Marketing Your Book 101: How Much Influence Should Marketability Have on Your Work?

If you’ve been writing for any lengthy period of time, you’re familiar with the catch twenty-two of publishing: you want to write your book your way, but you also want it to sell. Sometimes, those two desires don’t run parallel. Sacrifices are made, compromises drawn, lines in the sand erased.

In this month’s “Marketing Your Book 101”, marketing/promotion guru Erik Deckers offers up some advice on how to sell you book without selling your soul.

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How Much Influence Should Marketability Have on Your Work?
By Erik Deckers

Want to get a writer good and riled up? Do one of two things: 1) Ask where they stand on the Oxford comma; 2) Ask about the marketability of their book.

I can't help you with the Oxford comma, but I can tell you quite a bit about a book's marketability.

Marketability is often the last thing many authors want to think about. They want their art to stand on its own, and to write the stories they want to write, not what the masses want.

But marketability is often the first thing many publishers consider. They want to know how many people might want it, and how well you can market it.

In my first book proposal, I had to answer a few questions about whether there were books similar to mine, the size of my social media following, and whether I had an email newsletter list.

(Careful readers will note the Oxford comma in the previous sentence.)

Because the book was about social media and personal branding, my co-author, Kyle, and I both had a decent social media following, he had a sizable email newsletter list, and there were almost no books about personal branding. So we scored high on marketability, which we learned later went a long way in getting that book deal.

Yay, book marketability!

For us, marketability was a combination of whether a lot of people would buy the book, and how well we could promote it.

The book market for social media in general was already being tapped out. Kyle and I had written a book about Twitter marketing the previous year, but this was new territory for us. If we hadn't come up with a new idea that appealed to a large crowd, we never would have gotten the deal.

But my previous success has not meant automatic deals later on. I've proposed other book ideas since then, but the social media book market has just about run its course. If I want to write another book, I need to come up with a brand new idea.

Book marketability sucks.

How Much Do Publishers Think About Marketability?

First, just know that publishers do look at the marketability of your work, almost as much as they look at the quality of your work. And that goes into the decision of whether they'll publish your book or not.

Don't get me wrong. You could have 1 million Twitter followers, but if your work isn't that great, it will never be published. (Still, if you have 1 million loyal Twitter followers, do you really need a publisher? Self-publish that sucker!)

You may have written the greatest story about teenage vampire wizards who fight zombies, but since that one has already been done to death (I hope!), you're not going to get a lot of love from traditional publishers.

The marketability of a book is not just about the size of your social networks, it includes whether the book will be interesting to the largest number of people. When we wrote Branding Yourself in 2010, it was only the second book of its kind. But in the last several years, there have been a few hundred titles published on social media and its various sub-topics, so our publishers knew they had to strike fast. We were in the right place at the right time.

Having said that, I've read some pretty mediocre books published by people with big fat social networks, and it's easy to see how much consideration the social networks were given. (Hint: way, way too much.)

So Should Marketability Affect Your Content Choices?

Yes and no.

No, it should not, because you should be free to write the book you want, and people should buy it because it's good, not because it's what the masses want. On the other hand. . .

Yes, it should, because your publisher (ideally) knows what the public wants. If you can give it to them, you'll sell lots of copies, and you'll go on book tours where your publisher will put you up in the finest discount hotels and eat at the finest fast-casual restaurant chains. On the other hand. . .

No, it shouldn't, because you have options! You can skip the whole traditional publishing route, and self-publish on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. (Again, note the Oxford comma.) You can market your own book, or sell print-on-demand copies at book fairs and community fairs. On the other hand. . .

Yes, it should, because you can win the greatest number of readers if you pay attention to what the public likes, and try to keep up. On the other hand. . .

No, it shouldn't, because there's an audience for nearly everything you can imagine (and even those things you can't. Don't go looking for those though. Just don't.). Just because there's not a huge audience doesn't mean there's not an audience. Even an audience of 1,000 is a good audience. On the other hand. . .

Yes, it should, because your publisher can get you into the bookstores, especially the large chain(s), which means great exposure to a wider audience. On the other hand. . .

No, it shouldn't, because you're going to be doing most, if not all, of the marketing, and yet you're only going to get a small royalty from your publisher. But if you self-publish, you get a much larger royalty.

Ultimately—I hate these kind of indecisive answers—it comes down to what you want to do, where you think your book is going to go. If you want to write a commercially successful book that gets you invited to Killer Nashville as a keynote speaker, and your book is sold in the Barnes & Noble room, then consider your content and marketability very strongly.

But if you don't want to be beholden to others, to let someone else dictate your story choices, or you just plain want more money than publishers offer, then marketability be damned!

Your book's—sorry, your books'—success will depend on you and how hard you're willing to work.

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Erik Deckers owns a content marketing agency in Indianapolis, and is the co-author of four books on social media. He is also a professional speaker and newspaper humor columnist, and was named a 2016 writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House Project.

Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.

Marketing Your Book 101: How Long Should a Post Be? Three Tips for Writing Your Author Blog

Blogging has become essential to the marketing machine. You Tweet and Facebook about yourself, but now it’s a “must” to share your knowledge, and ultimately your writing skills through blogs. Marketing expert Erik Deckers answers that burning question about blog length. When is enough enough?

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How Long Should a Post Be? Three Tips for Writing Your Author Blog
By Erik Deckers

Someone once asked Abraham Lincoln how long a man's legs should be. "Long enough to reach the ground," he said.

I think of Abe's advice whenever someone asks me how long a blog post should be.

"Long enough to get to the end," I say. And then I have to explain the whole story, which ruins the effect.

Basically, there's no magic rule of how long a blog post should be. You need enough time and space to say what you need to say, and that's it. Don't say too much, but don't give short shrift to your ideas either.

Reading Is Different Today

People read differently today than they did 50, 20, or even five years ago. Readers skim and scroll to see what catches their attention. No longer can we write long, Faulknerian paragraphs that stretch on for pages, joined by semicolons and em dashes. In fact, this paragraph is making me uncomfortable, and I really want to hit the return key to make it—

GAAH! I couldn't take that much longer. You probably couldn't either.

Basically, we have become an impatient society. People read on their smartphones, tablets, and laptops. We're not a nation of readers, but a nation of skimmers. That affects how we write and engage our readers.

Here are three tips for writing the ideal blog posts to keep your readers coming back.

1. Use plenty of white space

Blogging is as much a visual medium as a written one. Imagine a book printed in a sans serif font, very little space between lines, and blocks of text that fill up an entire page. You'd probably quit after five pages.

White space (also called negative space because there's nothing in it) is important in making a post or magazine article appear readable. It's more pleasing to the eye, because it looks easier to digest.

I use short paragraphs partly because my fourth grade teacher said they had to be four or five sentences long, and I never do what I'm told.

But I do it mostly because when people skim-read, they think, "I'll just read a little bit. Oh, that next paragraph is short, I'll read that one. Oh, and that one. All right, this one too. And the next one."

If I've done a good job with my white space, people will jump from paragraph to paragraph, thinking they'll only read "a little more" until they reach the end.

And now here you are at tip number 2. See how that works?

2. There's no "magic number."

I can give you several good reasons why your posts should be less than 300 words, around 700 words, or why 1,000 words is perfectly fine.

For example, 300-word-writers will tell you a smartphone screen will hold 100 words. People who research this kind of thing know that readers have the patience to swipe two more times to read an article. That's—tap (100), swipe (200), swipe (300)—and they're done.

At the same time, long-form writers point to the growth of sites like Grantland.com and LongReads.com to say 1,000 word articles are perfectly fine, as long as the work is interesting.

Basically, whatever anyone tells you is the "best" length, just remember there's always a reason to pick another length. So just pick the length that suits you and your readers.

3. Identify "The Crease"

At the same time, you can have an article that's too long. If you've reached 1,500 words in one article, that may be too much, and you can break it up into smaller posts.

That's because when people tend to write about a big topic, they start combining two or three smaller points into one big point.

When that happens, look for the crease, that spot where you thought, "And another thing!" and kept writing. That "And another thing!" should instead be another blog post. Cut and paste everything from that point on, and save it somewhere else. Focus on what's left.

For example, I could have written this article as three separate articles—the importance of white space, word count, and the crease—and covered each of them in about 300 – 500 words. The crease happens between each point.

In fact, breaking up big posts is another blogging strategy. Rather than writing one big post about a subject, divide it up into several smaller ones. You can publish more posts more often, which boosts your personal brand by boosting your blog readership.

Did you see it? Did you see what happened back there? That previous paragraph was an added thought, but if I had kept going, I could have added another 300 words to this post.

That "In fact" was the crease. If this article really did run to 1,000 words, I could have cut that out and used it somewhere else. It was important to the central point of publishing, but it wasn't so important that I had to share it today.

Blogging is one of those specifically ambiguous art forms where you only have to write enough to make you happy. Just put your ideas out there, explain them thoroughly, but succinctly, and your posts will be exactly as long as they need to be. Just like Abe's legs.

His hat is a different matter.

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Erik Deckers owns a content marketing agency in Indianapolis, and is the co-author of four books on social media. He is also a professional speaker and newspaper humor columnist, and was named a 2016 writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House Project.

Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.

Marketing Your Book 101: Don't Artificially Boost Your Twitter Account

Save shortcuts for traffic congestion. That’s what marketing guru, Erik Deckers says. Build your Twitter following with care. In this month’s column, Deckers talks about the pitfalls of padding your Twitter account and how to do it right.

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Don't Artificially Boost Your Twitter Account
By Erik Deckers

I'm not impressed by your gigantic Twitter account.

Your tens of thousands of followers. Your legions of fans. The rampaging throngs of people who follow you and you follow back. The Kardashian-ness of your Twempire (Twitter + empire) only makes me look down my nose at you.

(Said the guy with 18,500 followers. More on my hypocrisy in a minute.)

It's become an epidemic among new Twitter users, this belief that you need 50,000+ followers just to be somebody. That Twitter success means having inflated numbers, and no real content to back it up. I especially see authors falling for this, believing that more followers equals more sales.

It doesn't.

I can spot these Twitter fakers from a mile away. They're the ones with 30, 50, even 100,000 followers, and yet they've only written a few hundred tweets. I've written over 50,000, and yet have only 18,500 followers. Nobody is that awesome at Twitter that they've got 100,000 people hanging on their every word after just a few hundred tweets.

There's no rule of thumb here. Nothing that says "you must have 2,000 tweets before you have 2,000 followers." But unless you're an A-list celebrity who just announced on Conan that you joined Twitter, you're not going to magically get 100,000 followers without publishing much of anything. It's only achieved through cheating.

Here's How They Do It

There are two ways you can build up a massive Twitter following, and they're both morally repugnant. I'm only telling you so you can avoid them, not do them.

1) You pay someone $25 or so for 5,000 followers. Sure, you have 5,000 shiny new followers, but they're not real. They're fake accounts, usually created by spammers in The Philippines. It's like filling the audience with mannequins at your next reading and bragging about a full house.

2) You yo-yo follow people. If you follow me, I get a notification, and follow you back. A few days later, you unfollow me, but I don't get notified, so I keep following you. Imagine doing that to 2,000 people. You follow them, unfollow them a few days later, and repeat, thus growing your army.

I call that yo-yo following. You raise and drop your follower/following count like a yo-yo. Do that for a few weeks with some black market software, and soon you're in the 100K club.

Here's The Best Way

There's a third way to get a big following: Create good work.

Write interesting stuff on Twitter that people want to see. Not inane motivational sayings every single morning. Not an uninterrupted stream of news articles. Just have conversations, and be interesting (I discussed this more in-depth in last month's column).

I've Twitter chatted with one of my favorite authors, Christopher Fowler (@Peculiar), author of the Bryant & May mystery series, about the weather in Indianapolis versus Barcelona, and the genius of interior windows for cooling a house. Even if he weren't already a favorite, I would check out his work just because he took the time to chat. That's the power of a simple person-to-person connection.

It will take a long time, but this is how you build a network of people who like you, trust you, believe in you, and want to support you. If you can fill your network with just 500 of these followers, you're doing much better than the person who yo-yo'ed their way to 50,000.

You have 500 readers, 500 friends, 500 people who want to see you do well. Not 50,000 faceless people who couldn't care less about you.

I've been on Twitter since 2007, and have amassed a respectable following by slowly adding people. It also didn't hurt that I've written three social media books, which attracted a lot of attention in the early days of social media.

I follow authors, artists, and people in my line of work. I follow people who interest me and I want to have conversations with. They're the people I remember, and the people who respond when I tweet something funny or ask for help with a problem, or even share something I've written.

I was recently followed by an author who had over 235,000 followers and was following 225,000. Needless to say, I ignored her. She had no interest in hearing what I had to say. At best, I'm one of a massive crowd. At worst, she'll unfollow me later, letting her black market software fill the hole.

Even if people follow her, they probably don't read her messages. They don't know when she's written a new book or see any new announcements. They don't care about her, because she hasn't shown she cares about them. Her strategy works if she's relying on statistical probability to create sales, but as a true communication strategy, it's ineffective.

You build a strong Twitter network the same way you make new friends: slowly, over time, letting people get to know you, and sharing in their interests. If everything grows naturally and organically, without being forced or faked, you'll have a network of true fans and friends who want to support you and see you do your best.

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Erik Deckers owns a content marketing agency in Indianapolis, and is the co-author of four books on social media. He is also a professional speaker and newspaper humor columnist, and was named a 2016 writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House Project.

Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.

Marketing Your Book 101: What Does Personal Branding Have to do With Writing?

Remember middle school when “reputation” meant everything? A little of that still exists today, except that as adults it’s more about commerce, and less about wearing the coolest clothes or hanging with the right people.

Marketing expert Erik Deckers explains personal branding, and ways to promote yourself that get people to associate happy thoughts whenever you come around, whether that’s in social media or in real life.

Erik will be sharing his knowledge at this year’s Killer Nashville. His sessions are a no-miss, standing-room-only opportunity.

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What Does Personal Branding Have to do With Writing?
By Erik Deckers

As writers, we all need to market ourselves. We need to promote our “personal brand”. That’s how people know us and decide whether they like us and our work.

A lot of writers hate it when I tell them this. “I shouldn’t have to market myself. My art should speak for itself,” they say.

Maybe you shouldn’t, and maybe it should. The world is filled with very good writers who don’t believe they should do something so crass as marketing.

One of them sold me my latte this morning.

Or my personal favorite, “I’m not a brand. I’m a person.” (And they do it all pouty, with their arms folded, like a child being told it’s bath time.)

A brand is the emotional response people have when they see your face or hear your name. (With a company, it’s what happens when they hear the company name or see its logo.) Everyone creates an emotional response in the people they know.

Think of it as a Yay/Aww feeling. People say Yay and Aww when they see us coming or going. Whichever they say at whichever time is entirely up to you.

That’s personal branding. It’s what people think when they see us, hear from us, read our name, or hear about us when we’re not around. Other people call it reputation, but I wrote a book on personal branding, so I need to stick with the jargon in the hopes of selling a few more copies.

There are plenty of articles out there telling you what to do with each of the four basic social media tools—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogging. Rather than do that, let me share three principles that will help you connect with people online and communicate with them.

Build Relationships

Social media is not a broadcast tool, although many companies and hucksters use it that way. It’s a two-way conversation tool that we’re forgetting to use properly. Think about your Facebook friends. You “like” things they post, and occasionally you comment. But unless it’s a vigorous political debate, most people don’t actually engage each other. We think we’re “talking”, when we’re really just having two one-sided conversations at the same time.

So what if we commented more, asked more questions, and had more conversations? How much deeper would our Facebook relationships be? What if you could do that on Twitter? Ask and answer questions, talk to people about books, or the news, or whatever’s happening in their lives. Talk to people and form online relationships. You’d be amazed at what you can learn just by having real human conversations on Facebook and Twitter.

This is an ideal way to build a reader base—these are your online “friends”. They’ll support you, because they like and trust you. There’s an old sales maxim, “People buy from people they like and trust.” Build online relationships with your readers, rather than just broadcasting news, and they’ll buy from/respond to you when it counts.

Gather Information

Social media is also a great source for information. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about major breaking news on Twitter before I saw it on the news that night or the next day.

Think about people who are only informed by mainstream nightly news, or the morning paper. By the time they hear the latest news, social media users have gathered the information, processed it, and are formulating next steps.

You can gather information from people in your field, the literary world, or anyone else who shares news and information. Create Twitter lists and fill them with journalists, scientists, writers, agents, publishers, news organizations, and so on. This way, you can gather information in real-time, not on an artificial schedule—often eight hours after the fact.

Share Expertise / Entertainment

As a business writer, I’m always looking for people who will hire me as a conference speaker or marketing consultant, or buy one of my books. As a humor writer, I’m always looking for people to subscribe to my column or buy one of my humor books (once I get around to writing them).

As mystery writers, you want to entertain your readers, but if you also have a nonfiction side, you want to establish your expertise. Blogging is the ideal way to do that. Write about topics of particular interest to your target audience, or write stories that will keep your readers coming back for more.

Push that work to your blog, LinkedIn page, or Facebook author page as a way to share your expertise or to entertain. Since traditionally published books can take up to a year to reach readers, and trade journals are a slow and inefficient way to establish expertise, online channels can help you accomplish that in weeks and months.

You can even go so far as to share items from your Information sources with your own networks. This curation strategy will further enhance your Expertise in your field, or if you practice Literary Citizenship (see last issue’s column), you can further Entertain your own readers.

You can easily enhance your personal brand if you focus on building relationships, gathering information, and sharing your expertise or entertainment with your readers. All it takes is doing what you’re already doing—having conversations, gathering news, and sharing ideas—but with social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogging. If you can do that, you’ll build a positive personal brand, and you’ll have fun doing it.

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Erik Deckers owns a content marketing agency in Indianapolis, and is the co-author of four books on social media. He is also a professional speaker and newspaper humor columnist, and was named a 2016 writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House Project. He spoke at Killer Nashville 2013, and will return again this year.

Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.

Marketing Your Book 101: Are You A Literary Citizen?

Marketing expert Erik Deckers gets to the heart of what Killer Nashville, the vision of Killer Nashville founder and magazine publisher Clay Stafford, and the alumni of the Killer Nashville family are all about.

In his debut column for the Killer Nashville Magazine as part of a new monthly series, Erik discusses what it means to be a good literary citizen. Erik will be sharing his knowledge at this year’s Killer Nashville. His sessions are a no-miss, standing-room-only opportunity.

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Are You a Good Literary Citizen?
By Erik Deckers

When it comes to promoting our work, there's no one who can help us better than our competition.

The people you become friends with at all those writing conferences. The people from your writing groups. The ones you smile at and congratulate, but secretly wish they would suffer chronic ass cramps whenever they talk about their latest success.

Those are your best promoters. They're the ones you should tell your fans about. The ones you should send congratulatory tweets to. The ones whose books you should read and tell other people about.

Think about it this way: when you finish reading a book, do you stop reading for the year? Was that your book for the year, and you're finished until some time in 2016? Of course not, you're already on the prowl for your next book.

So, if the author of the book you just finished told you about a book he or she enjoyed, wouldn't you be more likely to check that one out? Of course you would.

Do that for your fellow authors.

That's what my friend and novelist, Cathy Day, calls Literary Citizenship.

Literary Citizenship is the act of being a good citizen in our literary community. Just like in our regular communities, we work together to support each other — it's the whole "it takes a village" approach to living.

We also live in a literary community, and it's important to work together to support each other there.

That means going to each other's readings, buying each other's books, and supporting each other the way friends do. (And waiting to go home and sob, "Why not me?! Why not me?!" But that's a different article.)

Cathy even teaches a course called Literary Citizenship at my alma mater, Ball State University.

In her course description, she says: "A literary citizen is an aspiring writer who understands that you have to contribute to, not just expect things from, the publishing world." She's created six principles we can all follow. Here are three of my favorites:

1) Write "charming notes" to writers.

How do you feel when a reader says they liked your work? Feels pretty good, doesn't it? So how do you think your favorite writer feels when you do the same? Even the big-shot novelists like it. If you want writers to pay attention to you, start paying attention to them first. Send tweets, Facebook likes, Tumblr posts, and so on. Boost them, and they'll boost you in return.

2) Interview writers.

If you're a blogger — I hope you already are; if not, attend my class at the Killer Nashville Writers’ Conference — interview some of your favorite writers and writing friends. Email them a few questions, ask them to respond, and then publish the responses. This introduces writers to your readers, and will hopefully introduce you to their readers, because they'll tell their fans, "Check out my interview on this blog!" (More on this in a second.)

3) Talk up (informally) or review (formally) books you like.

Write short book reviews on Goodreads, Amazon.com, or BarnesandNoble.com. Better yet, review books on your blog (remember what I said about introducing writers to your readers?). You can become a trusted resource for good books, which will build your audience. An audience who will be interested in your own writing as well.

The easiest way to be a good literary citizen is with a blog and Twitter.

Your blog is where you're going to post your content. Not necessarily your actual writing (although you won't go wrong publishing the occasional short story), but your thoughts, ideas, plans, and news. Talk about the writing conference you just returned from, the writing residency you were awarded, cover options for your upcoming book, news about your book signings, your various flash fiction stories, and book reviews of your fellow writers. These are all suitable topics for your blog, and a way to keep people interested while you drum up interest for your own published work.

Your blog is going to be the hub of your literary citizen wheel. It's your publicist, your news station, and your own personal magazine. Publish anything and everything that will help your readers learn more about you, and your fellow writers.

Next, get a Twitter account. If you already have one, great. If you don't, get one, and use your own name for your Twitter handle, not something goofy like @Mustang1969BU. Connect with other writers, as well as your readers. Include your Twitter handle on your blog so visitors can connect with you.

Don't be stuck up either; follow people back. Until you become a big name celebrity who's too important to deal with fans, follow people back and communicate with them. Remember, they could be talking to — and reading — anyone, but they chose you. So show some gratitude.

Communicate with your fellow writers too. They're already talking to their own fans. If their fans see them talking to you, the fans are more likely to visit your website, read your work, and become your fans as well. Make sure you tell your readers about your writer friends as well. A little quid pro quo (or twid pro quo?) goes a long way.

There are other social media networks you can always try out, although these are the two you need to get started to build a readership, and grow it exponentially it by networking with fellow authors.

Remember, being a Literary Citizen means it's what you do, not what you get. Promote the work of others, and you'll see your own audience grow as a result.

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Erik Deckers owns a content marketing agency in Indianapolis, and is the co-author of four books on social media. He is also a professional speaker and newspaper humor columnist, and was named a 2016 writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House Project. He spoke at Killer Nashville 2013, and will return again this year.

Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.