Every year the tactics rotate: this year it is short video, last year it was newsletter swaps, the year before it was a platform nobody remembers. Meanwhile the constants keep quietly outperforming everything. A discoverable cover, a blurb that promises a specific feeling, and a book that ends in a series all still do more work than any single campaign.
Start with the product. Readers forgive an average launch; they do not forgive a book that feels unfinished. Professional editing and a cover that signals genre at thumbnail size are not marketing costs — they are the marketing. The algorithm you cannot control is the one running inside a reader's thumb as it scrolls your listing.
Then build the one asset you own: an email list. Social platforms rent you an audience on terms they can change overnight; a list is yours. Offer the reader something worth the address — a short prequel, a deleted scene, a practical guide — and write to them like a person, not a billboard. Everything else is amplification on top of those three foundations.