No worries, and thanks! I've shared quite a bit about self-publishing strategies in past blogs. The industry changes so much that the specifics of the advice is ever-evolving. I'd highly recommend utilizing Grok and ChatGPT to help design a book marketing campaign based on your books' synopsis. The basic versions are free and from what I've experienced, very capable.

Ten years ago the thing to do would be to build a loyal online social media following first, gather as many of their emails as you can, then build a robust email list (with a service like Mail Chimp) before you publish. This always worked very well for me.

Hive has been super valuable for incubating book ideas, gauging reader interest, getting book design feedback, producing the final text of the book itself, and sometimes even generating enough to fund the self-publishing. But I, personally, haven't found Hive to be a great place to generate actual book sales. Book trailers and audiobook versions also help. @honeydue would probably have some excellent insights here!

That connection with the reader is everything, really. I remember when I was posting chapters of my first novel on the blockchain in 2016—reading those comments each day felt like Christmas morning. Book sales are just like the icing on the cake.