For a self-published author, the two things we’re shortest on are usually money and time. Time, because most of us are running an 8-to-5 somewhere, are business owners, students, and writing, publishing, and marketing a book happens in the cracks of that schedule….evenings, weekends, that one hour before everyone else wakes up. Money, because self-publishing means every cost comes out of your own pocket, and marketing your book always feels like the thing you’ll “get to” once. When you feel like it. And you are not selling at all.
But here’s the truth that took me a while to sit with: you can hire someone to do it for you. I’m not kidding. If really you want your books to sell.
I know as you’re reading this, you’re asking, “Wait, I already spent this much money printing? Now you’re telling me to spend more? I would rather have just used a publisher then—” and honestly, I get it. That thought used to stop me too. But here’s the thing that reframe taught me: a traditional publisher isn’t giving you marketing for free. They’re charging you for it, quietly, every single time a reader buys your book and you take home Ksh 100 or 150 out of a cover price that’s ten times that. The marketing cost doesn’t disappear when you sign with a publisher. It just gets built into the deal, buried inside a royalty split you don’t see until the statement lands in your inbox. So the real question isn’t “printer money vs. marketing money.” It’s “do I pay for marketing upfront and keep my royalties, or do I pay for it forever, book after book, out of every sale?” Framed that way, hiring help on your own terms starts to look less like an extra cost and more like buying yourself out of a much bigger, quieter one.
If you advertise, if you post in the right places, you can find someone good to help carry the marketing load. And that’s exactly where I am right now as an author.
Where I started: grassroots marketing
Before I even thought about outsourcing anything, I did what most of us do first, grassroots marketing. Book clubs, WhatsApp chats, corridor conversations at work and in networking events, parents/teacher conferences, street hawking with a stack of books in malls and a lot of patience. It’s exhausting. Genuinely. I see why an author would leave their books under the bed for years. You’re doing the writing, the selling, the following up on M-Pesa payments, the delivery, the small talk, the convincing….all of it, alone. Yikes!
But it works, in its own slow way. It’s how most of us have to begin. Over the span of one year, doing nothing but grassroots effort, I sold about 250 books (at least none are under my bed). My last batch is sitting at Kibanga Books Bookstore right now. Not bad for one person hustling on the side of a full-time job. I’m proud of that number. But as we go deep into finishing 2026, I know grassroots alone won’t get me to where I actually want to go.
If you’re in the same place I am
If you’ve done the legwork, sold a respectable number of copies through sheer grit, and you’re now mid-year checking in with yourself, wondering how to grow beyond what your own two hands and your weekends can do, here’s what I’d tell you.
1. Understand that marketing is a skill, not a hustle. Grassroots selling proves your book has an audience. But scaling past that requires things most of us were never trained to do: running ad campaigns, building an email list, pitching to media, getting reviews, positioning your book for algorithms on Amazon or social platforms. That’s a skillset. Respect it enough to pay for it.
2. Know what kind of help you actually need before you hire. “Marketing” is a big umbrella. Are you looking for:
- A book publicist: someone who gets you press, podcast features, interviews, and reviews to build credibility and word of mouth?
- A social media/content manager: someone who keeps you visible online consistently, because most of us drop off after week two?
- An ads specialist: someone who runs paid promotions on Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon to get direct sales?
- A book marketing strategist: someone who builds you an actual plan instead of random, scattered activity?
Knowing which one you need (sometimes it’s more than one) will save you money and disappointment.
3. Vet before you pay. Ask for past client results, not just promises. Ask what their process looks like. A serious book marketer should be able to explain, in plain terms, how they intend to move your numbers, not just “trust me.”
4. Start small, but start. You don’t need a huge budget to test the waters. Even a modest investment in a short campaign, a few boosted posts, or one month of publicist outreach will tell you whether this is worth scaling into a bigger spend.
5. Track everything. If you invest money into marketing, you need to know what it’s actually returning: copies sold, reach, engagement, email sign-ups. Don’t just “feel” like it’s working. Know it.
The benefits of finally investing in this
The honest benefit is simple: your time gets freed up to write the next book, while someone else works the marketing engine in the background. It also means your book gets seen by people who were never going to find it through your personal network alone. Readers outside your circle of friends, family, and colleagues. That’s how you go from “the author my community supports” to an author with a real, growing readership.
The realization that changed how I see traditional publishing
Honestly, this whole journey has made something click for me. You know how some traditionally published authors say they get royalties of Ksh 100 or 150 per book, and us (aspiring authors) wonder how that’s even fair? It makes so much more sense now. The publishing house isn’t just printing your book, they’re pouring serious money into pushing it. Publicity teams, ad budgets, distribution deals, media relationships built over years. That’s what you’re really paying for when you give up a chunk of your royalty. It’s not free money they’re taking; it’s the cost of scale. And you become a best-seller really quick.
For self-published authors, we are the entire publishing house on our own. Share some of that money you’re earning from your 8-to-5 or your business to invest in getting to where you want to be as an author too. I know it sounds crazy, but… yeah.
As a self-published author, when you take on marketing yourself, you get to keep almost all your royalties, but you also carry the full weight, and often the full ceiling, of your own reach. Investing in marketing help doesn’t mean abandoning that independence. It means being strategic about which parts of the publishing house model you can borrow: a bit of expert push here, a bit of professional publicity there, without giving up your ownership.
If you don’t know where to begin
Contact me, and let’s help each other. Here’s how this works: I’ve been exactly where you are, grassroots-tired, proud of what I’ve built by hand, and just starting to figure out the marketing side myself. So I’m not offering to be your publicist or your ads expert. What I can do is walk this stretch with you: share what’s actually worked and what’s wasted my money so far, point you toward people and resources I trust as I vet them, and swap notes so neither of us is figuring this out completely alone. Sometimes the most useful thing isn’t hiring an expert on day one, it’s finding another author who’s a few steps ahead (or right beside you) to compare notes with.
