Writing books is one thing; marketing them is a completely different story.

By writing 1,000 words a day, I’ve already mastered the discipline part of writing. AI has helped me tremendously with book editing—making the process faster and improving the quality of my edits. The same goes for translations from German to English. My book cover design skills aren’t amazing, but they’re certainly above average. When it comes to writing style, I’m still learning something new every day—aren’t we all?

What I haven’t really tackled so far, though, is marketing. I had some ideas—creating this blog, using Twitter, making YouTube videos—and my STORY52 project is also part of my marketing efforts. But I never bought a good book on the topic, didn’t do deep online research, and never truly tried to market my books in a structured way.

As an independent author without a budget, you simply have to do it all: writing, editing, translating, designing—and marketing.

So from now on, I’m dedicating one article per week on my website to book marketing. This forces me to learn, and it also increases the value I offer readers on this blog. A win-win.

To get you started as well, check out this great resource I’ve already found: Book Marketing Bestseller

It’s by a guy named John Kremer, who also wrote 1,001 Ways to Market Your Books, a book praised by many authors.

At the moment, I’m working my way through his blog. His book is next on my list. You can find it on Goodreads here.

If I write about one marketing technique per week, I’ll have my own 1,001 ways to market books in about 20 years. Stay with me to see what number 1,001 will be.

Normally, I give away my short story books for free from Monday to Friday. For my latest issue, No. 11 The Wheel, however, I made it available for free starting on Friday (the promotion will run until Wednesday). Over the weekend, I may have seen a small increase in downloads, but nothing spectacular.

So far, my best-performing short story was downloaded 45 times in German and 8 times in English over five days (Killtime – US – DE). My worst performer was Protocol: Twilight (US – DE), with 13 downloads in German and 4 in English.

The Wheel had 22 downloads in the US and 16 in Germany over the weekend alone—you can still grab a free copy here: US – DE

That’s a slight increase compared to my average. Compared to my best issue so far, it’s roughly on the same level.

I wasn’t sure whether people look for books to read more often on weekends, even though online traffic is higher during weekdays for most of my other web projects. After this experiment, I’m still not convinced that they do. Sometimes, it’s simply the cover and the title that spark more interest in a book. Killtime, for example, just sounds more exciting than Protocol: Twilight, right?

Maybe the cover of The Wheel is one of the better ones I’ve created, which could have led to its above-average performance. Even if that’s the case, the download numbers aren’t dramatically higher than usual.

For now, I’d conclude that it doesn’t make much of a difference whether I set my books to free on Fridays or Mondays.

I’ll run more experiments in the future, but for the moment, I’ll go back to running my free promotions starting on Mondays and leaving out the weekends.