Fifteen-Minute Marketing for Authors: How to Build a Marketing Plan That Works and Find the Time to Use It

By Julie Coulter Bellon

Have you ever said, “I don’t have time to market my books and I don't know where to start?”

As a busy mother of a large family, best-selling author Julie Coulter Bellon was trying to balance kids, writing, and getting her books in front of the right audience. Some days it seemed impossible until she developed a system of marketing that harnesses the power of just fifteen minutes. Through proven patterns that have increased her visibility and sales, Julie will teach you her system of fifteen minute marketing techniques with tools that any author---from beginner to advanced---can add to their marketing toolbox.

**Newly revised in January 2024

I thought I was pretty knowledgeable with book marketing but this book showed me many things I didn’t know! Excellent, helpful read! ---Becky Monson, author of the bestselling Spinster series

Julie Coulter Bellon's Fifteen-Minute Marketing book is a must for any first time or seasoned author looking to up their marketing game. ---Bestselling author Jennifer Peel

Finally, a marketing guide that provides the content I need without the overwhelm! This book is a must-have for any writer wanting to make the most of their marketing time, get results, and still be able to focus on why we got into this industry in the first place: our writing! Bellon lays out the foundational pieces needed in any marketing strategy and then gives the reader small, concrete steps that add up to success. Trust me, you need this book! ---Annette Lyon, USA Today Bestselling author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julie Coulter Bellon
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780999794661

Julie Coulter Bellon

Julie Coulter Bellon is the author of over two dozen romantic suspense books. Her book All Fall Down won the RONE award for Best Suspense, Pocket Full of Posies won a RONE Honorable Mention for Best Suspense and The Captain was a RONE award finalist for Best Suspense. Most recently, her books The Capture and Second Look were both Whitney finalists for Best Suspense/Mystery.Julie loves to travel and her favorite cities she's visited so far are probably Athens, Paris, Ottawa, and London. In her free time she loves to read, write, teach, watch Hawaii Five-O reruns, and eat Canadian chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.If you'd like to be the first to hear about Julie's new projects and receive a free book, you can sign up to be part of her VIP Readers Group at juliebellon.com

Book preview

PART I Laying Out the Tools

The Five Areas of Marketing

The Five Areas of Marketing

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When I talk to authors about book marketing, a majority of them tell me they just aren’t good at it. What’s really happened, however, is that they’ve focused on one part of marketing and been disappointed in the results. The key to being successful is to incorporate all the areas of book marketing.

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When I first started putting my marketing plan together, I found that all of the marketing tools out there can generally be separated into five areas:

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Foundation

Product-Related

Social Media

Promotion

Networking

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Each area has specialized marketing tools, and the first five chapters of this book will be laying them out there on the worktable for you. Once you’ve seen the tools available, then you can decide which ones will work for your marketing minutes.

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In Part II, I’ll show you how I put together my own weekly and monthly plans so you can start to build a customized plan of your own with the marketing tools I’ve highlighted.

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Keep in mind, this is not a comprehensive list, and the marketing landscape changes all the time. This book is intended to help you organize your marketing toolbox right now and be ready to add more marketing tools to your plan as they come along. No matter what they are, you’ll be ready to implement them from the principles you’ve learned in this book

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Read on to start filling your marketing plan toolbox today!

The Foundation

Marketing is kind of like building a house, but for an author, you are building a writing career. Just as a builder won’t even begin to build without a plan, neither should you. And that’s what I hope we’ll be able to do together.

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So let’s lay out the tools so we can begin to work on a customized plan.

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The basic foundation for any successful author marketing is found in 1) your product and 2) your author website, so these are what we’ll be discussing first.

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If you are a traditionally published author, you will have to work with your publisher on some of these areas, but it is always a good idea to be informed so you can be a partner in your book marketing. If you are indie published you are the one who will make all of these marketing decisions, so it is important to know what tools could help you reach more readers.

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Your Product

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Your book is your product and you want your readers to have a quality experience. So, let’s take out the tools you need for your book.

Foundation Tool #1 A Great Cover

If you are indie-published, hire a cover designer to make a professional cover that accurately reflects your genre.

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For example, if your book is military sci-fi, don’t have a couple dreamily staring into each other’s eyes with the outline of a small-town main street behind them. Readers make snap judgments based on a cover, and if yours isn’t genre specific, or promises the reader something that you don’t deliver, your reviews will not be kind. Your cover is the reader’s first impression of you and your story. Make it count.

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If you are unsure of what kind of cover you should have, look at the Top 100 books in your genre and see what the bestsellers all have in common. That might spark some inspiration for elements you’d like to have in your own cover.

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Let’s talk about what makes a good cover.

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This is the first cover I had for my award-winning romantic suspense, All Fall Down.

All Fall Down Cover

It checks all the boxes for a good cover: It hints at a hostage-taking with the tied hands, it’s obviously military from the uniform, and it’s easy to see the title in a thumbnail. But something wasn’t quite right and my sales weren’t what I had hoped.

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I did some research on military romantic suspense. I looked at other covers and liked the idea of having a couple on mine, since some research suggests that having people on the cover sells better. So, I hired another cover designer and told him what I was trying to do and this is the new cover:

The new cover had a couple in Kevlar vests with guns, hinting at the romantic suspense angle, my name was still in block letters, but since it was in white, it popped more, and the color scheme was lighter, making it appear more like a movie poster. I loved it! And when I changed the cover, my sales spiked significantly. A good cover can make all the difference. And good covers don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. There are many professional cover designers that charge less than $100.

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But how do you find them? Ask your author friends for recommendations or look in the front matter of books that have great covers. Many times the cover designers are listed there.

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If you are traditionally published, you might have limited say over the cover your publisher provides. If you have any influence at all, make sure the cover fits your genre and is an image you will feel comfortable promoting since your cover is going to be the basis for a lot of your marketing materials.

Foundation Tool #2 A Professional Edit

It is important for authors to join a critique group and have beta readers—readers who can give feedback on your not-quite-ready-for-the-public manuscript. They