Marketing... sucks.

As a friend of mine told me today, "Marketing sucks."

And it's true. It sucks. Especially self-marketing.

Where do you draw the line between a few gentle reminders to "please buy my book!" and "I'M ANNOYING THE SHIT OUT OF YOU WITH POSTS AND UPDATES BECAUSE I WANT TO SELL MORE THAN 10 COPIES!" ??

Not asking for a friend. I'm asking this for myself.

It's hard to bust through all the chatter out there and actually make yourself noticed. Doubly so when you're trying to NOT be intrusive about it. Auto-DMs get you unfollowed or blocked. Random links to your amazon page go ignored with a simple "like" and then you're left where you started. Topping out at a handful of sales with no big firm behind you to help carry the financial burden.

Just like many indie-pub authors, I don't have much of a marketing budget. So I can't go around relying on ads from amazon or Facebook. I've found limited success in engagement through targeted ads on Facebook... but not a lot. Word of mouth will probably be my best asset - and that relies heavily on the first few people reading my book to like it enough to tell someone else.

Right now, my marketing plan is an 8-step process:

1: Facebook page with some paid ads.
2: My twitter account with occasional posts  - but as we all know, people tend to gloss over these as they're scrolling when it becomes clear the post isn't a meme.
3: A twitter account for my book. From here I can pin tweets, make posts, and possible sell an ad or two via twitter. This should, in theory, prevent my main account from being muted or blocked, while giving me a chance to put out new content.
4: Rely on friends and family to help RT and post links to my book when it goes live.
5: Prayer?
6: Hope REALLY hard that my book is good and people will just buy it.
7: Randomly tackle people on the street, force a copy of my book into their hand, and take $20 from their wallets.
8: Try to engage as many people on Facebook and Twitter as I can in hopes that some of them click the link to my amazon page out of pity.

***Contingency plan consists of duct-taping my book to cases of beer and selling it that way.

And that's about it. I think.

I am welcome and open to suggestions. I have about $100 to use for ads which, as we all know, isn't very much when it comes to this stuff.

How about you? How do YOU market your stuff?