Writing a Book Is an Achievement. It Is Not a Marketing Strategy.

I spent more than eight years writing Shadows Before the Dawn. Not eight years of waking up every morning and diligently writing a thousand words, to be clear. There were periods when I wrote constantly, periods when I barely touched it, and several occasions when I went back to the opening chapters and wondered whether the only sensible option was to rewrite the entire book.

Eventually, though, I finished it. The edits were complete, I had a cover, and after years of telling people I was writing a book, I could finally point to something real and say, “There it is.” I had been talking about it for so long that I suspect some people had started to think the book was less an actual project and more a personality trait.

It was a brilliant feeling, but it was quickly followed by a slightly less romantic question.

What now?

Writing a book is an achievement. It is not a marketing strategy. Finishing the manuscript does not create an audience, and publishing it does not mean readers will suddenly become aware that it exists. Even writing something genuinely good does not guarantee that people will find it, particularly when nobody knows who you are in the first place.

The uncomfortable truth is that nobody is sitting around waiting for an unknown fantasy writer to finish his 600-page novel. Readers already have more books than they could possibly get through. They have authors they trust, series they are halfway through, recommendations from friends and whatever Amazon, TikTok or Reddit has decided they should read next.

Your book does not enter an empty room. It walks into a very crowded one and tries to find somewhere to stand.

Finishing was only the beginning

Before publishing, I understood that I would have to market the book. I work in marketing, so this was hardly a shocking revelation. I have spent years helping companies work out who they are speaking to, why those people should care and how to explain what they have built without making everyone immediately lose interest.

Doing it for my own book felt completely different.

It is much easier to speak confidently about someone else’s product because you have some emotional distance from it. You can study the audience, test a few messages and look at the results without feeling that the entire thing is a judgement on you personally. With a novel, the product contains years of your life, hundreds of thousands of words and a collection of imaginary people who have occupied your head for longer than some of your actual friendships.

That makes it slightly harder to treat the whole thing as a straightforward marketing exercise.

Every piece of advice begins to feel personal. Show your face more. Post every day. Explain what makes the book different. Reduce the story you spent eight years writing to one sentence. Make videos. Build an email list. Run ads. Get reviews. Start a podcast. Somehow become interesting enough that strangers want to follow you, but do not talk about the book so often that they become tired of hearing about it.

Also, while doing all of that, write the next one.

Publishing involves an extraordinary amount of administration for something that began because I liked stories involving swords. There are platforms to understand, files to format, profiles to create, pages to build and advertising systems to learn. None of it is particularly impossible on its own, but together it requires a completely different kind of energy from writing.

When you are writing, the challenge is making the story work. When you are marketing, the challenge is getting somebody to stop long enough to notice that the story exists.

Effort does not create attention

I think writers can easily confuse the amount of work they have put into a book with the amount of attention it deserves. I understand why, because finishing a novel feels enormous to the person who wrote it. You remember the late nights, the deleted chapters, the plot problem that took six months to solve and the sentence you rewrote fifteen times despite knowing that no reader would ever notice.

Then the book is released and, rather rudely, the rest of the world carries on as normal.

Friends say they will read it, and some of them genuinely mean it. Some buy it and place it on a steadily growing pile beside their bed, where I assume it forms part of a long-term storage system. Family members congratulate you without having the faintest idea what the book is about. If you are very lucky, one of them will ask whether it is based on Game of Thrones, because that is the fantasy thing they have heard of.

Meanwhile, almost every piece of publishing advice tells you that readers want reviews before they will take a chance on a new book. This presents a fairly obvious problem. To get readers, you need reviews, but to get reviews, you first need readers.

There is no clever marketing observation that makes this contradiction disappear. People look for human signals when deciding what to buy. They want to know that someone else has taken the risk first, and I do exactly the same thing when considering a book by an author I have never heard of.

The difficulty for a new writer is creating those first signals without turning every conversation into a request to buy, review or promote something. You do not want to become the person who appears in an old friend’s messages after seven years and, following one polite question about their family, sends them an Amazon link.

At the same time, I do not think the answer is pretending not to care. I care deeply whether people read my book. I wrote it for myself, but I did not publish it so that it could sit unnoticed on a digital shelf. Wanting readers does not make the original act of writing less sincere. It simply means that the goal has changed.

At first, I wanted to prove that I could finish a book. Now I want to find the people who might enjoy it.

The strange job of becoming visible

Authors are increasingly expected to become content creators as well. For some people this comes naturally. They enjoy filming videos, sharing their process and building a public identity around their work. Others have created very clever faceless accounts, and I have even seen writers wearing masks to promote their books. Whether the masks are selling novels, I have no idea, but I respect the commitment.

I originally planned to remain almost entirely faceless. I chose to publish as C.J. Kael partly because I liked having a separate identity for my fiction. I wanted the books and the worlds to take the lead rather than making myself the centre of everything.

I now host a podcast with one of my closest friends and talk openly about how the book was written, so that plan has clearly gone extremely well.

I am still working out what visibility should look like for me. I do not want to spend so much time talking about writing that I stop doing it, and I do not want every post to become a disguised sales pitch. The most interesting path, at least for now, seems to be sharing the experience honestly.

That means talking about what I am trying, what works, what fails and what it actually feels like to release a book into the world. I am not interested in presenting myself as someone who has solved publishing. There are already enough people online promising that they know the exact formula for becoming a bestselling author, usually shortly before asking you to buy the formula from them.

I cannot offer that. What I can offer is the truth about trying.

Giving people the opportunity to care

Finishing a book matters. Whatever happens after publication, taking something that existed only in your head and turning it into a complete novel is worth being proud of. I still find it strange to see Shadows Before the Dawn sitting on a shelf and know that the story is no longer something I am merely planning to finish one day.

But completing the book does not give people a reason to read it. It only gives them the opportunity.

The next part is finding those readers without losing the thing that made you want to write in the first place. That might take another book. It might take three. It might require years of slowly building trust with people who enjoy the same kinds of stories, rather than waiting for one post, advert or algorithm to suddenly change everything.

I am still near the beginning of that process. The book is finished, but the work around it is not, and neither is the story. Shadows Before the Dawn is the first part of a larger series, and perhaps the best thing I can do for its chances is return to the reason all of this started in the first place.

I need to write the next book and give people another opportunity to care.