About ABC Book Marketing
We’re a small editorial PR and visibility agency for independent fiction authors – built around the belief that good books deserve the kind of campaign most of them never get.
Why this exists
Independent publishing has quietly become one of the most serious places in fiction. Novels that wouldn’t have found a home in traditional publishing twenty years ago are now reaching thousands of readers. Writers who once would have given up after a round of rejections are building careers on their own terms.
But independent authors also inherit a problem. The marketing support that comes with a traditional publishing deal – the publicists, the trade connections, the editorial conversations about positioning – isn’t there. And what’s on offer in its place is, too often, either industrial (packaged services sold at scale) or shallow (social media templates, ad spend, bestseller promises).
We built ABC Book Marketing because we thought there was room for something between those extremes. A service that does the careful, editorial work a traditional publicist would do – but for independent authors, on terms that suit how they actually publish.
How we think about this work
Publicity is editorial work. The best campaigns come from reading the book properly, understanding what it’s actually doing, and finding the sharpest way to describe it – in a pitch, in a press release, in a reviewer’s inbox. That’s not a task that can be automated or templated. It’s judgement, applied carefully and repeatedly.
We also believe in the slow things. A single thoughtful pitch to the right reviewer, written by someone who’s read the book, will almost always outperform a hundred impersonal mailshots. A relationship with a podcast host built up over years will land you a better interview than any cold approach. The unglamorous, patient work of building those relationships is what separates campaigns that move a book from campaigns that just make noise around it.
And we’re honest — with authors about what’s realistic, with ourselves about what’s working, with the press about what we’re offering. It’s the only way to stay in this business for the long term, and it’s the only way the work stays worth doing.
The people behind the work
ABC Book Marketing is a small, UK-based team. We come from backgrounds in publishing, journalism, and independent bookselling – which means we’ve spent years either making books, writing about them, or selling them. That experience shapes how we approach every campaign.
We’re deliberately small because the work doesn’t scale in the way some agencies pretend it does. Every campaign gets real editorial attention. Every author gets the same person replying to their emails. We’d rather take on fewer authors and do proper work for them than grow the client list to the point where the quality slips.
We’re also real readers. The books we work on are books we choose to take on – partly because the author’s approach makes sense to us, partly because we think we can genuinely help, and partly because we want to read what you’ve written. It doesn’t always work out. But when it does, it tends to produce the campaigns we’re most proud of.
Work with us
If what we’ve described sounds like the kind of support you’re looking for, we’d be glad to hear about your book.