A book promotion metaphor, with one book etched in stone and the other, in gold.
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I botched a book promotion so you don’t have to

ByTC Marti

Experience and pain are the two greatest teachers. So, in hindsight, I’m happy to say that I screwed up a massive book promotion. 

In May 2025, I unleashed Spirit and Water to the world on Amazon and the other bookstores. Building on the momentum from all the positive feedback I’d gotten for Book I in my old-world short epic fantasy series, and I say ‘short’ because the works are between 63,000 and 70,000 words, I took Spirit and Fire through a promo stack and set it to free as a lead-in to Spirit and Water.

And while I had gotten a ton of downloads, I think like 6,500, it wasn’t long until I realized I cast way too wide a net. My star rating tanked across the board as I’d gotten as many three, two, and one-star hits as I did fours and fives from that book promotion, and it taught me a valuable lesson: Stick to your niche, TC, and don’t get so cute next time.

Message received.

It wasn’t happening again

Fast-forward to September 2025, and I started building an email list for an unrelated genre, even if the inherent themes were the same. This was for a novella, Beyond the Lost Horizon, that kicked off my dystopian survival trilogy

I created a bundle in Bookfunnel and saw about 30-40 other books from various authors jump in. When I checked on the promo’s results, Beyond took the top spot in downloads and was like fourth overall in views. It also had one of the best conversion percentages in the promo, as the screenshot below proves.

One reason for its early success? I wasn’t about to leave anything up to chance, so I put this toward the end of its description: Disclaimer: This 37,000-word novella has strong libertarian themes, revisionist historical topics, and criticism of mainstream narratives. The inciting incident contains intense blood and gore.

Learning from the mistake made with Spirit and Fire

I’m sure if you went onto Amazon right now and typed in Spirit and Fire TC Marti, its overall star rating is probably trash. But sometimes, trash is okay if you know when to take it out.

So, what caused this error in judgment? What made me get so confident and think everyone craving shorter epic fantasy with dark leanings would love it?

I temporarily forgot that I’m a theme-first, genre-second author. I gave Spirit and Fire generic genre positioning as a dark fantasy, and went about this book promotion stack from places like Freebooksy, forgetting what made it unique.

This led to a massive genre mismatch, with fans expecting cookie-cutter dark fantasy and getting:

  • Politically-driven young adult fantasy with…
  • Romance tropes
  • Class (caste) differences
  • Work that reads closer to coming-of-age fiction

Is it a dark fantasy? Absolutely. But it’s more than that, and that’s what I never accounted for when I kicked off that promo.

How my book promotion changed with Beyond the Lost Horizon

When I unleashed Beyond the Lost Horizon’s ARC Edition one year before its actual launch, I was up front with the work’s uniqueness. It’s a dystopian/survival story at heart, but Beyond’s also got:

  • Romance
  • Cultural differences
  • Revisionism
  • Libertarian slants
  • Dissent regarding immigration, multiculturalism, DEI, etc.

If you read Spirit and Fire before picking up Beyond the Lost Horizon, the themes play on one another, and the genres take a back seat. Readers who already follow me and love my work also know I mix and match genres at will, and push the book’s primary genre to, and sometimes past, its limits.

Instead of promoting Beyond’s ARC as just another dystopian survival work, readers needed to know what this book was all about before they clicked ‘download.’ It also set the blueprint for how I would market my backlist and future works, all of which tell, you guessed it, the same theme, even if the stories are unique.

Spirit and Fire still stands tall

Before that rating tanked on Amazon, my newsletter readers had that thing at a healthy 4.9 outta 5 on Amazon, and I even saw a perfect 5.0 rating at a couple of the other stores. So, trust me, this book doesn’t suck just because the wrong people, the genre police, more likely, saw it and thought they’d make their voices heard with aces, deuces, and trips.

But if you’re reading this article, chances are you’re libertarian AF like I am, so I’ll assume you’re smarter than the normies out there who crave mind-numbing fiction to escape their dreary lives. Sucks to be them, but it doesn’t suck to be you.

So, I’ll hand you a reward for your efforts. Even if I botched my book promotion with the normies, Spirit and Fire still stands tall. If you want to dive in, you can pick it up at my store, and use coupon code BOTCHED25 for 25% off as my way of saying thanks for reading.”

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