Marketing
There are so many entities that seem to put themselves between you and the folks who read your books: retailers, Amazon (they seem to be a special category all their own), publishers, agents, publicists, media, social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc), communities (Goodreads, Wattpad, etc), just to name some of the most obvious.
In other words, there is:
You, the author –> some other entity –> the reader/audience.
Now, for the most part, these entities add value. Loads of value. Twitter allows you to do things you couldn’t do on your own, as does a publisher, agent, Amazon, Goodreads, etc. And of course, you get to CHOOSE which of these PARTNERS you want to engage with. Because that is what they are, partners in your professional process of having a writing career. That choice is entirely up to you. (yay freedom!)
Today I want to explore one way to forge a DIRECT connection with your audience. One where there is no other entity creating a ruleset as to how and when you can connect with your audience. In other words, a connection where no one is changing an algorithm, or terms, or saying you can do X, as long as you follow our parameters and use our proprietary system.
THE LEAST CROWDED CHANNEL
I remember author Tim Ferriss describing how he spent thousands of dollars for marketing his first book: he pursued the least crowded channel: IN PERSON RELATIONSHIPS (he mentions it here). He spent his money on airfare to try to establish relationships with people he thought could help his book find an audience. He felt that shouting more messages into crowded channels wouldn’t differentiate himself, he knew that sitting face to face with someone is the least crowded channel.
Possible ‘least crowded channels’ for you connecting with someone?
That I’ll only end up drowning in the sea of online voices. That no one cares. That I’m not interesting enough, attractive enough, young enough, clever enough, or technically adroit enough to catch and hold anyone’s attention no matter what I blog/post about, when, where, how, or how often.”
This is how Karyn Henley, an author I am working with described her fear of promoting her books. I had two reactions when reading this:
And it made me consider: why do we often hide these fears? From ourselves, and from the world, perhaps because they somehow seem shameful?
I have heard a lot of quotes akin to “the brave aren’t those without fear; they are simply those who feel fear, yet move ahead despite it.”
Too often we avoid talking about fear because it seems like an embarrassing debilitation – something that if we pretend isn’t there – if we don’t discuss out loud, that at least we can give the illusion that we are brave and unaffected. But bravery is usually FULL of fear in the mix. So let’s talk about it.
I think that the more we try to pretend that fear doesn’t and shouldn’t exist, the more we hurt our own chances to create whatever it is you dream about.
I have been talking to writers about this – what are their fears as authors. I mean the stuff that keeps them up at night. The stuff behind why we procrastinate, and why we do or don’t take actions to create or share our work.
Today, I would like to explore what I have been hearing. Here are a few of the fears we discussed:
APATHY
This seemed to be the number 1 fear among writers: That no one will care, no one will read their books, no one will feel any sense of enthusiasm about this thing they created.
Read MoreLiz Fenton and Lisa Steinke, authors of Your Perfect Life (Washington Square Press) have been best friends for twenty-five years and survived high school and college together. They’ve written the story of two childhood best friends who wake up the morning after their twentieth high school reunion to discover that they’ve switched bodies and need to figure out how to navigate their altered realities.
Says New York Times best-selling author Sarah Jio:
I loved this from the very first line (which will go down in history as the funniest, bravest first line ever). Hilarious, honest and truly touching, Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke are two important new voices in women’s fiction who write about life in such a real, relatable way.
Liz lives in San Diego with her husband and two children. Lisa, a former talk show producer, now lives in Chicago with her husband, daughter, and two bonus children.
Follow Liz and Lisa on their blog, Facebook, and Twitter.
We really can’t describe the feeling when we received that email from our now editor. The one that begins: I want to buy your book! We screamed, we laughed, one of us may have even cried a little (Liz!), and we both thought one thing: This is it! We’ve made it!
Little did we know it was only the beginning…
Countless times, we’ve read debut novels that entranced us. We’d devour them, then sing the author’s praises to anyone who would listen. And we were always baffled if said book didn’t take off and top the bestseller lists. In some cases, the author never wrote another. How could that happen? If a book is wonderful, it should prevail, right?
Wrong. There are a ton of factors that go into a successful book launch and writing a fantastic book is only one of them.
Read MoreAfter years of drafting, critiquing, revising, submitting and watching rejections pile up, you’ve finally landed a publishing deal and your book is coming out in several months.
Over those years you’ve worked hard, too, to build a platform — giving webinars on craft, writing articles that have run in places like the Huffington Post and contributing regularly to a popular blog (maybe WU?) drawing thousands of readers from around the country.
Yet, when you sit down for the long-anticipated meeting with your publisher’s marketing team, you’re told that despite your strong online connections with readers in cities from Portland, OR to Portland ME, your publisher won’t sponsor a book tour.
You’ve just come up against the false divide between ‘author promotion,’ which spotlights you as an author and an individual, and ‘book promotion,’ which focuses specifically on a given book. In promoting yourself as an author a book tour can be an important part of leverageing all the connections you’ve built as a voice in the literary world, and doing so makes perfect sense. People who’ve enjoyed your blog posts and articles, whom you’ve exchanged comments and tweets with, may well want to meet you in person when you’re in town. They’ll come to your talk in the local indie bookstore and possibly invite a couple of friends. Some might host book club events for you or feature you on their own blogs. If well-organized, such a tour can spark both sales and a word-of-mouth ripple effect.
On the other hand, from your publisher’s perspective, the link between you as an author — a person — and your book as a product for sale simply isn’t strong enough
Read MoreWhat if you stopped reading this right now. What if you didn’t read to the end of this post, didn’t allow yourself to be sucked into the potentially awesome thing I am about to tell you? What if…
… if you became willfully ignorant.
This all came to my mind this week after reading that Ira Glass had no idea who the editor of the New York Times was, and hadn’t even heard about the recent drama with the paper’s leadership:
Interviewer: Jill Abramson was fired.
Ira Glass: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Interviewer: Jill Abramson got fired from the New York Times.
Ira Glass: Okay. And she was who?
Interviewer: The executive editor.
Ira Glass: Okay. I read the newspaper, but I live in my own little bubble. When did that happen?
Interviewer: Wednesday. And it’s been a massive … the blogosphere is going wild.
Ira Glass: I hate reading media news so I actively sort of — I’m not interested in someone getting fired. No disrespect to people that are, but I literally had no idea who she was, or that she got fired until this moment.
Interviewer: Really?
Ira Glass: Yeah. I live in my own little world and we’re putting together a show that we’re putting up at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; I was rewriting the thing here at the Peabody’s that I’m doing today and we are doing a radio show, so it has been pretty busy. I’m so sorry that was either the worst possible quote or a possibly useful quote. Am I, like, the only person in New York who hasn’t heard this?
Interviewer: Maybe.
Ira Glass: Well, I take that with pride.
Interviewer: She was the first female editor of the New York Times.
Ira Glass: Okay.
Interviewer: It was this big unceremonious firing.
Ira Glass: Honestly, like, I’m a superfan of the New York Times, but I know nothing about how they put it together and I really don’t care.
I found this via Jason Kottke, who commented:
“There is very little about the Times’ story that isn’t just straight-up gossip. And for someone like Glass who traffics in ideas and is busy producing something of high quality like This American Life, media gossip just isn’t that important.”
Now, there is a flip side to that reaction in that the Jill Abramson story represents a deep fissure in our culture, and that knowing about it is critical to resolving many unaddressed issues about how women are compensated in the workplace. That this is an important issue, and knowing about it raises awareness that leads to progress and change, and gives voice to the […]
Read MoreToday, we’re excited to have Jennifer Haupt join us. She contributes to a wide variety of magazines, and also hosts the Psychology Today blog, One True Thing, an online salon of interviews with best-selling authors and essays about the moments that matter most. Her first foray into e-publishing, “Will you be my mother? The Quest to Answer Yes,” includes three personal stories, one of which began as an essay that sat at a widely read magazine for three years before it was, ultimately, killed. Now she’s using that essay to raise money for a worthy cause. All author profits from her e-book during May 2014 will be donated to mothers2mothers, a nonprofit working to stop the legacy of AIDS in Africa.
Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters, has this to say about Jennifer’s work:
Jennifer Haupt writes poignantly about the connections and missed connections between mothers and daughters—the love, the silence, the longing. With eloquence and grace, she shares a series of stories that reveal how our first relationship imprints and influences us forever.
Follow Jennifer on her blog, Facebook, or Twitter.
Six Tips for Choosing Assignments Wisely: It’s Not Just About the Money
During the past 25 years I have cranked out brochures about widgets and portals, gone to Haiti and Africa on assignment, spent eight years and counting on a novel that may never be published, been pulled over for speeding while cursing out O, The Oprah Magazine for killing my Haiti story, sold book proposals and buried a few in the bottom desk drawer marked “graveyard”…
Well, you get the picture. (And, may I add, not always a pretty one. Sorry, Oprah!)
Every one of these projects has been, if not strategic, at least a part of some broader plan.
Marketing writing during Seattle’s tech boom in the late 90s helped to fund my trip to Rwanda, where I found the bones of my novel. Writing fiction has made me a more skilled and creative nonfiction writer. The Haiti story that never made it into O, The Oprah Magazine because there was no happy ending has served as a piece of a larger creative nonfiction book project.
Read MoreToday, we’re thrilled to have Jenny Milchman with us. Her journey to publication took thirteen years, after which she hit the road for seven months with her family on what Shelf Awareness called “the world’s longest book tour.”
Jenny’s debut novel, COVER OF SNOW, was chosen as an Indie Next and Target Pick, and was nominated for a Mary Higgins Clark award. She is also the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day and chair of International Thriller Writers’ Debut Authors Program. Jenny’s second novel, RUIN FALLS (Ballantine, 2014), also an Indie Next Pick, just came out and received starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal. She and her family are already back on the road.
Says Library Journal:
Essential for psychological thriller fanatics, Milchman’s second novel trumps her acclaimed debut, Cover of Snow. Extreme heart pounding action follows this determined mother as she risks everything to save her children.
Follow Jenny on her blog, Facebook, or Twitter.
On the Road: Face-to-Face in a Virtual World
Every day I get an email from a writer asking me, “Do I have to do X?” X could be any number of things. Tweet. Blog. Pin things on…what’s that site again?
And my answer is always, “No.” Writers don’t have to do the latest Next Big Thing; they don’t have to do any one thing at all. But that’s not to say they shouldn’t do anything.
The way to cope with the barrage of possibilities is to find those you do enjoy so that when you do them, your enjoyment will be infectious.
My joy is live, in-person events. I am a passionate fan of bookstores—in 2010 I started a holiday called Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day—and appearances at them is for me a little piece of paradise.
Think about it. You arrive at the bookstore to a lovely stack of your very own books, a picture taken of you when you looked your best—or at least had makeup on. The bookseller greets you with cookies or a glass of wine, and then you get to meet the one or one hundred people who have come to chat with you about the writing life.
Did I say one or one hundred people?
Yes, I did. We’ll get to that.
When my first novel was due to come out, after a thirteen year journey/struggle/battle to publication, my husband and I knew that we would have to give this thing our all. So, like any other logical people, we rented out our house, traded in two cars for an SUV that could handle Denver in February, and withdrew our first and third graders from school.
We then hit the road on a 7 month/35,000 mile book tour. The question I get asked most often is whether it was worth it.
Read More“Managing our career.” “Managing our expectations.” “Managing our resources and time.” All these “management” terms being applied to the writing life — with good reason — can make it sound like we might actually need an MBA to reach our goals as writers.
In fact, in this age of the “writer as an entrepreneur” responsible for a growing share of the work required to not only create but also to sell a book, adding management skills to our repertoire of abilities is not at all a bad idea. Which is why a group of smart thinkers at GrubStreet — the Boston-based writing nonprofit that happens to be my in-town writing family — have come up with a tool to help writers become more strategic without having this task become yet another item on an already-overflowing to-do list.
And it happens to be based on a classic non-profit management tool.
Fascinated by the concept of applying a real-life management system to the often messy and unstructured process of writing, publishing and promoting one’s books, I asked authors Katrin Schumann and Lynne Griffin, who together lead GrubStreet’s Launch Lab program where this tool is taught, to walk me through it.
Called the “Logic Model” (sound like an MBA course offering? read on….), its goal is to help writers make the best decisions about where to focus their creative energies and efforts when it’s time to launch their books.
Katrin and Lynne explained that often, as launch time approaches, authors get overwhelmed by thinking that they have to do “everything:” Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, ad campaigns, bookstore talks, conference panels, media articles, email newsletters, book clubs…you name it. But inevitably, this kind of effort is depleting. We wind up doing too much, including things that don’t match our unique personality, skills, or career goals.
The Logic Model frees us from this by helping identify what our goals really are and where our true interests and strengths lie, allowing us to then develop a framework for deciding which areas it makes the most sense to focus on when launching a book.
It starts by dividing the thought process into three categories:
Read MoreWe’re thrilled to have Mollie Lundquist of LitLovers here today, who describes herself as “an English teacher gone mad.” LitLovers grew out of an online course she taught a few years ago. It was so much fun, she decided to go public.
She says:
LitLovers has brought together my lifelong love of reading, writing, and teaching. The site is about WHAT we read, HOW we read, and HOW we THINK about our reading. Approaching literature in that way can change how we see our lives and the world around us.
It’s my hope that readers everywhere will come to the site again and again to explore, learn, and have fun.
Follow Mollie on Facebook or on Twitter.
The WHYs of Book Club Questions
So. You’ve finished your book (check), found a publisher (check), gone through the editing process (check), and myriad other steps. You’ve reached a sense of cosmic completion. Om….
But then your publisher-publicist-agent (and even your mother) tells you to write Book Club Questions. Wait. Book club questions? On top of all the other hoops you’ve had to jump through?
Let’s step back a bit.
No less an arbiter of style and trends than The New York Times quipped in a recent headline, “Really? You Aren’t in a Book Club?” The “book club boom is nationwide,” says The Times, citing five million as the number of Americans belonging to local reading groups. That number doesn’t include the millions more (25 million for GoodReads alone) who meet online.
As an author promoting your book, why would you ignore an audience so immense and influential?–Influential, because book clubs talk with one another. Just ask Kathleen Grissom, author of Kitchen House.
With an initial print run of 11,500 copies, the book didn’t get traction right away…. In an era when digital buzz is considered crucial to launching books overnight, it was old-fashioned book-club word-of-mouth that prevailed. The book is in its 21st printing, with 254,000 copies in print and 152,000 e-books sold. — The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2012
Read MoreIsn’t that old fashioned.
Spending hours.
Days.
Weeks.
Months.
Dare I say, years.
Creating. Honing. Crafting. Editing. Exploring.
One’s own purpose. One’s craft as a writer. One’s ability to understand who they hope to reach, and how. And what they hope the effect of that connection will be. The legacy of the work.
Old fashioned to send a thank you letter in the mail, instead of merely “favoriting” a tweet.
To send a long email response to a Facebook post.
To ask to meet for coffee instead of having a phone call.
To focus less on gaming an algorithm (be it Amazon or Google), and more on publishing when it makes sense to you, the author.
To measure value in generations, not daily sub-genre bestseller lists.
To become AWARE of trends, of tools, of new opportunities, but not allow them to drive all of your actions. To balance the new, with the old, in a way that is personal to your challenges, and your goals.
To realize that “best practices” are often simplified lists of things that work only 30% as good as they used to.
And that enthusiasm is a better driver for action that skepticism.
That the demons you must battle to create and share your work lie less in understanding the ins and outs of metadata or social media or blog tours, and more in the bad habits you won’t give up, the excuses you cling to because they protect you from ancient fears.
As someone who straddles both sides of the publishing paradigm – I release books through traditional publishers and also publish my own – I have found that the straddle model really makes sense for me. Let’s see if it makes sense for you, too.
Broadly speaking, I publish two types of books, novels and how-to non-fiction. The novels are more suited to the traditional publishing model because they need the boost of reviews, national media marketing, and (even in this day and age) bookstore distribution. With my novels, then, I make common cause with a boutique publisher, sharing revenues 50/50 and using the combined clout of our marketing, publicity, and social media efforts to grow and build my fiction brand.
On the how-to side, though, I find that it’s much more effective to indy-pub, because the kind of how-to books I write are the kind of books that people go looking for. It’s a rare reader who wakes up one day and says, “I wonder if John Vorhaus has written any new novels.” But it happens every day that someone wakes up and says, “I need to learn how to write better,” and her internet searches lead her to me. In the case of the novels, then, I’m pushing content toward the reader. In the case of the how-to books, the reader is pulling content to herself. Since such a reader will come looking for my books, I don’t have to work so hard to market them, and I don’t need the marketing muscle, or the distribution functionality, that a traditional publisher offers. Thus I indy-pub and keep most of the revenue for myself.
Note that I use the phrase “indy-pub” instead of “self publishing” to describe my efforts. This is by design because, for better or worse, the latter phrase still carries the stench of vanity press, at least to people of my generation. When you say, “I self-publish,” people (well, some people) will think, “Ah, you’re not good enough to get a ‘real’ publisher.” Annoying, right? But if you say you indy-pub, suddenly you’re as cool as any alternative rock band. And not for nothing, but I hope you’ll join me in my campaign to remove “self publishing” from the zeitgeist. It isn’t helping us, and we would all be better off if we were perceived to be as cool as rock bands, yeah?
With that said, there is still a strong prejudice among writers for going with a so-called “legitimate” publisher. But consider this: a publisher, at the end of the day, is nothing but a content delivery system.
Read MoreRegarding the graphic above, man, was I glad I was able to bear down on those lolling tuna boats Dickens and Hugo—they need to get up from their on-deck hammocks and at least think about hitting the book-peddling accelerator before I catch them. Though I do hope I didn’t peeve dear Charlotte; however, she being the eldest of the sisters, she’s learned how to take these roller-coasterings.
[pullquote]But alas, all that glitters is not gold stars: this image of my book billowings was as ephemeral as the electrons it’s printed on.[/pullquote]
But alas, all that glitters is not gold stars: this image of my book billowings was as ephemeral as the electrons it’s printed on. A mere bit of pictorial whimsy, where I got to sit at the reading table (even if I had to use a high chair) with a pantheon of literary greats, but in truth, it’s one of those deceptive snapshots in time: if a photo is taken at just the right moment, a sedentary couch surfer might be seen to be leaping onto a moving stallion.
However, in the case of this Amazon KDP Select book promotion, my stallion never really left the stall. Here’s KDP Select in a nutshell, stolen from a post by CJ Lyons at Jane Friedman’s site: “In exchange for giving Amazon exclusive use of a piece of digital content for 90 days, you receive five days (any five you choose) to make your digital content available for free, and you also get paid for any of your e-books that are lent through the Amazon Prime library.” (You will see in the Lyons post comments that the whole KDP Select process has fallen out of favor with authors as a solid promotional tack.)
However, the main point in this piece is not to dissect KDP Select, but to discuss the travails and treats (?) of book promotion in general, in a time when authors, even those thin-shouldered ones like me, must shoulder the book-peddling burden.
My Kingdom for a Review
My interest in using KDP wasn’t to later sell copies of that promoted novel, but indeed to induce some positive reviews, in the hopes that might promote, fiendish marketer I am, the sale of my short story collection, which had been published by a small press after my novel’s self-publication. People who had successfully used the KDP program had noted that it was often helpful in the selling of other works; you will see many authors sell a novel for .99 as a loss leader, while their other works are priced much higher.
And it’s not simply a matter of “either/or” in regards free or paid. Many self-published authors on Amazon and other venues commonly adjust the price of their work downward (including free) for promotional boost, and upward again to find a sweet spot where there are measured sales without a high-price deterrent.
I was quite successful in my promotion in NOT selling copies of the novel, as well as very successful in not getting reviews, and resoundingly not successful in getting new sales of the short story book. Broken down, the 5 days of free KDP promotion garnered 3,288 downloads.
[pullquote]I did get one review of the free novel: it was titled “Lame,” […]
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