Estate by J. Andrew Shelley: How to market a novel in 2025?
This past summer, I was working with a wonderful client, author J Andrew Shelley on a marketing program for his second book, Estate. Estate is a unique book in that it is a novel, but it also winds in a lot of facts and tribulations about dealing with the passing of someone important to you. It's just not something that people think about very much or wanna talk about very much, is it? (You might remember that I did some photographs for the cover of this book several months ago and while they didn't even use my images on the front cover, I think it turned out to be a very engaging visual piece.)
So, then when death and estates is something that you have to think about….and you haven't ever learned anything about it and you're wandering around in the dark flailing wondering “who's gonna get the globe from grandpa’s study” and “how much money does everybody get”, and “how do we sell this house without losing all of it to taxes?”
One important thing about marketing something like this is…..who is it for? The appropriate audience could be anybody in the United States who will inherit something from a family member. That is a huge chunk of people. But how many of those people are going to buy a fictionalized tail of this most delicate and often traumatic of subjects. Shelley and I had several conversations about how best to approach this in 2025, especially as a self publishing author. He shared these statistics with me:
Traditional publishers publish 300k+ new books each year.
Amazon KDP is reported to publish 1.4 million new books each year. Some suggest that the number will be 2 million in 2025.
Only 35% to 50% of traditional titles (books that are sold in marketed by large publishing houses) are profitable.
How does one make an dent knowing that? How do you get yourself across? I think one way, not to say it's easy, is to put yourself out there personally on social media. I've done a fair bit of experimenting myself with TikTok and Instagram and the #booktok hastag has been hugely successful for some self published authors. But I would venture to guess that that is not just because of the book that they are selling necessarily to begin with, but because the audience has a connection with them.
You may not even realize that there are many well-known and successful writers today who started off as self-published writers. My big take away from market estate is that the rules (if they still exist) are changing every day. We did a whole bunch of Instagram ads, and Shelly built a great website and submitted the book to all the channels that you might think. In fact, Estate got a GET IT notice from Kirkus, which is amazing! But that has not translated into big sales. Not yet! I think it takes time! I think you have to build and build and build and not give up. What do you think?
