It might surprise you to know that I am an introvert. This presents some unique challenges to a self-published author like myself. When you’re self-published, you’re not only in charge of the introvert-friendly roles like writing, editing, and publishing. You’re also responsible for the marketing, which is really more a field for extroverts. Marketing includes a lot of tasks that are just simply not in my wheelhouse. I dislike marketing so much that I even looked into going the traditionally published route to try to get out of it. Unfortunately, these days publishers want you to have active social media accounts, attend book signings, and be interviewed on podcasts.
In other words, there is no escape from marketing.
Part of being a writer is learning how to sell your books. If you don’t sell your books, you can still be a writer, but you’ll have to use a good chunk of what could be your writing time for a job that actually pays the bills. For those of you who are curious, I fall somewhere in the middle. I don’t make enough money solely from book sales to support my family, but I have earned a respectable amount of income from my book royalties. Thankfully, my husband works and I have other gigs (like YouTube ad revenue, coaching revenue, affiliate commissions, and freelancing in the tech realm) which allow us to make ends meet.
I published my first real book, The Laid Back Guide to Intermittent Fasting, back in 2018. Okay, technically my first published book was Baby Potty Training, but I don’t count that as my first book. The baby potty training guide was one that I put together from a blog I had about infant potty training when my kids were little. The Laid Back Guide to Intermittent Fasting was the first book I actually sat down and wrote. I made an outline, wrote each chapter, and then sent it out into the world.
It has been my best seller, by far, earning me over $100,000 in book royalties. But keep in mind, that was almost 8 years ago. One thing I learned over time was that books generally have a sales cycle. Typically, a book sells for a year or two, and then it moves to your backlist, where sales drop. This was not something I was prepared for. I thought if you wrote a book and it was helpful, it would just steadily sell forever. This is not true. Even if you actively market your book, your biggest selling months are behind you after the first two years, in the vast majority of cases. Which means that if you want to keep selling books, you must (a) continue to write and publish new material and (b) actively market your newest works and your backlist.
And this is where I, as an introvert, struggle. I love introvert-friendly tasks. I adore the process of writing. I even love the process of editing and rewriting. Formatting the completed manuscript can be quite enjoyable. But no matter how hard I work on a book, and no matter how much I love the book, the fact remains: telling people about my book is the hardest, most uncomfortable work I do. Unfortunately, any book, no matter how good it is, will languish if no one knows about it.
When I decided I wanted to be a writer, I really only thought about the writerly parts. You know, waking up, pouring myself a cup of coffee, shuffling down the hall in my robe and slippers to my perfectly appointed writer’s nook. I would sit down in my overstuffed wingback chair, a fountain pen sitting at the ready, and then commence typing my masterpiece at my big, sturdy, wooden writer’s desk that would turn J.R.R. Tolkien green with envy. After banging out a few perfect pages, I would retire to my reading for a while, perhaps take a little nap, and use the remainder of my day to think my writerly thoughts.
My reality is far less romantic. I do not have a dedicated writer’s nook, nor do I own a fountain pen. I am typing this blog post at my computer while I walk on a treadmill. More often, you’ll find me writing in bed, either writing longhand on a legal pad, or typing on my dated laptop. In the years since publishing my first book, I have written sometimes consistently, getting 1,000 new words a day written without fail, and at other times writing nothing at all for months on end.
Both our income and our expenses have varied widely, which means that sometimes I’ve needed to spend my time doing work that is more dependable, while at other times I have been free to do the riskier work of writing. The real challenge is that in order to keep selling books, I also must consistently be marketing. My main method of marketing my books has been my YouTube channel.
Like many introverts, I find it somehow easier to share the deeply personal details of my life with an audience of complete strangers than to attend a party where I’d need to make small talk with acquaintances. I enjoy making YouTube videos, but to this day, it is still difficult for me to market my books in them. I have learned that my book sales increase when I hold one of my books up and talk about it during a video. Tactics that were more introvert friendly, like putting a link to it in the description, or putting a picture of my book on the end screen of a video, simply didn’t work as well (or at all). Even when I’m consistently marketing on YouTube, I have found it to be a fickle beast. Even though I have 77,000 subscribers, and I have made 906 videos, I never know when a video will get a lot of views, or if it will completely bomb. It is a crapshoot.
Another layer of complexity I’ve decided to add to the mix is that I began to write fiction. While it is popular these days to “niche down” and focus on one audience and one type of writing, I am simply not built that way. And when I look at writers of yesteryear, I see they had varied interests, too. C.S. Lewis wrote theological essays, a young adult fantasy series, a sci-fi trilogy, and Christian speculative fiction. G.K. Chesterton wrote murder mysteries, Christian apologetics, poetry, and political philosophy.
The fiction books I’m writing are for different audiences. I’ve published two books in a young adult fantasy series (think The Chronicles of Narnia), and I’m working on book three. I’m also nearing completion of book one in a cozy mystery series called Semper P.I. that, while completely clean, is meant for adults, not middle-grade kids. This means that I must do even more marketing if I want these books to sell. Which I do. But by branching out into fiction, I need to build an entirely new audience.
I started my writer YouTube channel in September of 2024, with the intention of using it to market my fiction work. I stuck with it for precisely two months before I stopped adding more content to the channel. Why did I stop? I simply couldn’t devote the time necessary to it. Every video I make takes several hours to write, record, and edit. There are only so many hours in a day, and YouTube is not an easy nut to crack.
The truth about marketing for introverts is that it takes a lot of energy. I have come to the conclusion that I need to diversify my marketing efforts. I love YouTube, and I’m grateful for it. But I have real concerns about having a purely digital footprint. I am watching AI closely, and I worry about how it will affect the publishing world. I have decided to double down on being human. To that end, this past weekend I attended my first-ever local author expo. I was a nervous wreck before the event. I had two simultaneous fears: that no one would show up and that lots of people would show up.
But I showed up. I fumbled my way through talking about my books to people who had never heard of me before. I talked to someone who knew me from YouTube. I met one person who had read my book, but who I don’t think knew I had a YouTube channel. When it was all said and done, I was completely and utterly exhausted. My local library is planning on doing another author expo in the fall. And I plan on attending again. Will I be nervous? Yep. Will I fumble through my explanations of what my books are about? Most likely. But I’ll feel a little more comfortable than I did on Saturday. I know this because every time I hold my book up in one of my videos, I feel slightly more comfortable.
I doubt that I’ll ever really feel comfortable bringing up my book and talking about it in a group of people. It is simply not how I’m wired. But I do want to continue to be a writer, so I’ll keep plugging along, doing the uncomfortable work of marketing, so that I can continue doing the work I really want to be doing: writing.
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