For me, 2026 is the year of marketing. I must increase my reach, and my income, if I’m going to be able to continue doing this for the rest of my life. I’d like to be able to! While I’m at it, I may as well share what’s working, or at least, what I’m doing, with all of you. Right now I’m focused on marketing that is either free or inexpensive, later on I’ll dabble in paid advertising, but pick the low-hanging fruit first, right? You know there’s a reason for doing that, in real life. If you take the low-hanging fruits, they are less likely to fall and be damaged while you get at the higher ones. Don’t know that the metaphor for marketing stretches to that, but there you are.

First of all, I’m going to share some numbers. I focused on my older series, Underhill, which consists of the Pixie for Hire trilogy and a couple of outrider books so far, for the month of January. Keep in mind the first book came out more than a decade ago! Pulling the Royalty report for January to present, you can see that there were sales for the month:

If we compare that year-over-year to the previous January (the only title not published then was the short story Following Trouble, which is dark blue in the first graph) we can clearly see the difference.

In terms of dollars, that’s about $150 for this last month, compared to $70 for last year, so I did succeed in doubling my sales there, which is somewhat the goal overall for my income in 2026. It’s a useful yardstick. Perhaps, in terms of marketing, the only yardstick.

The ROI is all on my time, I didn’t spend anything special to do the marketing for the series this last month: I made graphics, did a nifty timeline for the series, and updated the Amazon A+ content. I spent about twelve hours all told on marketing Underhill, but I was also doing other things, which I’m going to discuss in a moment. Some of the time spent on the marketing was learning, and that’s not time I’ll have to spend over and over, I’ll be faster from now on. And these initial numbers don’t show the long slow groundswell of word-of-mouth which is much more difficult to track.

In terms of indirect marketing, I’ve been creating interesting things and putting them on my social media feeds to give more for followers to look at and react to. If you follow me, you’ve likely seen the food graphics I’ve been posting, those are from an afternoon sitting down with a stack of cookbooks (I have hundreds) and a notebook pulling catchy quotes out of them. I then put the quotes on square graphics, and scheduled them for weeks in advance on X and facebook (you can’t schedule Substack Notes). You don’t have to do this – and likely shouldn’t, unless like me you plan to release a cookbook in the future – you could do this with literary quotes, or anything that interests you. Why interests you? First of all, so you can be enthusiastic in responding to comments, and not bored creating them. Secondly, because what interests you will bleed into your books. By finding mutual interests, you are building a base of readers who are likely to enjoy your work.

Finally (for this week’s post!) I am attempting to build a YouTube channel. This is a bit more challenging, as I have so very much to learn that it may be a long time, if ever, before I see any return from it. I don’t mean direct monetization, although that is a goal in terms of income diversification, I also intend this to be a marketing tool for my work and books, art, gardening, and cooking. I have a lot of things I am interested in, and weaving them into the one Youtube channel may be impossible. Time will tell.

I’m focused on figuring out what works, and what doesn’t, in terms of videos and shorts. So far this week I’ve learned that generating clips from Substack and putting those on YouTube as a short does not work: the images are tiny, because they are clipped from a landscape orientation and fit into a portrait-style. So I won’t bother with those in the future. I have also learned that people are interested in fountain pens, and gardening. They aren’t really interested in watching a video where I draw and talk at the same time, although I’ll do more of those because it’s a good skill to refine overall. I have a cooking video I made years ago with my son’s help that still gets views, so I plan to revisit that and see if I can manage multiple camera angles and the editing to get it right. The silly things that people really like? Videos of my chickens and cat. Also, as I highlighted here in the past, making tiny videos about the plot of a book gets a surprising number of views and I need to do more of those (they take a lot of time to make).

Time will tell with the YouTube channel, if it’s helpful or a waste of time. It’s certainly good discipline for me to put out a couple of videos a week (I toyed with daily and quickly dismissed that idea) as well as learning more about audio and video editing. The fun graphics for social media are clearly helpful. I have neither the time nor the inclination to haunt the socials interacting with random people, but this is also necessary. Finding conversations you can contribute to -not ever just saying ‘buy my book!’ – will catch attention and bring it back to your profile and after a few positive encounters, that may translate into someone picking up a book to give it a try. Pretty much all the social media sites prioritize sharing existing material over original stuff, but I have a dislike of that so I try to make original and interesting things for people to look at. Shouting into the wind, I know.