Author Russell Newquist helpfully informs us of the difference between marketing and advertising while explaining why marketing is essential for authors.
First of all, you have to understand that marketing and advertising are two separate but related things. Any business you run (and remember, selling your own books is a business!) must do both!
Marketing is everything you do – everything – related to letting people know that your product (book) exists and why they should purchase (and read) it.
Advertising is when you pay somebody to include some kind of ad for your product – a video, a little image, a blurb, a text segment, whatever. It’s a subset of marketing.
Advertising almost always costs money. Sometimes you can work out a trade with someone, but usually you’re going to have to pay for it. With other forms of marketing, on the other hand, you can very often trade hard work for money. And you must keep doing it.
You hate marketing? Suck it up, buttercup – or go get a day job. If you want your books to sell, you have to market them.
You’re probably used to thinking of marketing as a dirty word, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s time to rethink the word. Look at it this way:
Nobody will ever read your book if they don’t know it exists. Nobody. Ever.
Stop thinking of marketing as a dastardly activity and think of it as precisely two things:
- Letting people know that your book exists.
- Letting them know why they should read it.
I second everything Russell said. Marketing is what separates amateurs from pros. If you want to be a pro author, you need to market yourself–note: not just your books; yourself–constantly. Marketing grows brands. You are the brand. Your books are your products.
Russell follows up these truth bombs with some actionable advice.
Here are some cheap or even free things you should start early and keep at to market your book:
- Start a blog and write interesting posts about interesting topics!
- Bonus points if the blog’s topic relates to your book topic!
- Create profiles on various social media and participate!
- Get as many of your friends and family to read and review your book as possible!
- Talk about your book to anyone who will listen!
Here are a few other things that you should consider spending some money on, even if you only have one book:
A good cover. It’s not so much that good covers sell books (although they do). The bigger issue is that bad covers kill books. You don’t have to spring for the best cover ever. But a bad cover is worse than “not worth the money.” It will actually work against you. There are some good places you can get decent covers done for under $200. They’re worth it. This is also the gift that keeps on giving. You pay for the cover now for book one… but when book two comes out, book one still has that excellent cover you paid for. So book one’s sales boost from book two’s release will be better. And so on.
A good web site. Did you read what I said above about bad covers killing books? Ditto for bad web sites. The good news is, it’s pretty easy to build a not-terrible web site these days. But you want more than that. You don’t just want a web site that looks good. You want a web site that’s built to sell your book. If you’re not technically inclined, or if you’re no good at marketing, save yourself a lot of headaches. Pay someone to build a web site for you. You can find some not terrible web designers for a few hundred dollars. Like your book’s cover, this is the gift that keeps on giving. A good web site will keep selling book one… and then take only a little modification to start selling book two. Invest your time and energy here and, if necessary, your money.
Some sales artwork. The internet is a fantastic place and you can find artwork pretty inexpensively if you look. For $10-30 a piece you can buy very high quality stock images to use. For $30-200 a piece you can pay for some pretty good quality artwork. This is especially worth the money if your book is the first of the series. You can reuse that character art for every single book in that line – and add to it with each book. Eventually you’ll have a really huge collection of art you can choose from for flyers, posters, ads, etc. But you can also start small and cheap and build this collection as you have money.
I can confirm the usefulness of sales artwork from personal experience.
But there’s one piece of advice from Russell that needs to come with some major caveats.
Give away books. Yes, you heard me. Give them away. Give away as many books as you possibly can, especially book one in a series. Ebooks are best for this, of course, because they’re free to you. But give away print books, too, if you have to. The more the better. My experience is that about one out of every one hundred readers will actually review a book (maybe fewer). But you need those reviews. So get those books out the door to anyone who will read them. Remember: this is helpful for getting reviews and selling books now. But even more importantly, you’re laying a foundation of fans who will buy your future books. So give them away like candy.
Not to step on Russell’s toes, but I’ve got lots of experience with book giveaways. The result is that I’m much less bullish on giving books away for free than Russell is.
The best advice, as always, comes from Larry Correia: only do free if you have a plan.
Here are some pointers to help you make that plan:
- If you only have one book, don’t give it away for free.
- Most authors will tell you to make the first book in a series free. Consider giving away the second or third book in a series. I’ve found that people are more likely to go back and buy previous books in a series than they are to buy later installments after getting book one for free, but your mileage may vary.
- Give away free copies of your books through your web site/mailing list. Kindle Unlimited requires a 90 day commitment, and it sucks. Seriously, getting paid based on number of KENPs read amounts to a pay cut from Amazon to tradpub royalty rates.
The moral of the story? Always. Be. Closing!
By the way, The Secret Kings, Soul Cycle Book III is currently on sale for only 99 cents.
