Storiad Author Marketing Guide
You can do your own book publicity, and most independent authors should. A professional campaign runs $3,000 to $10,000 or more a month, and a lot of authors hand over that money before they understand what they're paying for. The work itself — getting reviews, booking podcast spots, and earning press coverage — is something you can run yourself with a contact list, a good pitch, and the patience to follow up. This guide walks through how.
People use the words interchangeably, but they pull in different directions. Marketing is the promotion you control and usually pay for: ads, your newsletter, a price promo. Publicity is coverage you earn from someone else — a reviewer, a podcaster, a journalist — who decides your book is worth their audience's attention.
The trade-off is credibility versus control. You can't buy a genuine review or an honest interview, which is exactly why readers trust them more than an ad. You give up control over the message and get borrowed credibility in return. Both belong in a launch. If you want the full picture of how the pieces fit, see our guide on how to market a book. This piece stays on the publicity half.
A publicist isn't magic. They run a specific, repeatable process, and once you see it written out, most of it is work you can do:
What you're really paying a publicist for is their existing relationships and the hours. Those relationships matter for big national media. For the reviewers, niche podcasts, and genre bloggers who actually move books for indie authors, a cold pitch from you works about as well as a cold pitch from them.
Coverage starts with the right names, not a mass blast. You want people who already talk to readers in your genre: book bloggers, bookstagrammers, podcast hosts, and reviewers who cover books like yours. Skip the big national desks for now; a review on a 2,000-subscriber genre newsletter sells more copies than a mention nobody in your audience sees.
Find them for free by looking at who reviewed your comp titles, searching directories like the Book Blogger List, and noting which podcasts feature authors in your space. Build a simple sheet: name, outlet, what they cover, contact, and a personal detail you can reference. This list-building is the slow part, and it's also where Storiad's media contact database helps, with 48,000+ verified bloggers, reviewers, podcasters, and journalists you can filter by genre instead of assembling from scratch. Either way, the list is the asset. Keep it.
A good pitch is short and clearly about their audience, not your feelings about your book. Lead with why their readers or listeners would care, give the one-line hook, then the essentials: title, genre, release date, and an offer of a review copy or an interview.
The pitches that land usually have an angle beyond "my book is out." Tie it to something timely or to the host's recent episode. One author pitched the real history behind her novel's setting to outlets covering that subject, which gave journalists a story rather than an ad. If writing the email cold is the part that stalls you, a template or an assist from StoriA, Storiad's marketing assistant, gets a first draft down; you still make it sound like you.
When a reviewer says yes, don't make them chase attachments. Send one link to a press kit that holds your bio, book details, cover, an excerpt, your contact info, and a few suggested questions. It signals you're easy to work with, which gets you the second yes.
You can build this as a one-page PDF from a free template, or set up a press room and media kit that lives at a single URL you reuse for every pitch. We break down what to include in our guide to the author press kit. The point is the same: remove every reason for a busy person to say "later."
This is the step that separates authors who get covered from authors who get ignored. Most pitches go unanswered the first time because the recipient was busy, not because they said no. One polite follow-up a week or so later wins a real share of placements.
Track who you contacted, when, and what they said, so you follow up once without pestering and never pitch the same person twice by accident. A spreadsheet does the job. If you'd rather not juggle one, Storiad's outreach tools send and track pitches in the same place as the contacts. The system matters less than the habit.
Reviews are their own kind of publicity, and they take lead time. Start lining up readers before launch so the page isn't empty on day one.
You don't need an expensive service to do it. NetGalley works but runs around $450 a month, and the reviews don't always land where indie books actually sell. Cheaper routes get you there: StoryOrigin and BookSirens for ARC readers, LibraryThing's Early Reviewers, and review sites like Independent Book Review and Midwest Book Review that consider indie titles at no charge. A quick note on tools: HARO, the service that connects sources to journalists, shut down for a while as Connectively and came back free in 2025 under Featured.com, so it's worth a look again alongside alternatives like Qwoted and SourceBottle.
The most common DIY mistake is pitching too late. Media runs on different clocks. Monthly print magazines work three to six months ahead, so a holiday feature gets assigned in late summer. Podcasts and online outlets move faster, sometimes within weeks. Daily papers are faster still.
Work backward from your release date. Start building the list and pitching long-lead print three to six months out, line up reviewers in the same window, and save the short-lead podcast and online pitches for the weeks around launch. For how this slots into the rest of your promotion calendar, see how to promote a book.
DIY is the right call for most indie authors, but not all. Paying for a publicist can make sense when you have a real budget and a launch big enough to justify it, when you genuinely have no time, or when your goal is national television and major print, where established relationships do real work. If you go that route, interview a few, ask for recent placements like yours, and start the conversation four to six months before publication. There's no shame in either path. The mistake is paying for a campaign you could have run yourself, or skipping outreach entirely because you assumed it had to be expensive.
For most independent authors, no. A campaign costs thousands a month and largely repeats outreach you can do yourself. It's worth it mainly for big launches aiming at national media, where a publicist's existing relationships matter.
Hiring out runs roughly $3,000 to $10,000 a month, and elite firms charge more. Done yourself, the real cost is your time plus optional tools, and you can run a credible campaign for well under that.
Yes. Building a media list, pitching, supplying a press kit, and following up are all learnable. The limits are time and reach into top-tier national outlets.
Pitch genre bloggers, bookstagrammers, and reviewers directly, and line up ARC readers before launch through services like StoryOrigin or BookSirens and free review sites that accept indie books.
Publicity is a relationship you tend, not a check you write. Get media coverage by building a list of the right people, sending a pitch worth opening, and doing the follow-up most authors skip. The list you build for this book is the same one you'll pitch for the next, so it compounds every time you publish.
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