Publication is not discovery. A book nobody has heard of sells like a book nobody has written, and closing that gap is a separate discipline from writing it.
Most independent books do not fail because they are bad. They fail because the only people who ever learn of them are the author's friends, and a book with no audience looks identical, from the outside, to a book with no merit.
Marketing is the work of making a book findable by the people who would want it, which starts with the unglamorous part, the listing itself, and only then becomes campaigns. Nothing here is a promise about outcomes. It is a set of things that can be done well or badly, done well, and reported to you honestly either way.
Not all of these suit every book. The first conversation is usually about which two or three are worth doing properly rather than all five badly.
- 01
Listing and metadata
The least glamorous and most reliably effective work there is: title fields, description, categories and keywords set so that readers searching for a book like yours are shown yours.
- 02
Social media
Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube, organic content and paid advertising, built around the book's actual readership rather than a general audience.
- 03
An author website
Somewhere that is yours rather than rented: excerpts, the story behind the book, and a route to buy it that does not depend on a platform's algorithm.
- 04
Email
Your subscriber list is the only audience you own outright. Newsletters and launch sequences written to keep it warm and to tell it when there is something to buy.
- 05
Content and press
Articles, blog posts and press releases that give people a reason to write about the book, placed where the readers of your genre already are.
Four things to insist on from anyone you pay to promote a book.
- 01
Honest about outcomes
Nobody can promise you a bestseller list, a number of sales, a review or a media placement. Anyone who does is selling certainty they do not have. You will be told what will be done and what it is reasonable to expect.
- 02
Reported with figures
Every campaign ends in a report of what was done and what resulted, with the data behind it. That includes the parts that did not work, which is the only way the next campaign is better.
- 03
Built for your book
A literary memoir and a military thriller do not share an audience or a channel. The plan starts from who actually reads your book rather than from a template.
- 04
You see the whole process
Full transparency about what is running, where the budget is going and what it is producing, shared as it happens rather than summarised afterwards.
Eight steps, beginning well before publication and continuing after it.
Initial consultation
A conversation about the book, the readership and what you actually want, which is not always sales, and is worth establishing before any money is spent.
Book review
The book and its current listings are read and assessed, so the campaign is built on what the book is rather than on what the brief says it is.
Information gathering
The material the campaign will need: your background, the book's story, the angle that makes it worth someone's attention.
Fact-checking
Everything that will be said publicly about you and the book is checked before it is said. A claim that does not survive scrutiny is worse than no claim.
Pre-launch
Anticipation built before publication day, when the listing is live and the reviews are not yet. This is the window most independent launches waste.
Launch
The publication itself carried through press releases, social posts and coverage, concentrated rather than spread thin.
Post-launch
The work that keeps a book alive after its first week, articles, ongoing content, and the long tail of search that outlasts any campaign.
The report
A full account of the campaign: every action, its result, and what the data suggests is worth doing next. Including the parts that did not work.
A few of the people the house has worked with, in their own words.
I had eleven years of notes and no book. What I got back read like me on a good day, my turns of phrase, my arguments, and none of the padding I would have added myself. The first chapter arrived and I stopped worrying.
Marianne ElleryIndependent author The structural edit was not comfortable reading. It told me the second half started in the wrong place, which I had suspected for a year and nobody had said out loud. Moving three chapters fixed a problem I had been trying to solve with better sentences.
Devon AlukoIndependent author What sold me was being told I did not need half of what I had asked for. I came in wanting the full package and left with a cover, a proofread and an honest explanation of why the rest would not have helped yet.
Priya RaghunathanIndependent author Three cover directions, all of them plausible, none of them the thing I had described. The one I picked worked at the size that actually matters, I could recognise it in a list of forty other books, which is more than I can say for my first attempt.
Tobias HearnIndependent author I own the book outright and that was written down before I paid anything. After two years of being quoted percentages by people who would not put them in writing, that was the whole reason I stayed.
Cecile MarchandIndependent author The audiobook took longer than I expected and they told me why each time rather than going quiet. The narrator they cast got my grandmother's accent right, which I had assumed would be the thing I had to let go of.
Nathan BoakyeIndependent author
What authors want to know before spending money on promotion.
Start with the listing rather than the campaign: metadata, categories and keywords decide whether readers searching for a book like yours are ever shown it, and fixing them costs nothing. After that, a tailored plan combining online advertising, a launch campaign, your author website and email to your own list will do more than any single channel. The order matters, advertising to a badly categorised listing is paying to send people somewhere that will not convert them.
It varies with genre and audience more than most marketers admit. Consistently worth doing: optimising metadata and keywords for search, engaging readers on the platforms your genre actually uses, seeking honest reviews from legitimate sources, virtual tours and author events, and email to a list you own. What works for a cookbook does not work for military fiction, so the honest answer is that the strategy follows the book.
It lets you talk to readers directly and build a following that persists between books, which is worth more over a career than any single launch. Practically: content about the book, giveaways, excerpts, work shared from behind the scenes, collaborations with book communities, and targeted advertising where it suits. It is a long game, and treating it as a launch-week switch is the most common way authors waste it.
We can approach reviewers, bloggers and press on your behalf and give them a genuine reason to be interested. We cannot commit their answer, and nobody can, a firm that promises you reviews is either buying them, which the retail platforms remove and penalise, or promising something outside their control. Paid placements, where they are used, will always be identified to you as paid.
No, and it is worth saying so. Plenty of authors market their own books well, and the listing work that matters most is something you can learn. What you are buying by hiring someone is time and pattern recognition across a lot of launches, not access to a channel you could not reach yourself.
You do, completely. The author holds 100% of the rights to their work, in every format, for its whole life. The house is paid for the work it does, not with a share of the book. That is the arrangement the house reopened in 2008 to offer, and it does not change with the tier, the price or the point at which you come to us.
Yes. Your name is on the cover and in the record. Everyone who works on the book (writer, editor, designer) works on your book, and none of them is credited on it unless you ask for them to be.
Yes. Your story is yours, and nothing about the project leaves the house. We will sign your NDA before you send anything, or supply ours if you would rather use one.
No. Six disciplines are available and you take the ones you need. Authors arrive here at every stage (with an idea, a half-draft, or a finished manuscript that only needs a cover and a shelf) and the work starts where you actually are.
It depends on the work: length, how much research is involved, how much of the book already exists, and which disciplines you need. There is no list price for a book, and any firm who gives you one before reading your material is quoting something other than your book. Tell us where you are and we will price the actual job.
Move the marker. You do not need to know what to call it: you only need to know where you are.
Tell us where your manuscript is, where you want it to go, and we'll show you what's possible.