I've spent a stupid amount of time trying to market books.
Like most indie authors, I've gone through the usual cycle. Make a Facebook post. Share something on Reddit. Mention it on LinkedIn. Wonder whether I should finally make a TikTok account despite being almost thirty and already feeling slightly out of place opening the app.
A few people like the post.
Someone comments saying the cover looks great.
Maybe you even sell a copy.
Maybe.
That's the problem.
You never actually know.
For a long time, I thought the answer was simply to do more. More posts. More platforms. More consistency. Every piece of marketing advice on the internet seems to boil down to "just keep posting", which is probably easy to say when your business is selling marketing advice.
Then one day it hit me.
What if the problem wasn't that I wasn't doing enough?
What if I simply had no idea what was already working?
Those are two completely different problems.
Imagine you spend three hours writing a Reddit post. It gets picked up, people engage with it, and a couple of hundred people click through to your book.
The following day you spend another three hours making an Instagram Reel that gets five thousand views.
Which one sold more books?
Without tracking anything properly, the answer is "I have absolutely no idea."
Views aren't sales.
Likes aren't sales.
Comments definitely aren't sales.
They're nice. They make your brain release a little bit of dopamine. Humans seem strangely susceptible to tiny red notification bubbles. Evolution really dropped the ball there.
But none of those things tell you where your readers actually came from.
Once I started thinking about it like that, my approach completely changed.
Instead of asking, "Where should I promote my book next?"
I started asking, "Which of the things I've already tried deserves another hour of my time?"
That's a much easier question to answer.
If Reddit consistently sends readers and Instagram doesn't, why would I split my effort equally?
If newsletters outperform everything else, maybe I should spend more time growing my mailing list instead of chasing whatever social network everyone has decided is essential this week.
Good marketing isn't about doing everything.
It's about identifying the handful of things that actually move the needle and quietly ignoring the rest.
That's ultimately why I built Tutarium.
Not because I wanted another link shortener.
There are already plenty of those.
I wanted to stop guessing.
I wanted to know whether the Facebook post was worth writing.
Whether that podcast interview sent anyone.
Whether changing the call-to-action actually made a difference.
Whether I should bother doing the same thing again next month.
Ironically, the data wasn't always encouraging.
Some things I thought would perform brilliantly barely generated any clicks.
Other things surprised me completely.
That's exactly what I wanted.
Bad news backed by evidence is infinitely more useful than good feelings backed by nothing.
I'm still figuring all of this out.
Tutarium isn't some overnight success story. It's a product I'm building because I needed it myself first.
But even with relatively small numbers, I've already stopped asking, "How do I market my books?"
Now I'm asking, "Which marketing is actually worth repeating?"
For me, that's been a much more useful question.