posting online, led to a bigger real-world opportunity, a stand at an event, which led to organic word-of-mouth that I never engineered directly. That's a far more realistic marketing story for a first-time author to expect than some big, orchestrated launch campaign.