Writing a book is hard, but marketing it on your own as an indie writer is certainly even harder!
For my own book called “Deployment from Scratch” (yes, it’s not gonna be the next Harry Potter) I wanted to validate the idea a little and put a stop to the silly idea before it’s too late.
As part of my validation I created a simple landing page and posted about the idea on the Ruby subreddit (which is one of target audiences) and to my blog (I was getting over 200 unique visitors at that time).
It actually took me by surprise as it got more upvotes than many of my useful Ruby articles! Over 40! 92% of all people upvoted it. And it was just publishing my idea to write something.
The post itself game me over 50 people in 2 days. Then I put a little ad on my blog and link to the book landing page from time to time when it was relevant (like someone asking about something on Indie Hackers website).
It took 493 days in total to get to 200 though so not an overnight success at all. I suspect most of the signups happened via my blog when I got some spikes after publishing new articles.
Having any kind of place that drives the traffic is really important as you cannot except Google just sending people your way.
Apart from a domain name and time it costed me nothing. I am on a free Mailchimp tear, did 3 updates, and had 6 unsubscribers. If you have any further advice for me, I am all ears :).