You wrote a second book.
And the moment you did, the first one quietly disappeared from your marketing.
Not intentionally. Not because you stopped caring about it. Just because the new book needed attention, and somewhere in that shift, your backlist became something you meant to get back to instead of something you were actively working. And now you have two books, maybe three, maybe more, and you're either trying to promote all of them at once and feeling scattered, or rotating your focus and feeling guilty every time one of them goes quiet.
I'm Jenn Hanson-dePaula. I've spent nearly 20 years helping authors build marketing that actually sells books. And multi-book marketing is one of the most underserved topics in this entire space, because almost all of the advice out there was written for the author releasing their first book. This episode is for everyone past that point.
Here's what I see happening constantly with multi-book authors.
They treat each book as its own separate marketing project. New book, new strategy, new content, new audience to build. And while that approach might feel logical, it creates two problems that compound over time. The first is that it's exhausting. You are essentially restarting from scratch every single time a new book comes out. The second, and this one costs real money, is that it leaves your backlist sitting there not doing much while all your marketing energy flows toward whatever is newest.
Here is the shift that changes everything, and I want you to sit with it for a minute.
You are not marketing books. You are building a library.
Those are not the same thing. When you market individual books as separate projects, you are in a constant cycle of launching and stopping and launching again. When you market yourself as an author with a body of work, everything you have ever written starts working together. New readers discover one book and find the rest. Long-time readers stay engaged because there is always more for them. And your backlist, instead of quietly fading, becomes one of your most powerful selling tools.
The authors who figure this out are the ones who have sustainable, compounding book sales instead of launch spikes followed by silence.
Let me show you what this looks like in practice, because it's different depending on what you write.
If you write fiction, your backlist is a reader discovery engine. Think about how you find books you love. You discover one author, you love their work, and the first thing you do is go looking to see what else they've written. Your readers do the exact same thing. The problem is that most fiction authors never make that easy. They don't mention Book 1 in the content they create about Book 2. They don't have a simple "start here" for new readers on their website. They're so focused on the newest title that someone who finds them today might not even realize there are more books waiting.
If you write a series, this is even more important, because a reader who starts mid-series and feels lost is a reader you just lost. Every piece of marketing you create for any book in that series should make it absolutely clear where new readers should begin. Not in a complicated way. Something as simple as "This is book three in the [series name], and while it can be read as a standalone, but most readers start with book one" tells your audience exactly what to do. That one sentence is doing a lot of quiet, powerful work.
If you write standalone fiction, your author brand is the through line. “If you love emotionally-driven stories with characters who feel like real people, I write books for you.” That sentence works for every book you have ever written and every book you will ever write. Readers who find you through one novel need to understand instantly that there are more worlds waiting for them.
If you write nonfiction, your books are pillars of a single area of expertise. The risk with multiple nonfiction books is the opposite of the fiction problem. With fiction, authors forget to connect the books. With nonfiction, authors sometimes market each book as if it serves a completely different reader, when in almost every case the reader for Book 1 is also the most qualified reader for Book 2. The person who read your first book and loved it has already told you that they trust you and that your topic matters to them. They are your most likely buyer for the next one. But that only works if you're actually telling them it exists.
I want to tell you about one of my clients. I'll call her Jennie.
Jennie had published two contemporary romance novels, both standalones, both in the same emotional lane. When we started working together, she was posting consistently and showing up regularly, but she was running two separate content strategies, one for each book, and burning herself out trying to give each of them what she thought they individually deserved. Her sales on both had plateaued. Book 1 was averaging around 8 copies a month. Book 2 wasn't doing much better.
When I looked at her content, the problem was clear immediately. She was marketing two separate products to two separate imaginary audiences, when in reality the reader who loved Book 1 and the reader who would love Book 2 were the same person. She had never, in any piece of content she'd created, mentioned both books in the same breath. A reader who found her through Book 2 had no obvious reason to know Book 1 existed.
We made one fundamental shift. We stopped marketing two books and started marketing an author. Her content became about the kind of reader she writes for, the emotional experience her books create, the themes her work explores consistently across both titles. When she promoted one book, she mentioned the other naturally, the way you'd mention a friend. When a new reader found her, her bio, her website, and her newsletter all made it clear that there was a reading journey waiting for them, not just a single title.
Within 90 days, Book 1 was averaging 23 sales a month. Not because she was promoting it more. Because she stopped marketing it in isolation.
Here is the practical strategy underneath all of this, because I know some of you are analytical thinkers who want the framework, not just the concept.
You do not need to promote all of your books equally at all times. What you need is a rotation with an anchor. Your anchor is your newest book, or your bestselling book, or the book most likely to bring in new readers who will then discover the rest. That's the one you lead with in most of your content. Your other books come up naturally in context, in your bio, in your email newsletter, in the back matter of every book you publish, and in a dedicated campaign once or twice a year.
Your email list is especially powerful here, because it is the one place you can directly say to someone who already trusts you: did you know I also wrote this? Social media requires luck and algorithm timing. Email lands in someone's inbox because they chose to be there. Use it to introduce your backlist to people who are already your readers. That conversation is one of the highest-return things a multi-book author can do.
And through all of it, the thread that holds your marketing together is not your book titles. It is your author identity. The clearer you are about who you are as an author and who you write for, the easier it becomes for every reader who finds any of your books to find all of them.
Every month you market your books in isolation is a month your backlist is leaving sales on the table. Readers who would have loved everything you've written are finding one book, not connecting the dots, and moving on. That is not a small cost over time.
If you want to build a content strategy that makes all of your books work together and you want someone to research your specific genre, your specific readers, and build that strategy with you rather than handing you a generic template, that is exactly what my Social Growth Sessions program does. Every strategy I build starts with deep research into your genre and your reader, and for multi-book authors that research has to account for how all of your titles fit together. You can find the link in this episode's description.
And if you'd prefer to start with a self-directed system, the 90-Day Book Sales System walks you through the foundation work that makes all of your books marketable under one unified author brand. That link is in the description as well.
If you want to start somewhere completely free, grab the Book Marketing Blueprint. It takes about 15 minutes and will show you which pieces of your marketing foundation are missing right now, including whether you have a clear author identity that could be doing this work for you.
Next time I'm talking about something that trips up almost every author I work with, whether they have one book or ten: the email list that isn't growing the way it should, and what is actually causing that. If your newsletter feels like it's going nowhere, that one is for you.
I'll see you then.
