Get a good marketing team—You might have the greatest novel in the world but if you don’t have a good marketing plan and marketing team in place no one will ever know about your great work. Unless you’re an expert in marketing and social media, you’re going to need help. That doesn’t mean you have to go get some Madison Avenue advertising consultancy to do the marketing for you.  There are plenty of advertising services available online, and social media is probably the number one vehicle used by indie authors to market their books.  Get a good social media manager and let them run with it.  If you try to do all the tweets and posts yourself, you’ll never have time for writing another book.  Plus, a social media manager knows the ins and outs; they know what works, what doesn’t, what gets people to engage and so on.

I like to experiment with marketing from time to time.  Consider getting a group of college marketing majors together for an afternoon of brainstorming.  Have them come up with some real wacky ideas.  Anything goes and nothing is too bold.  You never know what may work and turn you into an overnight success.  Take their ideas and work with the rest of your marketing team to figure out a strategy for employing some, all, or none of the ideas.