You Don’t Need Thousands of Followers to Sell Your Book

Marina Aris

Aug 18

5 min read

Updated: 22 hours ago

One of the questions I hear surprisingly often from authors is some version of this:

How do I get thousands of followers so people will buy my book?

The question makes sense. Spend enough time online and it's easy to come away believing that successful authors have large platforms, large platforms create book sales, and therefore the first thing you need to do is build an audience of thousands of people.

I don't think that's where most authors should begin.

Because having thousands of people following you and having readers who genuinely care about your work are two very different things.

A Follower Is Not Necessarily a Reader

This distinction matters.

You can have a large social media following and very little meaningful engagement with your book. You can also have a relatively small audience made up of people who read your work, recommend it, attend your events, buy your next book, and tell other people about you.

Which audience would you rather have?

For me, the answer is easy.

I'd rather have the readers.

This is one of the reasons I'm cautious about putting numbers at the center of an author's marketing strategy. Numbers are easy to measure, which makes them tempting. Followers go up. Likes go up. Views go up. Rankings go up and down.

But none of those numbers tells you the most important thing:

Did the book connect with someone?

Think About the Room You Actually Want to Fill

I often ask authors to imagine something completely different from a social media dashboard.

Imagine walking into a room filled with people who have read your book.

Not random people. Not followers accumulated because you figured out how to work an algorithm.

Readers.

Maybe there are 20 people in the room. Maybe there are 200. Maybe someday there are thousands.

Every person is there because something you created reached them.

If you write fiction, perhaps they became absorbed in your characters or disappeared into a world you created.

If you write memoir, something about your experience may have helped another person understand their own.

If you write nonfiction, perhaps your book taught someone something, changed the way they approached a problem, or gave them an idea they could use in their own life.

If you write poetry, maybe you found words for something another person had felt but couldn't express.

If you write for children, perhaps your story became the book a child asks a parent to read again and again.

That's an audience.

And that's very different from a follower count.

You Don't Need Everyone

One of the strange things about modern marketing is that it can make authors feel as though they're failing simply because most people don't know who they are.

But why should most people know who you are?

Most people aren't the readers for your book.

Your job isn't to convince everyone to care about what you've written. Your job is to make it easier for the people who would care to discover it.

That is a much more manageable proposition.

It also changes the way you think about marketing.

Instead of asking:

How do I get more followers?

You can begin asking:

Who is this book really for?

Where are those readers?

What might make them curious about this book?

What can I share that would give them a genuine reason to connect with me or my work?

Those questions lead somewhere.

Start With the Book

I believe authors sometimes make the mistake of looking outward too quickly.

They see what another author is doing and assume they should do it too.

Someone is making videos, so they think they need to make videos.

Someone has a newsletter, so they start a newsletter.

Someone posts every day, so they decide they need to post every day.

Someone has 50,000 followers, so suddenly 50,000 followers becomes the goal.

But none of those decisions began with the author's own book.

I would rather begin there.

What did you write?

Why did you write it?

What is interesting about it?

What inspired it?

Who might recognize something of themselves in it?

What conversations naturally surround it?

What do you know, believe, question, imagine, or care about because you spent all of that time creating this particular work?

That's where your marketing material is.

Give Readers Something Real to Connect With

Authors sometimes tell me they don't know what to post.

I understand why.

If you believe marketing means constantly inventing promotional messages about your book, you will probably run out of things to say very quickly.

But your book didn't appear out of nowhere.

There is an entire world surrounding its creation.

Where did the idea come from?

What was the writing process like?

What surprised you?

What did you remove?

What did you learn?

For fiction writers, how did the characters develop? Did any of them refuse to behave the way you originally imagined? Are there deleted scenes or pieces of the world that never made it into the finished manuscript?

For nonfiction authors, what experience led you to your subject? What questions are people always asking you? What do readers misunderstand about the topic? What do you wish more people knew?

That's material worth sharing.

Not because you've found another way to advertise your book, but because you're allowing readers into the world surrounding it.

A Smaller Audience Can Be a Powerful Audience

There is nothing wrong with wanting your readership to grow. Of course we want books to reach more people.

But growth should be the result of connection, not a substitute for it.

One reader who is genuinely moved by your book matters.

One hundred readers matter.

One thousand readers matter.

The goal isn't to dismiss scale. The goal is to build something worth scaling.

If you can create genuine connections with readers, those relationships can last far longer than a temporary spike in engagement.

A reader who cares about your work may follow you from one book to the next. They may recommend you to a friend. They may show up at an event years later. They may rediscover an older title because something brought it back into their life.

That's the kind of author career I'm interested in helping writers build.

Find Your Readers, Not Your Followers

So if you're worried that you don't have enough followers to successfully publish or market a book, I would encourage you to change the question.

Don't begin with:

How many people are following me?

Begin with:

Who are the people who might genuinely care about what I've created, and how can I reach them?

Then give them something real to connect with.

Your ideas. Your characters. Your experiences. Your curiosity. Your expertise. Your humor. Your perspective. Your reason for writing the book in the first place.

You don't need to become an influencer.

You need to become discoverable to the readers who are looking for something only your book can give them.

And that is a very different kind of marketing.