[TfTi] Indie Authors, Rejoice!
Reaching Your Readers Is Your Responsibility

Which also means it’s in your control, the real reason to rejoice.

This post grew out of two items in my inbox recently:

• Rob Eagar’s newsletter item, “Your Publisher Is Not Your Marketer”
• The Washington Post newsletter item, “How a nearly 70-year-old debut novelist published 2025’s breakout hit”

Publishers Market to the Marketplace

It’s been common wisdom for years now: traditional publishers don’t market your book for you. They expect you to come with a platform and marketing plan laid out in your book proposal.

But Eagar draws an insightful distinction between what he calls “retail marketing” and “consumer marketing.”

Retail marketing, he says, “pushes books into the marketplace.” They do this with a sales and marketing process that focuses on contacts with bookstores, distributors, along with some advertising and publicity and Eagar allows “they’re generally competent” at those kinds of marketing — though other insiders tell us much of those efforts are reserved for books that sell north of 50,000 copies.

He goes on:

“But retail marketing does not create reader demand. It merely makes the book available.”

Read that again.

It amuses amazes frustrates baffles me — I really don’t know what the right emotion is, probably any of those and more at a given moment — when I hear folks talk about how traditional publishers have distributors and can get books into bookstores.

So what? They “sell” books to bookstores on consignment. Getting your book on a store shelf does not mean it’s been sold to or read by anyone. If that doesn’t happen, they get “remaindered” and sent back to the publisher to be ground into pulp for the next author’s dream.

And more likely than getting it on a shelf, publishers will make your book “available” by getting it listed in Ingram’s catalog.

Which anyone can do by publishing on Amazon KDP with expanded distribution, or on IngramSpark (see my post, Which Big Dog Will You Choose).

Authors (Should) Market to Readers

So if the kinds of marketing traditional publishers are “generally competent” at doesn’t create reader demand, what does?

Eagar explains:

“Consumer marketing does something else entirely. It pulls readers toward a book. It requires identifying the exact audience most likely to care and engaging them directly — through email, podcasts, social media, speaking, partnerships, communities, advertising, and word-of-mouth.

“This is what actually drives sales.”

He tells us that “most publishers are weak” at this kind of marketing. And he points out that it’s because of their focus on blockbuster titles that they cannot devote resources to “building a custom audience” for every book they publish.

In other words, they won’t do consumer marketing for new authors or mid-list books to uncover and engage with their readers.

As Eagar concludes:

“In reality, publishers are optimized for retail access, not reader attraction.

“When authors don’t understand this distinction, they over-rely on the publisher and under-own the one form of marketing that actually moves the needle: consumer marketing.”

How One Indie Author Reached His Readers

The Washington Post (WP) article linked above demonstrated that the writer failed to understand the distinction, too, with its subtitle, “With virtually no marketing or social media presence, Theo of Golden became a blockbuster.”

The article starts out by telling us that in the Spring of 2025 the publishing industry started noticing a self‑published novel “that was fast becoming one of the biggest sellers of the year.”

Apparently, among those in the industry and the article writer, “No one knew exactly how.”

She asserts in that first paragraph:

“Theo of Golden had limited distribution, and virtually no publicity or marketing campaign. Its author, Allen Levi, lived alone on 1,600 acres of family land — mostly pine trees — in Georgia, where he kept honeybees and a blog, and posted homespun music videos. That was about the extent of his social media footprint.”

Um, well, we’d say a blog of his own on his branded website and a YouTube channel for his music would be a nice start at building a social media footprint.

But yes, that line about “limited distribution, and virtually no publicity or marketing campaign” harks back to the traditional publishing notion that retail marketing is what any bestseller needs.

I’ll skip the parts describing Levi’s writing and the book’s content and get to what he actually did to reach his readers and mystify the industry.

It started with getting help from his niece, Aron Ritchie, to get the book published in October 2023 (here is the Amazon sales page for the original paperback edition). That’s nearly a year and a half before the buzz described at the outset of the WP article. Keep that timeline firmly in mind, lest you think this is an overnight success story.

Back to Levi and his niece:

“Though she had thrown herself into researching the ins and outs of independent publishing, she took a low‑fi approach to publicity.”

Indeed. I would have edited that to say she took a “no-fi” approach to publicity, i.e., from what’s covered in the article, they didn’t do any. Instead,

“She compiled a spreadsheet of Levi’s sprawling network from the various chapters of his life — childhood, college, music, his volunteer work reading to elementary-schoolers and working at a foster home — asking contacts to spread the word.”

Stop and think about that starting point. I’ll confess I’m like many of our clients and would have struggled to pull together a “sprawling” list. But her method of breaking down “the chapters of his life” seems like a great way to recall people and groups you may have been out of touch with for a while, but who might be happy to reconnect and learn about your latest endeavor.

And the lesson: your network is likely much bigger than you at first think. Spend some more time mapping it out.

Then she opened another front:

“At night, after putting her kids to bed, she posted to Facebook groups from her phone, trying to reach book clubs across the country.”

Note another addition to their social media footprint, Facebook, overlooked by the WP writer. But more importantly, note the targets: groups and book clubs.

Then comes the part where she put Levi to work:

“If they were within driving distance, Levi drove to visit in person, meeting with 10 or 20 people at a time.”

Unsaid in the article, but implied, Levi probably contacted and interacted virtually with the groups and book clubs outside his driving distance. That’s a consumer marketing path we urge for all our clients.

Once they had some sales, Ritchie enabled her uncle to engage directly with happy readers:

“Every few weeks, she prepped him a call sheet titled ‘Good souls to connect with’: readers who had emailed Levi touching thank-you notes, or who wanted to teach the book in a course, or who shared it with their cancer support group.”

The results? By the end of 2023, they’d sold around 3,000 copies. In 2024, they sold 25,000. By the time the publishing industry became aware, in Spring 2025, they were selling a thousand copies a day.

All of this on the consumer marketing efforts of Levi and his niece.

And then, of course, Levi began fielding offers from traditional publishers. His wise niece “ran the numbers and told her uncle that he stood to make more money if he stayed independent.” (We’ve run the numbers, too, in Weighing the Investment in Your Book: Indie, Hybrid, or Traditional Publishing.)

Levi, however, bought into the illusion that a traditional publisher’s retail marketing and distribution channels would lead to more sales. Ritchie says, “But what he was willing to sacrifice for was the distribution.”

We wish him luck, but hope he keeps reaching his readers himself — and listening to his niece.