Book Marketing for the Author Who Is Already Doing Too Much
EPISODE ONE HUNDRED EIGHT
This episode is for the author who is already showing up, already trying, and still not seeing her marketing move the needle. Because the problem isn't the effort. It's where the effort is going. Jenn breaks down why most authors aren't losing time to marketing. They're losing it to the chaos around marketing. And what actually changes when you have a clear system underneath everything you create. If you've been telling yourself you'll get serious about this when things slow down, this one is worth your time right now.
Links
Book Marketing Blueprint FREE download
Transcript
Let me guess how your marketing time actually goes.
You sit down to post something. You open Instagram. You scroll for a few minutes trying to get a feel for what's working. Twenty minutes later you're still scrolling, and now you're also comparing yourself to three other authors and wondering if you should be on TikTok.
You open a blank post. You type something. You read it back and delete it. You rewrite it. You stare at it. You finally post it, maybe forty-five minutes after you sat down and spend the rest of the day checking to see if anyone liked it.
And then you do this two or three times a week. And at the end of the month, you've spent hours on marketing, you're exhausted, and your book sales look basically the same as last month.
This is the author I want to talk to today. Not the author who isn't showing up. The one who is and is running herself into the ground doing it.
I'm Jenn Hanson-dePaula, and I've been working with authors for nearly 20 years. And I want to offer you a reframe that I think is going to change how you feel about all of that time you've been spending on your book marketing.
You don't have a time problem. You have a systems problem.
Here's what I mean. The time you're spending on marketing right now isn't actually going towards your marketing. It's going towards decision fatigue. What do I post today? Is this good enough? Should I try a different angle? What are other authors doing that I'm not? That mental overhead - the scrolling, the second-guessing, the starting over from scratch every single week - that's where your time is disappearing. Not into marketing. But rather into the chaos around marketing.
And there's a massive difference between those two things.
An hour of scattered, unfocused effort and an hour of clear, intentional effort pointed in a specific direction are not the same thing. One creates noise. The other creates momentum. And if you've been giving marketing your time without giving it a direction, you've been experiencing decision fatigue which is why it feels like a black hole.
I want to tell you about an author I worked with. She had two young kids, a book that had been out for a month, and sales that were nowhere near where she'd hoped. She told me she had maybe an hour a week for marketing, if she was lucky. And every time she sat down to use that hour, she'd spend most of it trying to figure out what to post, and then feel like whatever she posted didn’t matter anyway.
She wasn't ignoring her marketing. She wasn't unmotivated. She cared deeply about her book. She was just maxed out, and her marketing had no clear direction, so none of the time she gave it was compounding into anything.
When we worked together, that's where we started. Not with tactics. Not with a content calendar full of random ideas. We started with the foundation underneath everything: who her reader was, what her book gave that reader, and what her content needed to say to make those readers stop and see themselves in it. Once that was clear, the hour she had stopped being wasted. Every minute she spent was pointed at something specific.
In 90 days, she sold 3,400 copies. Same book. Same platform. Same number of hours. The difference wasn't her schedule. It was that her marketing finally had a direction.
That's what a system does. It doesn't give you more time, it makes the time you already have actually count.
And here's the thing I want you to sit with: if you've been telling yourself you'll get serious about marketing when things slow down, when the kids are older, when work settles, when life gives you a little more breathing room - that moment probably isn't coming. But your marketing can still work inside the life you actually have right now.
Because this isn't about posting every day. It's not about being on every platform. It's not about spending your evenings crafting the perfect post. The authors who are building something substantial aren't out-posting you. They're out-systeming you. They know what they're saying, who they're saying it to, and why. So when they sit down to create content, it takes fifteen minutes instead of an hour. And every piece they post is doing a job instead of filling space.
Once you build that foundation - once you know your reader, your core messages, and the three types of content your marketing needs - you can plan a full month of content in about two hours. And then you can maintain it in one to two hours a week after that. Not because marketing got easier. Because it got clear.
If you're an author who is already showing up, already trying, already spending time on this, you don't need to do more. You need what you're already doing to actually work. And that starts with building the system underneath it.
The 90-Day Book Sales System walks you through exactly that. It was designed specifically to work in one to two hours a week. Because most authors don't have more than that, and they shouldn't have to. If those are the kind of results that you’re looking for, the link is in the description for this episode.
And if you want to grab my free Book Marketing Blueprint first, it takes about fifteen minutes and shows you exactly which pieces of your foundation are missing — that link is in the description for this episode as well.
Next time, I'm talking to the author who has invested in marketing help before, did the work, and still didn't see results. If that's you, and you've been burned enough times that you're skeptical of spending another dollar on this, that episode is specifically for you. Don't skip it.
I'll see you then.