This Crazy Writing Life: Okay, Let’s Talk About The 800-Pound Gorilla: Marketing
By Steven Womack
Bold statement time. Ready? Here it comes…
I’d rather write five novels than market one.
I think that probably goes against the grain for most people. After all, writing’s hard. A novel is long, a grinding marathon of page after empty page that goes on months, sometimes years, before you reach the finish line.
And yet I’d rather run five of those marathons than try and sell one.
When I say that, I think there must be something wrong with me. For some reason or other, I’m uncomfortable blowing my own horn, hawking my own work. For some people, it comes easily, like drawing a breath. For me, it’s always seemed…
Well, unseemly.
When I was young, one of my best buddies got us both a summer job selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. We got about two days of training (I still remember the spiel: The Bison, the world’s most complete home maintenance system. Guaranteed to protect your home and furniture, conserve your time and health…) and we were then turned loose on an unsuspecting neighborhood.
I think I lasted three days.
A couple of decades later, when I finally sold (there’s that word again) my first novel, I assumed the publisher would take care of all the marketing. They’d set up book signings for me, take out ads, arrange for reviews. All I had to do was cash the checks and write my next book.
Ah, what a naïve little grasshoppah I was.
Truth is, long before the genteel gentlemanly world of 19th century publishing morphed into the Darwinian dog-eat-dog cutthroat business it’s become in the 21st century, writers had to bite the bullet and learn to sell their own stuff. Now, in the age where the number of indie-pubbed writers has long surpassed the number of traditionally published authors, it’s more important than ever that writers grasp the fundamentals of marketing. When every writer is essentially a small shopkeeper slinging pages out of a tiny storefront, unless you’re willing to promote your own work, you’re never even going to get noticed, let alone make a living.
Last September, I found myself in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida at the annual Novelists Inc. conference. I’ve written about Novelists Inc. before in This Crazy Writing Life. The beauty of the Novelists Inc. conference is it’s all business. You don’t get many seminars on developing character or finding your voice with these folks. But you will get in-depth seminars on indie audiobook production and negotiating foreign translation rights contracts.
At this conference, one of the best marketing seminars I ever attended was put on by Ricardo Fayet, who’s one of the four founders of Reedsy, a company that provides support and guidance for indie-pubbed authors, as well as being a gateway connecting freelancers with writers. If you don’t know these guys, just Google them and go to their website. It’s worth the trip.
Ricardo’s written two books on marketing for indie authors: How To Market A Book and Amazon Ads For Authors. I’ve got them both and they’re well worth the price.
Ricardo’s seminar at the conference did a deep dive into the underlying psychology of marketing and a few basic principles that indie authors need to learn and deploy. It’ll make the hell of marketing a little less hellish. Let’s take a brief look at what Ricardo described.
Principle #1: It’s cheaper to retain an existing reader than acquire a new one.
It costs five time as much to attract a new reader—in money and effort—than it does to keep an old one. That’s why series are so powerful in today’s marketplace. Whether you’re Jack Konrath writing 27 installments of his Jack Daniels series books, John D. MacDonald’s 21 Travis McGee novels or J.T. Ellison’s nine novels in her Lt. Taylor Jackson series, a series quite literally builds a brand that attracts readers and keeps them. Fayet even cited one series that’s run to 112 books.
What if you’re not into series? Then develop a style and voice that becomes as identifiable and as reliable as a series. Dick Francis wrote mostly standalones (outside of his four-book Sid Halley series), but his style and voice was so distinctive that when you pick up a Dick Francis book, it’s instantly identifiable as a Dick Francis book.
Principle #2: Product trumps marketing every time.
This principle embodies the notion that, over the long run, no amount of brilliant marketing will sell a bad book. You’ve got to write an amazing book to even have a chance of competing in the literary marketplace. Fayet cited the statistic that only seven percent of traditionally published books sell over 10,000 copies.
“You can’t sell a book if it isn’t good,” he noted.
Principle #3: Decay is inevitable.
“What’s working now isn’t guaranteed to work forever,” Fayet said. “In fact, it’s almost guaranteed to peter out at some point.” All marketing and promotion efforts and strategies eventually begin to lose their effectiveness. This principle doesn’t apply only to books. All products, sooner or later, need a marketing refresh. Interest wanes, attention moves on to other things.
And a sidebar to this notion is the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your results will come from twenty percent of your efforts. And you must constantly look ahead. If you focus solely on today’s marketing efforts and campaigns, then you won’t be prepared for when it all stops working.
Principle #4: Steady versus Explosive Marketing.
Steady, consistent marketing efforts will get you to a certain level of sales. But you may find you’ve hit a ceiling and you’re just not breaking through to the next level.
Explosive marketing, however, requires a different approach. It requires careful planning and execution, along with good timing. If spaced out properly, explosive marketing avoids fatigue and wearing out your audience. Finally, Fayet noted, it works best for highly targeted campaigns, and for many authors, that means being enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
Principle #5: Volume x ROI.
This is kind of a big one, folks. Start by imagining the global audience of readers: millions.
Now imagine your audience: a tiny subset of millions.
So how do you reach and then grow your tiny subset. The best strategy is to start small and cheap. Maybe that’s Amazon ASIN ads or Facebook ads. This is a highly targeted strategy, where you aim to reach the people who already read your kind of book. This may not be a huge number of readers, but your Return On Investment (ROI) is potentially going to be pretty good.
Then you aim a little higher: BookBub Featured Deals, Meta A+ ads, then maybe on to digitally targeted ads, TV, even billboards and print ads.
But remember, with each step up the marketing ladder, you’re going to reach more people. But your conversion rate’s going to go down, along with your ROI. So if you want to broaden your reach, remember that with each new and larger strategy, it becomes harder to make your money back.
Principle #6: 10% of 1000=1% of 10,000…or why you don’t need to be chasing trends.
One of the most baffling questions for many writers is the question of writing to the market or chasing trends. Of course, we all want to tap into the popular zeitgeist. If there’s a demand for something in the marketplace, we all want to meet that demand. But especially in traditional publishing, the timeline for bringing a book to market may be so far out that the trend will have passed before your book can get out there.
Just remember, Cabbage Patch dolls, Beanie Babies, and Pet Rocks were once all the rage.
On the other hand, we all want to write for a growing market. But what if you occupy a bigger place in a smaller market? Fayet noted that 10% of 1000 readers is the same number of readers as 1% of a 10,000 reader market.
This is among the most complicated and convoluted decisions a writer must make. Sometimes it’s better to stay in your lane. Should we just ignore trends?
Fayet’s answer is “Of course not!” Trends signal a growing market, but you need to weigh your decision against several factors:
Can I expect to make more money in a new genre or a new kind of book? Would I be better off just delivering what I know my current readers want?
Can I expect my existing fans to follow me?
Can I keep my sanity and have a little fun by taking a new path?
Do I know the new genre well enough to dip my toe into it? Do I have the skill set?
Can I reasonably get in on the trend in time?
This is all complicated stuff… Marketing and promotion for writers can make writing look easy. But if you keep in mind Ricardo Fayet’s six principles every writer should let guide their careers, then this mine field might not be quite so treacherous.
In next month’s episode of This Crazy Writing Life, we’ll start taking deeper dives into specific marketing strategies.
I don’t know when this installment will be published in KN Magazine. I’m writing it before Christmas, so if it comes out before the holidays, have a great one. If it’s 2025 when you’re reading this, I hope this year’s your best one ever.
And thanks for coming along for the ride.
