Learnings from SelfPubCon 2025

26 October 2025

This journal entry is in progress as I go through the conferences at my own pace, so maybe come back later for more thoughts, haha ;)

New Takes on Marketing Must Dos: Insights from ALLi’s Reach More Readers Guidebook

Speaker: Orna Ross

With my decade of work in marketing, I thought I’d know most of what Orna would talk about. But, in the end, the talk wasn’t much on marketing strategies but rather knowing what kind of publisher you are as an author. Knowing that will influence what type of marketing you’ll lean towards the most (and of course it was a promotion for the future ALLI’s guide on book marketing, which I’ll probably get because I’m now curious what type of marketing is best for me to do, haha).

Let me summarize what the types of publishers are:

• You are an engagement publisher if you love creating a community around yourself and your books, participate in events, post and interact on social media and create crowdfunding campaigns (among other things I suppose);
• You are a craft publisher if your focus is on quality (writing and publishing), if you’re looking for a little bit of prestige and editorial reviews, and collaborate with literary influencers (among others too);
• You are a volume publisher if you do rapid release, ads (on social media and/or retailers), lean more towards algorithm marketing and love to automate your processes (again, among others).

Orna advises that you choose only one publisher type, even though you think you’re something in between. So I did the exercise for myself – which was highly complicated actually – and found out I might lean towards the craft publisher type more. I’m someone who’s hyper-focused on quality (maybe a bit too much), and I know that, deep down, I’m doing everything I’m doing because I’m looking for acknowledgement. Or maybe I’m wrong and I’m an engagement publisher. Would be great to do one of those personality tests to be sure, haha.

Success Spotlight: Innovative Strategies from Indie Authors

Speakers: Sacha Black, NJ Adel, Leia Stone, Chris Glatte and Golden Angel

On direct sales:

• Start with print on demand: Sacha does sell more via direct sales than via Amazon at this stage of her career. She has started with fulfilling her orders with BookVault, then scaled up with TikTok shop, and now she has a Shopify website and a warehouse from which she ships all her books. So… start small, then scale up (because it needs a lot of capital upfront).
• Customize the experience for the reader: with the rise of technologies, readers want to feel a connexion with the author. So if you can personalize their experience with a signature, goodies, character arts, bookmarks,… and add that to their book order, they’ll love it and recommend you.
• Exclusive products to your website: I get that Sacha has a few reader magnets that readers can get for free when they sign up to her newsletter, but if they want it in paper format, it’s only available through her website. As for Leia, she does special editions of her books on her Shopify store.

Random notes:

• Go wide: Leia recommends to take out some of your backlist from KU and sell them from other venues. Of course, if you do well in KU, please do stay on KU.
• Boost productivity with dictation: Not the first time I heard this advice. Chris talked about how he increased his productivity with AI dictation. So he basically talks to an audio recorder, pulls out the mp3 version and then uploads it to Prose Write. The tool does the transcription and light editing of what he has dictated. I’ve yet to check this tool out, but it sounds promissing. And yes, it’s AI, but not generative AI. It doesn’t do the job for you, it simply helps you with the transcription (which is a very different thing, which is why I mention it).

Beyond the Book: New Pathways to Readers with IngramSparks

Speakers: Ben Hughes, Adam Beswick, Samantha Young and Will Dady

2025/2026 Trends:

• Authors paying more attention to their metadata. It results is more discoverability of books and in sales of books. Coincidentally, I’ve updated my metadatas end of October, haha.
• Direct sales through the author’s website or another platform. That’s the second conference that talks about direct sales by this point.
• Global selling and translations. Authors are thinking more and more about selling globally, so having their books in more than one language.
• Getting creative in the book printing area. Spayed or printed edges, dust jacket, etc. AUthors are getting creative with print on demand and they’re creating great products.