The Real Cost of Free Book Promotion: Your Time

Most authors have small budgets. It’s the nature of the beast when profits are so small, and you’re literally competing with every book ever published for attention. This means authors are drawn to free promotional opportunities. After all, why spend precious marketing funds on something you can do for free? The problem is free marketing isn’t free. There’s a hidden cost. Your time.

Moreover, “free” promotion is often a full-time job in disguise, and the time investment can be more expensive than paying for promotion or a freelancer’s services. There’s a steep learning curve to use free promotional tools effectively, leading to wasted time, exhaustion and stress.

Let’s took at two of the most popular “free” book promotion tools and determine the time they consume.

Social Media

If you’re an indie author, you’re a small-business owner running your own indie publishing house. I did some research to learn how much time marketers recommend businesses spend on social media. This is what I found:

• On Facebook, you should be posting one to two times daily.

• On Instagram, you should be publishing two stories per day and three to five posts a week.

• On LinkedIn, you should be posting one to two times daily.

• On Pinterest, you should be posting at least once a week.

• On Threads, you should be posting two to three times daily.

• On TikTok, you should be posting three to five times weekly. Although, I have seen advice advising this per day.

• On X, you should be posting two to three times daily.

• On YouTube, you should be posting at least three times a week.

BlueSky was not mentioned but, seeing as it has a similar format as Threads and X, we can assume two to three posts daily there as well.

But there’s more than posting to social media. Experts advise five hours per week per platform. I mentioned nine social media platforms. If you use them all, that’s 45 hours a week. How is that time spent?

The bulk is spent on content creation – creating graphics and writing captions. During the editing process, it takes 30-60 minutes per minute of finished video. You’ll want to proofread captions as posts are easier to fix before they go live. Before you create content, however, you need to create a content calendar. The calendar specifies what you post, when and on which social network. After content is created, it must be scheduled.

Once posts are live, you’ll want to examine, and keep a written record of, how each post is performing. Examine metrics such as impressions, engagement, reach and increases/declines in followers. What performed well? What fell flat? Use the information to improve your content calendar.

You’ll also spend time doing market research by explaining your competitors’ profiles to see what they do well. What can you replicate?

The five hours doesn’t include time spend engaging with followers, the people you follow and others. Engagement time can vary wildly depending on how well your posts are performing and how often you reach out to others.

Blogging & Newsletters

Blogs and newsletters are two more “free” book marketing tools.

Marketers advise businesses blog two to four times per week with the goal of averaging 8 to 12 posts per month. The blogs that rank the highest on Google average 2,450 words or more. The time it takes to write 2,500 varies depending on your typing speed and if you need to first conduct research. This can take anywhere from two to eight hours, meaning you’ll spend anywhere from 16 hours a month (taking two hours each to write eight blogs) up to 96 hours a month (taking eight hours each to write 12 blogs) blogging. That’s just research and writing. That doesn’t include revising, editing, formatting, creating or sourcing photos, and scheduling.

Of course, after your blog post is live, you must publicize it on social media.

Marketers advise businesses send one email newsletter per week. This also involves writing content, revising, editing, formatting, and creating or sourcing photos. Before scheduling, newsletter links must be tested, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to send yourself a test copy to ensure there aren’t any errors you can’t see in your dashboard. How long does this take? A few hours a week.

How much time have we used per week? Forty-five hours on social media, four to 24 hours on blogging plus an unspecified amount of time on a newsletter. What is your time worth? Can you spend 50-70 hours a week on “free” promotion? When free promotion becomes a stress-inducing time sink, it’s time to step back and examine if your time could be better spent elsewhere.