Marketing Your Self-Published Book – Page 15

Marketing Missteps Episode 3 : Waiting till the book is done to start marketing

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been delving into some of the marketing mistakes I’ve made or seen made over my many years of experience in the self-publishing industry as an author who works alongside other authors to bring books to fruition. The first mistake? Devolving into a self-centered campaigner. And the second? Confusing the sales message with the marketing campaign. I’d like to stress that both of these mistakes–in fact, all of the missteps I’ll be unfolding over the course of this blog series–are incredibly easy to make, and have more to do with the vast numbers of authors flocking to indie publishing each year, with little to no experience in marketing to start, and no easy way of filtering through the noise of the countless resources available online. A blog post like this one is only helpful if it actually cuts some of the clutter, right?

Which is why, as we tackle the third most common misstep I see self-publishing authors make in marketing, I am reminding myself of one very important fact: No grandstanding. Just deliver the facts, with exactly the right amount of necessary context, and shine a little light on the path forward for busy authors with limited time to spend marketing much less researching new marketing strategies. And with no further ado, I give you:

He Who Waits To Finish–May Never Really Get Started

I speak with authors on a regular basis who are just one month–or one week–or one day away from having their book out, but who haven’t yet launched a website. “I’ll get around to it when the book’s actually ready for people to read,” they often say. And when’s that? When it’s already on bookstore shelves but there’s no buzz to sell it? But the fact of the matter is, if an author waits that long, anything they try to do after the fact will be too little, too late–no matter how much time and effort he or she pours into the attempt.

Don’t wait to launch your website, your social media platforms, your blog, and other aspects of your digital strategy. I want to repeat that: DON’T WAIT for your book to come out before you start marketing in earnest. Sometimes, a delay can’t be avoided–and I get that, really I do–especially since self-publishing authors are carrying a heavy burden on top of already busy lives. But in most cases I’ve run across, maybe eight out of ten, the delay is artificial, not practical. And it’s usually because the author in question underestimated the months and even years it can take to generate traffic on a website.

The instant a website is live, it can be paired with all of your existing online interactions. If you’re already blogging, fantastic! If you’re already on Twitter and Tumblr and Pinterest and Facebook and YouTube and Goodreads, great! Start shepherding your existing followers in the direction of your official website for updates. Get them used to turning to your website as a resource before your book is out–and that way, they can become advocates for your book even before its publication. One of the toughest things to do as a book-lover is to recommend a new book without having either the actual book in hand or some easy-to-find website to point new readers to. But if your website is live, then you leave room for anticipation and that much-desired “buzz” you’ll need to start selling books on the day of your book’s release. And don’t forget, you are the most undervalued tool in the toolbox. New readers don’t just fall in love with books; they fall in love with the people who write them, too. They will (understandably) want to know more about you, and when your next book is coming out, and where they can contact you for media and review inquiries–all of which is made 500% easier if you launch a website … and early.

One more time for those in the back: don’t wait!

Thank you for reading! If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or contributions, please use the comment field below or drop us a line at selfpublishingadvice@gmail.com. And remember to check back each Wednesday for your weekly dose of marketing musings from one indie, hybrid, and self-published author to another. ♠

ABOUT KELLY SCHUKNECHT: Kelly Schuknecht is the Executive Vice President of Outskirts Press. In addition to her contributions to the Outskirts Press blog at blog.outskirtspress.com, Kelly and a group of talented marketing experts offer book marketing services, support, and products to not only published Outskirts Press authors, but to all authors and professionals who are interested in marketing their books and/or careers. Learn more about Kelly on her blog, kellyschuknecht.com. 10:00 AM

Alternative Marketing Methods, Book Marketing, Kelly Speaks, Marketing Your Self-Published Book, Social Media Marketing

Marketing Missteps Episode 2: Confusing the Sales Message with the Marketing Campaign

Those of you who have been following my Wednesday posts here on Self Publishing Advisor for a while will probably have picked up on a couple of my habits by now, and one of them is diving into series that examine the many facets of an issue under a microscope. I like to see every angle, follow every lead, and to be thorough. Which is why, in continuing this new series that began with last week’s post on the subject of “Marketing Missteps” I want to do full justice to the heart of the matter.

What, then, is the heart of marketing?

This is the question that has rightfully dominated boardroom discussions at the top traditional publishing houses as well as the living rooms and kitchens and offices of thousands of entrepreneurial independent authors’ homes. Marketing, when push comes to shove, is about raising both awareness about and motivated interest in your product. And by “motivated interest,” I mean the kind of interest that leads to product sales. But note one thing: the sales come after the awareness. To push for sales with a mercenary if understandable motive is, as an author, to do both your book and your readers a disservice.

To prioritize sales above the human being on the other end of the Facebook group, the email listserv, the Twitter feed, the phone line, the book signing table, and the Goodreads book page is to declare your financial gain to be more important than quality human communication, and art. Readers, like everyone else in the market for new acquisitions, have a sixth sense about pushy and over-eager sellers. And here’s a fact:

Your readers want you to be a storyteller, not the stereotype of a used-car salesman.

So, what does “pushy” look like and how can you avoid it?

Many first-time self-publishing authors release a book accompanied by persistent announcements across all social media platforms––and not just cute little notices, but noisy and self-interested announcements. (And if you’ll remember, we talked about the self-centered marketing campaign last week in detail.) Marketing is a more subtle endeavor than a Sears Factory Clearance ad, however. You are entering a crowded market––with around five hundred thousand new books released each year––with every other entry clamoring for readers to spend money. When you as an indie author begin shouting into the void, cramming shotgun marketing messages into every available Tweet and post and picture and conversation––well, you do nothing but damage. You have become part of the background noise readers must filter through every day, in search of a story they actually connect with.

And how not to become yet another unheard voice? Lead with your wit and your humanity. Look to the authors you admire on social media and their blogs and elsewhere––how much space do they dedicate to explicitly sales-related messaging? I guarantee you it’s not much. Instead of constantly pushing links to sales pages, the successful self-publishing author and marketer is increasing the value proposition of both their own personal brand––as an author and person––as well as the value proposition of the their work (published and ongoing).

We’ve mentioned it many times before and elsewhere that the best marketing strategy is to write another book and to talk about that process instead of constantly pushing sales for an already published book––readers will have their interest piqued by a work still in progress in a way they won’t be by something they can simply hop on to Amazon or Goodreads to read detailed reviews about. The mystery of an unfinished novel is an incredible asset! Whatever else you do, don’t stop writing––offline.

Don’t confuse sales messaging with a healthy and engaged marketing campaign. Do remember how you first fell in love with a book, an author, and filling your bookshelves. That is the kind of positive impulse that you want to tap into.

Alternative Marketing Methods, Book Marketing, Kelly Speaks, Marketing Your Self-Published Book, Social Media Marketing

Marketing Missteps Episode 1: The Self-Centered Campaign

You’re a self-publishing author, recently come out with a new book, and you’ve already decided to throw yourself into marketing in a serious capacity. So what next? Finding that starting point is a tough first act, but it’s always helpful to know a couple of false starts that others have made before you, isn’t it? That way, at least you know a couple of places not to start, and you can find a path to success that fits your own indie experience, bolstering your skills and steering clear of your weaknesses.

Today, I’m going to begin a new series that will take a close look at several of the most important marketing missteps to avoid; the story doesn’t end here, of course, but hopefully this series will prompt you away from the edge of a few abysses. One or two of the mistakes I’ll point out may strike you as “common sense” points, but as my dad once whispered to ten-year-old me on a sidewalk corner facing a four-way stop in heavy traffic where nobody could quite figure out the correct right-of-way: “Common sense ain’t so common now, is it?” Even if a mistake strikes you as obvious, every reminder is a good one!

This week’s post is going to examine one of the most pernicious of all marketing missteps: that of the self-centered campaign. At its simplest distillation, the self-centered campaign will alienate you from your readers quicker than a ten-year-old at a traffic stop. Why? Because readers are smart. (I find it’s a wise policy to always assume my readers are smarter than I am, and they always seem to notice even the tiniest of continuity errors in my work before I do!) They will pick up on the arrogance–intentional or unconscious–of an author who makes their marketing campaign all about his or her excellence instead of shining the spotlight on the real stars of the show: the book itself, and the readers who have so cleverly fallen in love with it.

Here’s a hard fact to swallow: Your readers won’t always care about you, the author. You might be able to persuade them to, a little, over time, simply by virtue of writing excellent social media posts or demonstrating sensitivity to others. One crucial misunderstanding that self-publishing authors make is believing that they and their readers value the same things. Hopefully, your readers will care about your humanity and the work you produce, but beyond that is murky waters. How do we un-murkify them? By doing the work. By doing the research. By figuring out what you do for your readers that no one else can.

Bess Livings' illustration for Snow White

To successfully market your indie book, don’t sell the customer your product (or book) … sell them your solution to their needs. What issues interest your readers? What subjects compel them? These are the basic components with which you can build a successful marketing campaign.

Market research, even basic, is more than just helpful. It’s necessary. It is the one magical ingredient that will move your strategy away from something self-centered and toward something that is product- and consumer-centered.

But how to get there? What are the best strategies for research? One consideration might be to craft a simple survey with SurveyMonkey, or to poll a small focus group. I recommend steering clear of using friends or family as focus group members, since their personal connections to you will skew how they answer. And besides, online crowd-sourcing platforms like the aforementioned SurveyMonkey (as well as Facebook Groups and Google Forms) make for an inexpensive replacement for focus groups. What you ask depends on what you find useful, but it might be worth crafting a few questions that speak to your readers’ genres of interest, the amount of time they spend reading or on social media, and how they like best to engage with fellow fans and their favorite authors.

Whichever avenue you pursue, these basic data-gathering methods should give you new insight into your readers, and help you shape your marketing message to focus less on you and more on the them.

Alternative Marketing Methods, Book Marketing, Kelly Speaks, Marketing Your Self-Published Book, outskirts press, Uncategorized

Marketing in the Hybrid Publishing World

Two weeks ago, after much consideration, we settled on a simple and straightforward definition for hybrid publishing:

Hybrid publishing is any publishing model that allows authors to enter into direct, flexible, contractual collaborations with industry professionals that in traditional publishing would be indirect (they would be paid by the publishing house, not the author) and are not traditionally available to self-publishing authors. This includes companies like Outskirts Press, which offers a range of collaborative services, and excludes the so-called “hybrid author,” or someone who has moved from traditional publishing into self-publishing or vice versa.

And last week, in hopes of getting a glimpse into the actual experience, I dove into the stories of two self-publishing authors who have chosen the hybrid publishing track: Norman Smith of Dog Ear Publishing, and Mirtha Michelle Castro Mármol of Outskirts Press fame. Smith’s review spoke to what I consider the real strengths of the hybrid publishing experience: constant communication, flexibility, and a real willingness to put the author’s vision at the forefront of the publishing process. Meanwhile, Mirtha Michelle’s interview highlighted the collaborative nature of hybrid publishing––from writing her book, to finding the company she wanted to go with, to finding a designer for her book’s cover, to connecting with her readers after the fact.

This week, I want to answer a different set of questions, and I want to take us back to marketing, our focus for our Wednesday posts here on Self-Publishing Advisor. How does hybrid publishing assist an indie author in the realm of marketing a book, for example? Does it offer tangible benefits? How can an author know when the expense is paying off?

Value vs. Expense:

As hybrid self-publishing superstar CJ Lyons puts it, “If you are spending more time marketing than you writing a book, then you are probably doing a disservice to your readers by not writing the best book that you can. You can trust your readers and if you are writing a book they love then they will do the marketing for you.” And it’s true: your readers are the greatest force for influence that you have! When readers fall in love with a new world or a new book, as you are probably already well aware, they can’t help but want to share the thrill of discovery with their friends, families, and other social connections.

Connecting with your readers is, of course, a matter requiring some delicacy in and of itself. Marketing doesn’t happen by itself; your social media presence, whether you’re a solo act or working with a hybrid self-publishing company, will require work. You have to balance your personal time and energy budget without falling behind on either sleep or sacrificing valuable time you might spend writing that next book (and that next book is a powerful marketing tool in and of itself, so you don’t want to sacrifice it). The difference between being a “regular” self-publishing author–assuming, for the moment, that we set aside the massive range of experiences that fall into that category–and being a self-publishing author who chooses to work within the hybrid model boils down to resources. A good hybrid publishing company will reduce the amount of time and energy and expertise required to keep up a vigorous social media campaign as well as a nationwide marketing plan to something more like light maintenance than heavy work.

Within the hybrid model, you the self-publishing author don’t have to be the one running down to Kinkos to print out a massive pile of fliers that you spent weeks designing yourself, or staying up late squinting at a dim computer screen scrolling through tweets about your book. You pay to let the professionals assist you with that. Most companies offer a range of marketing products (like this one from Outskirts Press) and bundles so that you can choose to pay for only the services you need or that you don’t know how to manage yourself, and which allows you to only spend money on truly necessary expenses. An easy way to know if a product is worth spending money on is to hop on a web forum and ask around after authors of equal expertise in, say, book trailer creation–and see how long it took them to design one. Multiply the hours they spent by the average going wage for freelance videographers (anywhere between $20 and $50 an hour in USD) and compare against the price for that product. Run the numbers for each product you’re thinking about purchasing, and make your decisions accordingly. These figures don’t allow for the expertise you’ll have access to by paying a professional to do them for you, but they do give you a starting point–and we all need one of those!

Alternative Marketing Methods, Book Marketing, elizabeth speaks, Marketing Your Self-Published Book, Social Media Marketing

In Your Corner : Celebrate National Reading Month With These Marketing Tips! (part one)

March is National Reading Awareness Month! Here at Self-Publishing Advisor, we love the fact that there’s an entire month devoted to celebrating the written word–as well as the ways in which we can spread the joy of literacy–and I would like to invite you to join me in making reading a focus all month long, here in our Thursday blog post slot.

As writers, we’re not just people who produce stories; we also consume them, share them, and advocate on their behalf. As writers, March of 2016 is the ideal time for you to not only finish your book and start publishing it, but also to promote yourself and your book while encouraging everyone to read.

Think this sounds like a challenge? Maybe it is. But I have some pointed ideas to get you started. This is doable. I promise you! All you need to do is dedicate some time each day this month to pursuing the marketing and promotion tips I’ll be posting here for the next four weeks.

GETTING STARTED : Become the local expert.

If you haven’t heard of National Reading Awareness Month or know the details of its longstanding connection to Dr. Seuss’ birthday, the history of the National Education Association, and how you can participate … well, it’s time to you pay a visit to the NEA’s website and browse through the plentiful promotional materials, media tips, press release tips and fact sheets the NEA has posted there in order to introduce you and other acolytes to the Read Across America celebration.

Another tip? It’s well worth offering to speak at local schools and NEA events, or to local organizations on the importance of childhood reading skills. Many schools, libraries, bookstores, and other organizations welcome the outside help in putting on events of this kind, and yes–there’s something in it for you, too. The more you make yourself indispensable to your local literary and literacy-building community, the more likely you are to be called on again in the future, and to get word of your own work before fresh eyes. Best of all, there’s a great deal of satisfaction in knowing you’re helping to foster the next generation of readers–some of whom may go on to read your book! Which leads me to ….

TIP TWO: GET ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE YOUNG

Yesterday was Read Across America Day! Writers are some of the biggest supporters of this day and event. While you may have missed the boat for 2016, there’s no better time to prepare for the next year than now, when the opportunities (even the missed ones) are fresh on parents’ and teachers’ minds. Contact local schools, libraries, and nonprofits to find out how you can help promote reading, writing, and kindergarten readiness in general–not just today, but throughout the entire month of March. Ask if you might partner with some of them in throwing an event next year, in 2017, and start lining up the logistics. When it comes to scheduling things in March, which is testing season for many American schools, the earlier you get started the better an outcome you can expect.

TIP THREE: CONSIDER ONLINE ADVERTISING

The last two tips built upon a foundation of interpersonal networking–that is, meeting people face to face and using this method to benefit everyone. But what about those readers beyond your immediate sphere of influence? How can you get them reading–and reading your book in particular? Here’s a thought: Once your book is published, consider whether it might benefit from any online advertising. You can set up ads on sites like Facebook, Google and Goodreads easily, or with some assistance from your self-publishing company and the marketing consultants they likely keep on staff. If you’ve published through a company like Outskirts Press (my own stomping grounds), you can count on their staff to help you make your book more discoverable on Google with something like the Google Books Preview Program.

TIP FOUR: INTRODUCE NEW FORMATS OF YOUR BOOK

You know how it goes: The more easy a thing is to buy, and the more accessible it is to a large number of people, the more sales of that thing will jump. It’s a well-demonstrated fact that self-publishing authors can reach a larger audience of readers by offering additional formats such as Kindle, Apple iPad or NOOK editions of your book. And if you’ve only ever published your book digitally, perhaps it’s time you branched out into Print on Demand (POD) copies of your masterpiece! Consider which formats you want to offer and add them before or after your hardcover format hits the virtual shelves. If you feel inexpert in how to make the most of a multiplatform, multiedition publication, don’t hesitate to turn to those with the most wisdom to share: your fellow self-publishing authors! We’re here for you.

Always remember: you are not alone. ♣︎

ABOUT ELIZABETH JAVOR: With over 18 years of experience in sales and management, Elizabeth Javor works as the Manager of Author Services for Outskirts Press. The Author Services Department is composed of knowledgeable publishing consultants, pre-production specialists, customer service reps and book marketing specialists; together, they all focus on educating authors on the self-publishing process to help them publish the book of their dreams. Whether you are a professional looking to take your career to the next level with platform-driven non-fiction or a novelist seeking fame, fortune, and/or personal fulfillment, Elizabeth Javor can put you on the right path.

He Who Waits To Finish–May Never Really Get Started

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What, then, is the heart of marketing?

Your readers want you to be a storyteller, not the stereotype of a used-car salesman.

So, what does “pushy” look like and how can you avoid it?

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Value vs. Expense:

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GETTING STARTED : Become the local expert.

Always remember: you are not alone. ♣︎

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