I marketed my books on TikTok and Instagram Reels for 60 days straight. Here's what happened

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Hello friends. I apologize if you can hear the yard work. I closed the windows, but it's it's that time of year where it's hard to avoid hearing a neighbor doing yard work. So, sorry about that. Today, I wanted to get back to the topic of marketing on Tik Tok and Instagram, especially Instagram reels.

[00:00:20]And these videos are particularly geared to people like me who are not good at social media and hate doing it and don't have a ton of experience with social media marketing. It has been one of my goals this year to kind of work my way into social media marketing and finding a way to make it feel like it's not this huge burden on my life and that it's not taking up a ton of my bandwidth and that it feels a little bit fun even maybe.

[00:00:51]So, last year when the potion dealers had released pretty recently, I did a 30-day challenge on Tik Tok and Instagram, and I did a video about how that turned out, and it seemed like I had a bit of a sales bump from it, but it was hard to tell because the book had just come out. So, it was hard to figure out for sure whether the sales bump was coming from my social media marketing efforts or whether it was just coming from the YouTube channel and pre-existing fans. Well, now it's been a while and my sales had really started to drop off and I hadn't been doing any marketing. So, I figured this was a good time to do a new challenge and really be able to tell if it made any difference because my sales were quite low. So, it's it's easy to see if this marketing made any kind of change. So, I'm going to talk about my results and I'm going to talk about some of the insights that I learned doing the 60-day challenge as kind of a followup from the 30-day challenge. When I did the 30-day challenge, I learned a lot of the basics of Tik Tok and Instagram.

[00:02:00]There's inevitably going to be some overlap and information between those two videos, but if you want to watch that one, I will link to that in the description. But this is kind of a part two. Oops. I just realized I forgot to turn on my microphone receiver. So, I also apologize for the sound being a little crappy for the first couple of minutes, but it's it's working now. When I did the initial Tik Tok Instagram challenge, it seemed like I was seeing results, but it was also taking up a ton of time and energy. And I learned a lot of the basics of like what are the common types of videos and slideshows to make, but it was like, oh my gosh, this is taking up a stupid amount of time.

[00:02:42]It's not really worth it. But after taking some months off and thinking back on that challenge, I started thinking more and more like, how can I do this in a way that's sustainable? That was like my number one goal with this challenge is to see if I could figure out a process that was sustainable. And the other thing is I had come to see the value in doing ongoing marketing efforts. Not only is it bringing in new readers and just getting the word out about your book to people who haven't heard of you, but it's also continuously reminding your pre-existing audience that you exist, your books exist, kind of what they're about, when you're going to release a new one. I mean, if you're into marketing, it's like, duh. Of course, that's what marketing does. But it was sort of like I came to realize this in a deeper way like it's okay to market yourself. You're not annoying people or if you are they can always unfriend you. But generally it's just another little thing in the feed. A lot of you continue to like heart my videos even though I know you've already read my books and seen my post a million times. I thank you so much if you're part of my little like cheerleading squad. Believe me, I do see you and I really appreciate the boost. The other thing I started thinking about is how a lot of Tik Tok advice is pretty overwhelming when you start because most of the Tik Tok advice is based around like here's types of posts that you can do. Here's my process. Like I make a slideshow with 20 slides and it's a hook from your book and then I find trending music and this is what I do for background and I use this stock photo site and like all of that and then you'll find like five different people with five different slightly different types of processes and slightly different types of videos and ways they select music and all of that. So, you kind of take in all that advice and it's like very overwhelming and it's also really easy to get caught up in the idea of like, well, if I just like change this one little thing or if I just do this one like little magical trick, if I just like use the edits in the app or I use a different font or I use hidden keywords or I, you know, like there's all these things that's like, oh, maybe I'll go viral if I just do this one like magical thing. However, everybody has a different little magic trick that they use that supposedly gets their post to go viral. And frankly, I'm not really buying that any of them are like this magic bullet and is the reason that posts do well. So, particularly in the beginning, this is what I'm thinking.

[00:05:21]Put all that out of your head. The only things you should focus on when you're just beginning your marketing and you hate it and it's intimidating are a figuring out what types of hooks work for marketing your book and b figuring out how to actually make your videos quickly. Now, if you're thinking, "No, I don't want to make quick videos. I want to make a huge variety of posts. I want to do like aesthetic reels. I want to do posts where I talk to the camera about my life. I want to do a whole variety of posts. I just don't have time to do it.

[00:05:57]That's where I'm like, okay, just to start, give yourself a challenge like I did where you're just trying to figure out the simplest type of post that you can make again and again and again. And once you've gotten comfortable with that type of post and making the posts, then you can start thinking about like a more dedicated marketing strategy. That's where I'm at like now. My next step is I'm going to think about more of like a a broader marketing strategy that's maybe a little more engaging and isn't just kind of the same post over and over. But I don't think I would have really ever committed to anything if I hadn't just first focused on what is the path of least resistance here. Throwing out all the advice that just is too timeconuming. What is the quickest way to just market my books daily in a kind of just pop it out there and forget it kind of way. So really all I'm trying to do is figure out what works and how to optimize my workflow. Because one thing that you might not realize at first is just that it takes a lot of time to kind of get used to making Tik Toks and reals. You can make them in app, you can make them in Cap Cut, you can make them in Canva. I use Canva because I was already fairly familiar with Canva due to making YouTube thumbnails and stuff for YouTube. So, I'm just really comfortable with Canva at this point.

[00:07:22]And I also have a paid subscription. So, you know, I get access to all of their extra fonts and stock photography and stock footage. And, you know, I might as well. That's a lot of stuff I have free access to. Well, I mean, not free, but with the subscription I'm already paying for. Despite all the time that I've spent in Canva making YouTube thumbnails and graphics for YouTube videos and all the things I use Canva for, the fact remains reals and Tik Toks are a different kind of package. So, it took me a long time not to make stupid little mistakes that would just easily eat up 10 or 15 minutes just fixing the mistake. when you start making them, you'll quickly realize what I mean, unless you're already adept with software, which just like wait, oops, I I accidentally deleted the thing that I was using and now like I messed it up or just like figuring out an efficient way to keep making videos that are slightly different from the last video. It seems like it's going to be so easy. Sorry, Coco scratching the chair. But I just kept kept making little blunders or secondguing things. Oh, and another big one I would put like I would end up putting the the graphics or the words like I wouldn't account for all the crap that Tik Tok was going to put on the screen. So like you wouldn't even be able to read the words that I put up because they were behind all the stuff Tik Tok throws up. So I was always making videos where I was like, "Ah, damn it. I that one looks bad. You can't even read what I said. Or just stupid little things like I wouldn't drag the image into the full margins of the picture and then when I'd post it, it would have like a line of like background and I was like, "How did I not see that?" Stupid stuff. Stupid stuff. So throughout the 30-day and 60-day challenge, I just got a lot better at making the Tik Toks and reals in a streamlined way. So, that's one reason to just give yourself a really simple challenge and not get too fussed over like how to go viral, what's like the optimal thing. Don't worry about it.

[00:09:33]Just get used to the program. The other thing you're trying to get used to is just figuring out what's like a sales angle for your book. You can go through and you can like pull hooks and you can reuse the same hooks over and over with slight variations.

[00:09:49]everyone who's doing a ton of Tik Tok posts, they are not coming up with a fresh hook for every post. And that was something that took me a little while to realize that I'm really just finding like just a handful of things that work and maybe just changing them slightly.

[00:10:06]Plus, just the act of choosing like your photos or your, you know, background stock video or if you make a little video of yourself or just choosing music, all this stuff can eat up way more time than you expect. So, it can be very tempting to get ambitious with the social media marketing. And I think that's what leads a lot of us to think, I absolutely hate this. This is taking up so much time. This is ridiculous.

[00:10:33]It's not just that it actually does take up a lot of time. It's that we just can't help wanting to make it good, wanting to make each one like unique and special. Try to throw that out of your head is what I learned because you're not going to be rewarded for those efforts most of the time. Try to find the path of least resistance that's just a good hook for your book. If you are like me and you are publishing books or about to publish indie books and you are struggling with the marketing and publishing and business side of things, I do really really recommend InkersCon.

[00:11:10]I am thrilled to partner with them this year because I get so much out of their panels. The con just started yesterday, but it's not too late to sign up. You actually get access to their panels for 6 years. So being one day behind is not a big deal. They have 24 classes for authors that are taught by very experienced, very knowledgeable authors, as well as live roundtables and interviews with best-selling authors.

[00:11:41]Yesterday's live roundtables, which you can still access, include panels on deep POV, creating unique and dynamic casts of characters, the nuts and bolts of starting a newsletter, and the business math every fiction author should know, as well as six live sessions, including author Q&As's, mastering the in-person pitch and what to expect from your editor. They also have a wealth of classes on just general marketing like Facebook ads, newsletter funnels, all kinds of things. So, if you want a lot of marketing knowhow in one place, I definitely recommend checking out InkersCon. And best of all, if you use my code cozy creative 26, you get $50 off for a total of $1.99 for all of this professional level information and inspiration. So, I definitely recommend that if you're in that place in your career. So, with The Potion Dealers, it's a hard book to market. It was not written to like trends and tropes like at all. But the best angles that I found for it are that it's like a 1960sbased like jet age cozy fantasy that it has like this kind of glamorous you know panam department stores parties nightclubs pop music but with mixed with magic fantasy like oldw world magic it's like a glamorous cozy fantasy that angle seems to work pretty well. It's something that I think is a quick hook that people can understand very quickly, which is important, but it's also it stands out. Not everyone is going to want that, but it does grab your attention if if there is any part of you that thinks, hm, I like cozy fantasy, but I would like something a little different with the setting and the vibes. The other hook that's worked pretty well is that the main male lead is blind and doesn't have much in the way of like magical powers. He mostly gets by with his like wit and charm.

[00:13:42]He's a magic dealer, but isn't really very magical himself. So, I've used some marketing hooks related to like having a blind male lead and particularly one who's written like as realistically as I could manage in a fantasy setting. I can tell that one's working because my also bots on Amazon are now books about blind dukes. So, I guess I'm appealing to people who like a blind male main character. But that one is also tricky because a I don't want to seem like I'm like fetishi fetishizing. That's a hard word to say. A disability. So I don't want to like play that up just as like the main I don't know. I feel a little weird about it. The other thing is it's hard to come up with like backgrounds for those posts. I have like a couple of pieces of fan art and that's been really nice to use for it, but you know, it's not like there's like great stock images of like a blind guy or braille, believe me, I've tried, but there really isn't.

[00:14:40]So then you just have to go with something really generic and that kind of works. I mean, I do use fairly generic backgrounds like, you know, clouds racing over a sky or a flickering candle. you know it you don't need to overthink the background but nevertheless you are a little bit limited in what you can use in that context. So still those are the two hooks that have worked the best for me.

[00:15:03]So I've been using them a lot. You will have to find your own hooks and then when you're judging your hooks you're going to look at how much reach the post got. But you're also going to look at whether people are actually buying your books. Another thing that I've noticed is people talking about how they've gone viral and they got 50,000 views on a single post, but they didn't get any sales. If you're not getting any sales from your posts, then something about your pitch is not connecting with like actual sales. Like it might be that the pitch is grabbing people's attention, but when they go to your book's actual page on Amazon or whatever, there's something about the cover or the blurb that's like, "Nah, I don't necessarily want to read this." Maybe something isn't connecting. Or maybe there's something about your pitch that like people like the post, but they're not interested in the book. It's hard to say, but ultimately what really matters here is making sales, not just going viral on Tik Tok and Instagram. None of my posts have gotten more than like 1,200 views. But if I'm making a post a day, posting it to Tik Tok and Instagram, and they get a combined total of like 1,500 views, and I do this every day, that is 45,000 people every month seeing one of my posts, and it does lead to more sales. I'm going to get to the numbers shortly, but let me just also briefly touch on what kind of posts I've been making. These are some of the most common posts to do on Tik Tok and Instagram. One is two pages. You can either do it as a, you know, a slide with two pages or a video that just goes from one page to the next. That is just like a quick hook written out. It does not have an excerpt from your book. It's just a written out hook. You can also just put that whole hook on one. You know, the words are static there. it's not two pages and just have a moving background. Another type having a video where it has a actual excerpt from your book with some highlights and like a moving background. You can also do a longer slideshow that has an excerpt from the book that goes across multiple slides with one static image for the background. When I first started doing these, I thought that every page had to have a different picture for the background and it was taking me forever.

[00:17:28]And then I learned that people were not changing the background image with every slide and that made it a lot easier. And then you can also do things like a aesthetic reels, videos where you're actually talking to the camera, things where you're playing with viral sounds, you know, all those types of things. But in my mind, those take a lot more work and thought. So, I have done very little of those. I've done a couple of like the aesthetic reels, but not a lot. Another option for backgrounds is you can always do the page flip. You just have your book in the background and you're flipping through the pages and that's the background. Another background option you can have is an image of you and you're walking and the phone's pointing at your face or you're like reading your book and you're reacting to it and then you have an excerpt of something that's like, oh my gosh, that reflects the mood that you're expressing. If you're comfortable with showing your face, these can be effective. They're kind of embarrassing, but that was my most successful one yet was one of me walking with my face. So, you're going to kind of play around with those basic formats and find a way to do it quickly. I've mostly stuck to the video format and the main reason is because Tik Tok and Instagram reals use the same, you know, aspect ratio for videos. But when it comes to posts on Instagram, static posts, they are square instead of the longer phone shape. So you have to export what you make to an Instagram size and redo it. That adds an extra step. And then on top of that, Instagram doesn't really push like the static posts out to people that are not your followers. So, I don't use those very much. I know there is like a purpose for Instagram posts, but since currently I'm mainly trying to get a new audience, I've mostly stuck to videos. Instagram also has a newer feature called trial reels where you can choose to only push a video out to people that do not follow you. So, what I've been doing is doing every video as a trial reel first and then the next day I'll post it to my actual feed anyway because I actually get more videos from people that don't follow me from the ones I just post like the normal way. But by doing it both ways, I get more reach. I hope that makes sense. So, you know, like I might post a trial reel on a Wednesday, it gets 150 views. I post it to my main feed on Thursday and it ends up getting 500 views of which about 250 are not people that follow me. So, I still got better reach with the main post on Thursday. But when you add in that extra 125 from the trial reel, it doesn't hurt. Instagram doesn't seem to mind if you post the same video two times. You can also choose to push the trial reel to your main feed, but I just do them as separate because I have this feeling that Instagram does like if you don't do well on the trial, then they don't really show it to anybody. It's just a theory. So, just very quickly to recap the thing elements you're going to need, your background, which you can find via stock photo sites. I use Canva paid or you can film your own face or you can film flipping through your book or you can use fan art and or commissioned art if you have any of that. You can use it more than once. So, you might as well hooks. Take a little time to write down some good hooks. If you're struggling with hooks, you might want to follow some other authors and just like really look at their feeds and jot down some of the hooks that that they're using and kind of reuse them with your own book.

[00:21:13]I'm not gonna take time out of this already long video to like tell you all the potential hooks you could use, but that's what I did. I just looked at some authors that are like killing it and I wrote down like a big old list of hooks that people are using for my own inspiration. Disheveled editing Lydia here with Reinhardt, special guest. It just occurred to me I could post my list of hooks I've already written down to my Substack for this week. So, if you're watching this video this weekend and you want a list of hooks, join my Substack and I will share it there. The description, I have just like a file that I use that has like the descriptions for all my books. When I post a Tik Tok, like I just drop in like the description of like here's what the book, here's the vibe, the tropes, you know, basically you're trying to get the keywords in the description. I hear that people aren't really using hashtags much anymore, so I just get all the keywords in the description and call it a day.

[00:22:09]And music. Personally, I have not noticed any difference in trying to find viral music versus just picking music off my own personal playlist. One of my best performing videos used like this African funk song from the ' 70s that had only been used on Tik Tok like 300 times ever. But I just chose it because I thought it fit the vibe of the Tik Tok. So if you want to mess around trying to find viral music, you can. But I didn't because I don't even I don't know what the kids are into. I just want to put on my own music. So that's what I do. And if I'm feeling lazy, I just use whatever Tik Tok suggests for me that sounds like, "Yeah, that'll work." So basically by making a lot of posts that were mostly all kind of the hook of would you like a fantasy novel with the vibes of the 1960s, most of my videos were about that. They were promoting the potion dealers and I got it down to where I could make one in about 15 minutes including the posting time. So that's not bad. Occasionally I would mix it up and market one of my other books as well. So, I'd say that like about 70% of my posts are for the potion dealers and the other 30% are for the other Hidden Lands books. So, I'm going to get to the numbers. Bear in mind, by the end of the 60 days, I had the process down to about 15 minutes a day. So, we're talking about an hour and 45 minutes of work a a week. So that's what like about seven hours or so a month, which still sounds like a decent amount. But that's something that I I really wanted to factor in like how much money am I making doing this versus the time that I'm spending. And it was a sobering realization that like if I'm spending 7 hours, then I really want to be making like an extra $140 ideally, which uh spoiler alert, I did not. But I do think that the efforts were worth it because hopefully some of the people reading my books will become readers of more than one book or maybe they'll watch my YouTube channel. But it does make you realize how this can eat up a lot of time for not a lot of results. So getting it down to a very quick process is extremely important. Of course, I should add, you know, do your own math.

[00:24:32]If you have posts regularly getting many thousands of views or going viral and your views to sales ratio is really good, then you might you might want to put more time into it. Likewise, if you're getting hardly any sales off your post, then you might not want to put hardly any time into it at all. So, you know, take the time to actually run the numbers at some point and see how many actual sales are you getting out of this versus how many hours are you putting into it. I think sometimes we forget about that part. And these things can build with time of course. So, you know, your return on investment might be lower in the beginning. So, factor that in too, but still. So in February, I had not marketed my books in months and I had not released in many months. And in the month of February, I sold 31 Hidden Lands books. Nine of them were the potion dealers. Pretty dismal. In March, I started to do this Tik Tok and Instagram marketing challenge. The only other marketing that I did is that I had a free bookie promotion on one of my older reverse harum paranormal novels.

[00:25:47]Not very similar to the Hidden Lands, but there's always a possibility that I could have gotten a few crossover readers from that promotion. I doubt it was a lot, though. Usually when people get your book on Free Bookie, the first thing they're going to do is read the rest of that series. cuz they're not going to be like going into your catalog and reading completely unrelated books like right away. So, in the month of March, I sold 52 copies of the Hidden Lands books and 15 of them were The Potion Dealers. So, we went from 31 books to 52 books and we went from nine copies of Potion Dealers to 15 copies of The Potion Dealers. Not bad for only one post a day for one month. One would hope these efforts would be somewhat cumulative were they? Well, let's look at April. In April, I sold 53 copies of the Hidden Lands books. So, that was showing me that the marketing efforts definitely were paying off. I had raised my average book sales from about 30 to 50 on a consistent basis for two months now. But more notable is that I sold 24 copies of the potion dealers. So we went from nine copies to 15 copies to 24 copies with 2 months of very basic social media marketing. So, in this sense, it seemed to be paying off and like stacking up. And I don't have any more books out in the series yet. I'm almost done with book two. Well, almost being relative because I'm also trying to move and I haven't even worked on it in a couple weeks cuz I'm so overwhelmed. But theoretically, I'm almost done. A lot of times series don't even take off until you get two, three, even four books in, especially if it's like a longer series like this. So, that gave me a lot of hope that if I am able to really market this consistently over a long period of time and I add new releases that I might actually start to see some more for reals sales. I would really like to see this number get into like the hundreds every month, but I think that could be possible as my catalog builds and if I'm able to continue to market consistently, that certainly seems doable. Two months is still not a lot of data collection. Now, over the last month, I I had to drop off the social media marketing again, unfortunately, just as I was building momentum. I kind of Dade had to go to the hospital and his doctor that he's been seeing for years just suddenly up and left and went to Tennessee and now he doesn't have any doctor that can help him with his medical stuff. So, our need to move out of here kind of got a real jolt and I've been working so hard on just trying to sell all our stuff and like talking to a realtor and a lender and like that's been eating up all my time. But when all of that finally clears up and I can really just like come up with a dedicated social media marketing plan and start to like batch create my posts and get everything a little more organized. I'm excited to see where this goes. And of course releasing the second book in the series.

[00:29:09]So was it worth it? Yes. Is it imperative that I keep my process simple and streamlined? Also yes. or it is going to eat up way too much time without much reward and that's going to lead to frustration and burnout. So that is my latest advice on Tik Tok and reals. Just real quick, I wanted to give you guys one more data point. I stopped I pretty much stopped marketing my books at around the end of April and the month of May started off with my sales still going quite well. And then it was about like 10 days into the month, all my hidden land sales just stopped dead. So that alone kind of shows me how important it is to maintain that social media marketing and that it is working.

[00:29:58]If you want more marketing advice, I definitely suggest checking out InkersCon. And don't forget to use my code cozy creative26. When I recorded this video, I said cozy creative 25.

[00:30:10]Like I don't know what the heck year it is. If you'd like more from me, my members get two bonus videos per month voted on by you guys. And you can access my memberships through YouTube, Substack, or Patreon. I have options.

[00:30:25]And thank you all so much to my members for supporting all of my content here on YouTube. If you'd like to read any of my books, I always recommend the Hidden Lands books first. And you can find the link in the description to all of my books. I post every Sunday and sometimes on Wednesdays. And I thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next time.

[00:30:45]Bye.