And Some Fell on Stony Ground
Today’s post contains reflections on marketing a self-published book. If that’s not your thing then you might want to surf away now.
Let’s begin with two quotes.
‘But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.’
‘Then,’ said Yossarian, ‘I’d be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?’
Heller : Catch 22
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‘Look, you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t need to follow me – you don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves: you’re all individuals.’
‘Yes! We’re all individuals.’
Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
There is a lot marketing advice online for self-publishing writers. My comment, six months after publishing Coyote in the Corner, is that a lot of that advice would be great for first or second movers in a small market, but is less helpful in a very crowded market where everyone is doing the same things. It’s a bit like reading a guide book to lonely places – when you get there you find that everyone else has read the same guide book and the places are no longer lonely.
You see this everywhere once you are attuned to it, for example:
- Advanced reviews on the day of publication with exactly the same introductory wording
- ‘cover reveals’ to an indifferent world on social media
- virtual book launches
- look-alike/clone covers
- neat genre-focused packaging
- taglines and book subtitles designed to play the Amazon algorithms
- flash giveaways and discounts
This is all designed to game the system (especially the Amazon system); it is all about getting noticed, making sales, becoming a ‘best-selling author.’ It is about success and it is about status and it is entirely distinct from the merits or otherwise of the book.
It reminds me a lot of the sort of stuff I used to see on LinkedIn and assorted ‘business’ sites and magazines – 10 Habits of Successful CEOs/Executives! The implication was that if you adopted those habits then you too could be a successful CEO/Executive. What was ignored, of course, was the majority of people who did those 10 things but somehow failed to be successful. There was a false premise lurking in there, by implication at least, and notably absent were any mentions of other contributing circumstances to business success – such as parental wealth, government funding (particularly military funding or tax breaks) and, especially, luck.
There is a direct parallel with self-publishing.
Wa’ ‘Appen?
These thoughts arise from an Amazon (UK) ranking for Coyote in the Corner that I spotted last night (shown to the right). What struck me was that the sudden climbing of the rankings to the dizzy heights of 161st did not result directly from anything that I’ve done in the recent past. It might be because of one or two recent sales – thank you, whoever you are – but I can’t honestly point to my sales and see a correlation. In fact, I made a sale today and the book, as I write, is down to 359th in the rankings.
Of course, I immediately screenshotted the ranking and put it on social media to suggest to people that they might be missing out on something special 🙂
However, the relationship between sales and marketing in this context does not look clear. Obviously, some marketing is required, but you can’t feed product into a maw, ratchet a lever a couple times and watch sales squeeze out of a nozzle. In fact, I’m coming to the view that the best you can hope for is to raise awareness and let things grow. The growth may be encouraged by the addition of fertiliser in the form of marketing bullshit, but if that’s too crude or formulaic then audiences will spot it a mile off. In time, the hope is for positive feedback loops to kick in as more books are published and an audience emerges.
I’m reminded of the first arrival of Harry Potter in our house. It was when Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets came out in paperback, which is to say *before* the Bloomsbury marketing machine went mega. The key driver was word of mouth in the school playground. The zeitgeist was, ‘I want this because my friends all have it and say that it’s great.’ The market dynamic changed from ‘I want to sell’ to ‘we have to buy.’
And that’s the trick: you want your potential readers to feel, like Yossarian, that they’d be a damned fool to do anything other than buy a copy. The kicker is that that feeling has to be earned, because audiences have learned not to be manipulated, and even if you did get away with stunts and tricks once, it would be self-defeating in the long term. You earn the changed dynamic when the product delivers value to its assumed target audience – assuming they know the book exists, and that brings us back to marketing.
I’m not drawing any conclusions here, and the above is hardly innovative thinking, but it is something I’m thinking about ahead of gearing up to publish The Raven and the Hart later this year. In some respects, that ought to be an ‘easier’ proposition than Coyote because it is a novel rather than a collection, although ‘easier’ is relative. It will certainly be a different proposition.
Will I do things differently this time? Yes. I just don’t know what yet.
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If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Here’s a song about the joys of writing:
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