I was a first-time indie author launching a psychological thriller.

Throw a rock into a writing community and you're probably going to hit somebody writing one.

I had no built-in reader audience. Like, at all.

I started actively marketing Sarah & Charlie in mid-July 2026. The book launched August 18.

I started with:

0 reader email subscribers
0 dedicated social followers
0 previous fiction audience
$0 in paid advertising
~1 month of pre-launch marketing

At that point, the question wasn't, “How do I tell more people I wrote a book?”

It was:

Why the hell would somebody care about this psychological thriller when they have thousands of others to choose from?

I didn't define my reader by age, gender, or some made-up persona.

Woman, 37, makes $82,000 a year, drinks oat milk.

I don't care about that.
I cared about how they behave.

The Sarah & Charlie reader gets into shit.

They like horror, mysteries, psychological thrillers and cold cases.

They love lore.

They develop theories.

They notice clues.

They finish the movie and immediately start researching everything they missed.

They don't just want to consume a story.

They want to be inside of it. Living it and breathing it if they could.

So, I didn't market Sarah & Charlie like a book.

I treated it like a case.

Instead of a traditional author website, I built a case file around Sarah Silver's disappearance.

Then I carried that idea through the entire experience:

Case-file website → investigate the disappearance
Missing-person flyers → encounter Sarah in the real world
Easter eggs → reward people who dig deeper
Submit a Tip → actually participate in the investigation

I didn't want the marketing to just look like a mystery.

I wanted people to behave like they were investigating one.

And instead of constantly yelling "BUY MY BOOK", the messaging gave people a different question:

What the f*ck happened to Sarah Silver?

No Paid Ads.

No discounts.

No giant BookTok campaign.

No established fiction platform.

No year-long audience-building runway.

The paperback launched at $24.50, and social media was one way into the story, it wasn't the entire strategy.

I also leaned into physical marketing because a missing-person flyer sitting in a coffee shop can do something another book graphic on Instagram can't:

Make you stop and wonder who Sarah is.

Within the first month:

• 50 copies sold directly through the website
• 3 additional Amazon sales
• 0 →90+ email subscribers at peak
• 0 → ~40 dedicated social followers
• $0 paid advertising
• Readers finished the book in a day and started asking for Book 2.

Wholesale retail opportunities emerged.

And Sarah & Charlie was accepted into the CultureCon marketplace by people I didn't know.

Now, let's not bullshit the numbers.

Some of those first 50 buyers knew me. I'm not going to pretend 50 strangers magically appeared because my messaging was incredible.

The more interesting signal was what happened outside my immediate network.

Strangers bought it.

Retailers became interested.

People I never expected to care about the book cared.

And readers started behaving exactly how the strategy predicted:

They got involved.

I didn't think of everything before launch.

Events weren't part of the original plan.

Neither were book clubs.

In fact, it wasn't until someone asked about them, that I started making a plan for it.

Stay tuned on this.

I started with no fiction audience, no reader list, no dedicated following, no ad budget, and about a month to make people give a shit.

So I couldn't rely on reach.

I had to rely on relevance.

And that's the bigger messaging lesson.

Sometimes the problem isn't:

How do we market this product?

It's:

How does the person we're trying to reach want to experience it?

For Sarah & Charlie, they wanted clues.

Theories.

Lore.

They wanted to know what the fuck happened to Sarah Silver.

So I didn't just give them another psychological thriller.

I gave them a case to solve.

Check out the Case File