Wow, a lot of posts came in. I need to get busy here.
Thanks, Polenth. You and winks have a point about pricing. And from the SFF marketing podcast, a full novel's price should be at least $2.99, although I guess it's considered advantageous to drop the price for special promotions, like BookBub (if you can get it).
AgathaChristieFan (btw, I'm one, too), one of the podcast hosts also writes cozy mysteries, so I'd say the advice they give should cross genres. Just look at the titles of the individual episodes, as well as the guest speakers. One of their guests was a romance writer, and a lot of her advice was tailored to people writing 40k books, which I guess is common in that genre, but it didn't apply much to me. I didn't finish that one.
They've only got a few podcasts on social media, and the general gist of that was that you shouldn't take too much time on it, which is advice I'm trying to take to heart.
As a cautionary note: these authors all publish a lot, as in at least six titles per year. And from what I've been able to glean, that's a marketing move all on its own, especially if you advertise. In fact, if you do both, according to Joanna Penn (How to Market a Book, plus she's also got a lot of free stuff about marketing on her blog), you don't actually have to do anything other than that. She just launched a new sweet romance pen name this year, and she said she's already maintaining platforms for her fiction and nonfiction work, so she didn't want to add another.
Concerning Facebook, I did glean something useful from the podcast. Pay for a boosted post (which will reach everyone who liked your page or profile) only for new releases.
As bonus info, on another podcast episode they discussed paying for boosted tweets on Twitter, and none of them found it was worth the money.
I don't do much with Facebook. I've got if-this-then-that protocols set up so that everything I blog automatically gets posted there. I've only got fifty likes (I'm better at getting newsletter subscribers, and that's hard.) But it's supposed to matter that I'm there. Facebook is still the most popular social media there is (just think of all the people you know whose only social media account is Facebook). From what I've read, you want to be find-able on that media. Also, you want to control your name. This is hypothetical, but the last thing I want is to be confused with another Cathleen Townsend who has outspoken views that I'd find totally reprehensible, like white supremacy or such. So it's a way of safeguarding your online identity. I pop in and check it every week or so, less when I'm hammered for time, and it only takes a few minutes.
Although for this year, I also loaded a year's worth of posts onto the scheduler. Three times a week, and they're mostly uplifting quotes by fantasy authors, although I do substitute in holiday stuff as well, and not just for Christmas. As an example, in January I posted a series of quotes by famous black women in honor of Black History Month. And I hit most holidays (like Groundhog Day) with happy, non-confrontational memes. That cost me some time, and I'm not sure yet if it's worth it because I only started it this year. But the if-this-then-that stuff only needs set-up, and then it takes no time at all.
One caution on if-this-then-that. Don't automatically post your tweets to your Facebook page. I look at two or three Facebook posts per day as the absolute max (that includes sharing other people's stuff), whereas on Twitter, my minimum is eight tweets a day (in the scheduler), and that doesn't count all the retweeting I do, which is usually at least twice the base tweeting. (Yet another aside--only two of my scheduled tweets are book promotion--the others are funny memes, quotes, and evergreen blog content.) Anyway, that many Facebook posts would annoy people, and they'll unfriend you.
rwm, most of my time on goodreads is spent on the Reading Rounds groups when I'm a part of one. But there is a way to if-this-then-that your blog posts onto goodreads, and I've done that. I mean, why not? I'm already writing the posts, and you never know. I have no idea what results I've gotten, if any, but it's free, and it's a one-time task, so it's no big deal if it never nets me anything.
April, hugs back to another fairy tale lover! And yes, I listened to KM Shea's SFF marketing podcasts, and I even went to check out her blog and her work on Amazon. As concerns her marketing strategy, which mostly seems to consist of publishing a lot and blogging (she doesn't even care if readers get on her newsletter), she got her start back in "the gold rush years" at the beginning of this decade. I'm not sure it's something a writer could replicate in the current marketplace, although she also publishes a lot, which seems to be a constant.
Although I have considered targeting her readers with my as-yet hypothetical AMS ads.
M. H., I just went to Amazon and bought your book on AMS. I figure the last thing I need is to try to figure out all the stuff you already know.
And thank you so much for passing on the term noblebright. It is such a pain Googling fantasy. Most of the hits seem to be for fantasy football or sex stuff. Even trying fantasy fiction didn't help much. There's just too much football stuff out there.
Thanks so much, everyone.
ETA: It seems I always post something and then remember something else I wanted to say, and this time is no exception. Grr.
I never quite finished my thoughts on book promotion and frequency of publishing. So we already covered that if you publish a lot, you can squeak by with no social media at all, not even a blog (although everyone needs at least a static website).
But what if you're like me, and the thought of publishing six books a year is currently out in fantasyland?
One of the book marketers I've followed, because he gives away lots of free info, is Tim Grahl. He orchestrates book releases for a lot of big names, and he has a system that covers all the way up to nine months before publication, and he's worked with SP authors as well.
You can get the blueprint for his system for free, by signing up for free email courses, although if you want exact details of how to go about it, you have to fork out money for his main course (no surprise there).
But he covers a timeline to getting all this stuff out. It makes a book launch way more work than publishing frequently and getting your ads lined up, and like I said, if you do everything, it'll take you nine months.
I
think successful SP publishing works something like this:
You have three main components in your arsenal for avoiding the dreaded internet cloak of invisibility.
1. Your books themselves, which should be of professional quality,
2. Paid advertising, like AMS, Bookbub, Freebooksy, etc.,
3. And social media, which is free, but it will cost you time. That includes leveraging your social media, like writing guest blog posts to increase your internet friends, which will come in very handy at launch time.
If you do any two of the three a
lot, that seems to be working, and this is for established authors, but they've used this stuff recently to launch new pen names (not just JF Penn, but the podcast authors have done this, too). As an aside, the podcast hosts all have at least Facebook accounts, and they blog, although not that often, like once a month.
And everyone does email lists. Consensus is so rare in the gig that when I find it, I really pay attention.
If you have more of a trade publishing schedule, like once a year, we need to act more like trade published authors in this area. That includes reaching out to media, book bloggers (which I've personally found to be a time sink with not that much payoff), etc.
These two models work. They've been used multiple times by many authors, and the results seem to be fairly reliable.
So of course, what I'm trying is a hybrid model. I definitely want to publish more than once a year, although a lot of mine have thus far been trade publications in ezines and such, which is something I'm going to be backing away from. It was important to me for the validation--yes, my writing really is of professional quality, since publishers are actually willing to pay me for it.
But I've had ten of them, and I mostly get my validation from reviews now. And I'm not sure ezines and anthologies netted me anything in terms of readers. If they did, it was small.
So, I want to try to amp up my personal publication schedule to at least two books a year, preferably three. Heaven knows I've got enough of the things already written. I'm still sitting on eight novel manuscripts and one short story collection. None of them are quite ready, although four are pretty close.
(The problem is I drafted seven novels before I knew anything about writing other than grammar, punctuation, and all the nonfiction writing you have to do to get a writing-based degree. I've learned a lot about writing from trying to fix them, and also from writing short stories and posting in SYW. (SYW critters, I love you sooo much.) But honestly, those seven books were so riddled with problems that it will probably be faster to just rewrite the last two, which have had very little beta input, rather than fixing the existing drafts.)
I've been pretty successful with my novelette, Stolen Legacy, at least in terms of email subscribers, (I just hit 173 today!) so I figure I know how to work that length fairly well. So I'm considering trying to supplement getting out my early novels with some novelettes, which are faster.
Novelettes come with another advantage--I get to write something new. I wrote very little new last year--I focused on editing and figuring out social media--and it's driving me nuts. And ultimately, your attitude about this stuff matters. So I want to work this in as well.
Anyway, what I'm going to try is getting out as many quality books that I can, which will probably be 2-3 per year max, at least at my current skill level. I hope to get better at managing all this stuff, but it's unwise to put together a business plan that depends on skills you don't yet have.
I'll continue with my current social media (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, blog), although I'm going to try to put less time into it. The scheduler has already helped there, although if you're going that route, I'll warn you that it was a
huge time sink for me up front. It took six solid weeks of many hours per day last fall, although part of that was making my graphic ads for short stories, books, and evergreen blog posts. I made sure I chose a scheduler that saved the posts (eclincher), so I should never have to work that hard at it again.
I'm going to try as many paid promotions as work, measured by expanding readership, particularly email list. I'd like to break even, but I can suck up small losses.
And I'm going to do some of the stuff on the Tim Grahl checklist, but not all of it. I'm not sinking nine months into every launch. I have too many books. So I'll try the stuff that takes maybe two months lead time.
I hope this helps someone out there. It took a year of my life to figure out this plan. And I don't even know if it will work yet.
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Having read that book, I think you're selling it too cheap. I'd buy it for more than .99 cents! Why not start at 2.99 now? What's stopping you? 
