Last updated 19th February 2019

Leg Iron Books is a very small operation. We do not have a dedicated marketing department (we can’t yet afford the drinks bill for one) and we have a limited marketing budget. Promoting all the individual books will cost far more than promoting this site, which showcases all the books. However, individual book promotions will happen as time and budget allows.

It would be very helpful indeed if individual authors promoted their own work – and let us know about it. If you get a great review, send us a link. If you have a YouTube channel and you’ve posted a reading of some of your work, we can link to that too. Have a page on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or Goodreads or anywhere else remotely relevant? Send us the link. Promoting your work doesn’t have to cost much, if anything. Any promotion or publicity you get, we will be happy to include that here.

Some small publishers require their authors to aid in promoting their work as a condition of future contracts. Leg Iron Books imposes no such condition. If you don’t want to do it, there is nothing compelling you. We will promote all the books, however it is important to remember that we will be splitting the budget among many books. There won’t be much available per book.

There are free options. Leg Iron Books is looking into using Cafepress and related sites to produce merchandise. Mugs, fridge magnets, T-shirts etc, bearing the Leg Iron Books logo and book cover images. Note that we can only do this with covers provided by Leg Iron Books. Authors who produce their own covers hold copyright to those covers so we cannot make them available without explicit permission. It would be best for those authors to set up their own Cafepress accounts and we will link to them from the author and book pages here. Well, it’s only fair that those who produce the images profit from their resale, if possible.

You can produce simple fridge magnets (magnetic business cards) on sites like Vistaprint, but be prepared for some frustration getting the images right. Do not use such sites for T shirts, they will sell you printed T shirts in a set size but you have to buy them first. Those are better placed on the Cafepress – style sites where they print to order from customers.

There are already Leg Iron Books magnets which will, of course, be distributed to authors with the author copies of their books and (if budget allows) distributed to past authors too. So far the budget does not stretch to creating advertising merchandise for individual books, but that day may yet come.

We are not keen on paid reviews. If you are paying for a review, that naturally skews the reviewer towards leniency since if they give consistently bad reviews, nobody else will pay them. Unpaid reviews, or reviews ‘paid for’ with just a free copy of the book, are far more convincing. Unsolicited reviews are best of all, but those are very hard to come by other than ‘verified purchase’ reviews on Amazon. Which are, of course, entirely up to the purchaser.

In summary, marketing is a learning curve that is proving to be a steep one. We are, however, moving up that curve. Even so, we are happy to link to any promotion any individual author has put out there, in any format.

This is not limited to books published by Leg Iron Books. We will add any link to any of your other work to your author page. It all helps.

We are principally promoting Leg Iron Books. You are promoting… you. We will help with that.