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Free Marketing Resources for Authors

Posted on by Natalie
Writer sitting on the floor of a hallway with a stack of books and a coffee while working on a laptop.
11
Nov

Looking for free marketing resources for authors that are actually worth your time? Most freebies are thin lead magnets built to collect your email address.

The two I offer are different:

  • Both draw on research covering about 3,800 indie authors and 51,000+ book titles and
  • Both are built to help you make better decisions about where to spend your time and money.

Below, you’ll find what’s inside each resource and who it’s best for. Both are free, and both arrive immediately by email.

1. My Research Foundation for Indie Book Marketing (Free Annotated Bibliography)

This is an annotated bibliography of 27 studies and publications from 2022 to today. Every entry has a plain-English summary and key findings, so you can see what the evidence says without reading 27 papers.

It covers BookTok, Bookstagram, BookTube, TikTok Shop, influencer marketing, and indie author economics. The findings come from primary research, including meta-analyses, field experiments, longitudinal studies, and interviews with real authors, covering about 3,800 indie authors and 51,000+ books. Every source links to a DOI or institutional repository, so you can verify anything yourself.

Best for authors who:

  • Feel buried in conflicting advice from TikTok, Reddit, forums, and online gurus
  • Are launching a book, whether it’s their first or their tenth
  • Are paying someone for book marketing and want to check that their strategy rests on real research
Get the free annotated bibliography

2. 15-Minute Author Website Self-Audit (Free Checklist)

This 3-page checklist shows you exactly where your website may be costing you book sales, and you can run the whole thing in about 15 minutes.

It walks you through five areas:

  • SEO basics: can readers, AI chatbots, and search engines even find you?
  • Trust signals: why should a stranger buy from you instead of the 100 other authors in your genre?
  • Conversion elements: are you turning visitors into buyers, or watching them bounce?
  • Social presence: is your footprint consistent across platforms, or scattered everywhere?
  • Email list health: is your biggest asset actually working for you?

A scoring guide at the end helps you rate your website’s overall health. The checklist is based on the same framework I use in my professional Full Discoverability Audit, and it’s the same one I give clients before a paid audit.

Best for authors who:

  • Are launching a book, whether it’s their first or their tenth
  • Spend hours on marketing but see little payoff
  • Aren’t sure what works and feel overwhelmed by conflicting advice
Get the free website self-audit

Which free resource should you start with?

  • Start with my bibliography if you’re deciding what to do next, such as which platforms to try or which advice to trust.
  • Start with the self-audit if you suspect your website is leaking readers and you want to find out where.

If you’d like help putting either one into action, I offer one-on-one consultations and audits for indie and self-published authors. Every service I offer is created by humans, and I don’t use AI for copywriting, strategy, or tactics.

Image by expresswriters from Pixabay.