Reddit mentions of The Body Electric: Special Edition

Let's get this out of the way first: the biggest mantra of marketing indie books is write the next book.

This is one of the best pieces of advice--the more you have out, the more exposure you'll get. Sales lead to sales (true of both trad and indie--with every book I publish, I see a boost in past book sales). But it's also not feasible for everyone--some people require more than a few months to produce a novel ;)

My biggest learning curve over the last few months has been that marketing for traditional publication is different than marketing for indies. Marketing for indies is much more online-focused, and with good reason--most sales come from ebooks.

That said, doing live events did lead to sales of both the paper book and a boost of ebooks--but not enough to make it worthwhile to sink many funds into travel for the events. (A recent local booktour covering about a 400-mile area cost about $100 for me to participate in between gas and one night in a shared hotel room, and netted me about 20-40 sales/day.)

Leveraging social media has been my biggest boon, as well as adding value to the book by releasing a Limited Edition (now sold out) and special editions--here's the print regular and the print special edition; special editions are available at all platforms except Amazon in ebook form.

A solid newsletter base is something I never saw the value of before, but definitely realize is important now, and I've been steadily building up my subscriber base in part by developing a newsletter concept that's balanced between news about me/my books, and news about the sci fi and YA world. You can see a sample here. And I spoke more about developing my newsletter here.