Choose your own adventure 🌎

choose your own bookselling adventure - header image

Hey,

We're talking a break from our series on email this week to talk about the weird and wonderful world of bookselling instead.

I've worked in marketing and tech in some form or another since the start of the century, and I've created campaigns to sell everything from luxury vacations to cheap d*ldos, so when I say something like "books are weird products," I really do mean it.

Of course, this means you shouldn't beat yourself up if you are struggling to get sales going or floundering in your attempts to level up.

Books are weird products. Truly. They're incredibly cheap in relative terms, but customers are ridiculously picky – reader tastes are so refined as to be almost beyond parody. And I don't mean refined in the sense of "I only read mid-twentieth-century French literary fiction" – although such readers certainly exist.

I mean "refined" in the sense that readers are incredibly specific about what they like… and what they don't. Even within niches.

(Before you curse the phenomenon too much, this is what makes it possible for so many of us to make a living, rather than being dominated by a handful of established players.)

This is not a problem you can neatly sidestep, but it is one you must account for – mostly through knowing exactly who your Ideal Reader is, and how to reach here. Something I wrote an entire book about, if you are curious.

But I want to speak about someone else this week.

You.

Specifically, how you can enjoy your marketing journey. How you can spend your time on things you enjoy and skip the things you hate through the simple magic of… not doing them.

You really can choose your own bookselling adventure, and I'll show you how after this brief message which I have shoehorned in here so seamlessly.

Privacy Policy Change

Our lawyerly overlords insist I make you aware of a change in my Privacy Policy. I know, exciting or what?

You can review the changes at the above link if you have crippling insomnia, but all that has changed is that my mailing list provider has switched from "MailerLite" to "MailerLite and ConvertKit" – reflecting the fact that I moved my non-fiction list (i.e. you guys) to ConvertKit this week.

I'm sure some of you are curious as to why I have made that change, particularly as I have recommended MailerLite so strongly in the past.

We might get into it more when we return to our series on email marketing but the short version is that I still very much recommend MailerLite (indeed I'm still using it for my fiction list), but I was running into some specific technical issues/limitations that mostly pertain to my course and won't be so applicable to the average author.

My recommendations around ConvertKit and MailerLite haven't really changed in that I still think MailerLite is a very solid choice, but I'm also happy I made the change and I'm liking what I see at ConvertKit also. Certainly recommend it for people happy to spend a bit more and looking for a more robust platform or more advanced automations, or those getting into selling direct, or merch, or doing courses, or anything like that.

I'll leave it there for now, but will return to that in more detail soon – possibly via a MailerLite vs. ConvertKit video review or something. There are solid pros and cons to both platforms, as I see it at least. And mostly pros in both cases. Happy to continue recommending both providers, as I have done for a couple of years now.

Choose Your Own Bookselling Adventure

Figuring out how to sell books – or how to sell lots more of them – can be a stressful affair in 2021. When I started back in 2011, all you really had to do was publish your book, run a 99¢ sale occasionally, and… that was pretty much it tbh.

Today, the amount of marketing tools at our disposal is staggering – and I'm guessing quite befuddling for those starting out (and for quite a few of old-timers also).

It's not just the sheer number of marketing options which has exploded, but the complexity has increased exponentially as well. And then the strategies – the way you put all these pieces together – have become so involved too.

One thing has remained constant: the antipathy most writers have towards marketing. Even those who grab it with both hands often do so with gritted teeth at first.

But here's the thing. If there's something you personally hate, then you really don't have to do it. There's always more than one way to skin a croc.

(Example: I hate Amazon Ads. How do I handle that? By… not using Amazon Ads.)

Between content marketing and BookBub Ads and price promotions and the whole world of Facebook and the giant spellbook of email wizardry and the many, many ways you can use free offers to grow your entire operation… there's a whole lifetime of learning there if you are really going to truly master all of them. But you don't have to.

You can choose your own bookselling adventure. You can mold your own marketing machine based on how you like spending your time, neatly sidestepping the things you hate.

Let's break it down.

The Three Ps of Book Marketing

To successfully market a book, you need the three Ps:

• product

• promotion

• probably some retention as well.

Yeah. Stretching the P-thing there, but it's hot outside and my brain is melting. Just go with it.

Product

The product part should be obvious – maybe – but pretty much all of us get tripped up by this step in one way or another.

Simply put, you need a book that readers want to buy. If you don't have a book which readers want to buy, then no amount of promotion will save you.

Some books are better than others. Some books are more commercial than others. Some niches are more lucrative than others.

What niche you work in is totally up to you. How commercial you want to be in your writing is totally up to you. It's usually harder to make money in a smaller or less commercial niche – but it's not always that simple.

Some genres have less competition than others – and not always because they are smaller or less lucrative.

Some niches are underserved – they have started trending upwards but writers and publishers haven't moved with the uptick in demand.

Certain authors will constantly seek out those opportunities and seek to work that seam until it runs dry, and then look for the next. This is the most extreme version of "writing to market."

Here's a less extreme version: find the overlap between what you like writing, and what sells. Or to put it another way, out of the dozen or so possible story ideas you have right now… which is most likely to sell? Write that.

You can write to market in the "extreme" way above, or the milder way below that… or not at all. It's totally down to you how you spend your time, just be aware that choices have consequence. If you are steadfast in your desire not to kowtow to the market in any way, to make absolutely no "compromises" to your artistic vision, perhaps factor that into your sales expectations.

I mean, I'm personally dying for someone to write a literal space opera with lots of singing Italians dying very, very slowly… in space… but I don't think it's going to outsell The Expanse.

And perhaps also keep in mind that working within the confines of a commercial genre can be a wonderful intellectual challenge too and help you grow as an artist.

Of course, it's not just about how commercial your product is, but also how much volume you have. One of the more common emails I get from newer authors usually says something like "I have tried everything and spent three thousand dollars, but I've only sold twelve copies of my debut novel."

The misstep here is (a) spending that much money and (b) focusing more on selling that first book rather than writing the next one. Which is a shame because marketing gets much easier and much more cost effective when you have more books out. And that goes triple if you are smart and write a series instead of a bunch of standalones. (I was not smart.)

A commercial product, and plenty of it to go around. Preferably a series in a genre already popular with readers.

But that's not all! You also need to package that product correctly or readers will simply walk on by and pick up something that is packaged correctly instead – and there are no shortage of choices that will distract them if you mess this step up.

I won't go into the packaging part here too much but I cover that in great detail in a bunch of videos in my free course Starting From Zero – so head to my site and check that out if you want to dive into that topic further. In short though, you need to package your book in a way that is familiar to fans of that genre – and I mean price, cover, title, and blurb. The whole shebang.

Do that, and the dreaded promotion part suddenly gets a whole lot friendlier.

Promotion

I'm often asked what's "hot" right now as if marketing strategies were fashion choices, and someone in Paris has decided that BookBub Ads are en vogue and Facebook Ads are for rubes.

This is silly.

Equally frequently, people want to know what the "new" thing is, like ad platforms are bananas and spoil quickly.

This is just as silly.

The fundamentals of marketing don't really change. You need a commercial product, and then you need to promote it to your target market.

Exactly how you do that doesn't really matter… as long as you have at least one effective means of reaching readers.

If you have built your entire marketing operation on Amazon Ads, you don't need to sweat it if you bounced off BookBub Ads, or could never crack Facebook.

Having one ad platform working for you is fine and dandy.

Some authors never really advertise at all, and just get by with regular releases, frequent price promotions, and a bunch of promo sites.

And that's fine too – indeed, it's arguably the best approach when you are starting out and have fewer books to work with.

The cost of clicks might rise and fall a little on one platform or another, but far too much time is spent chewing over that – in my opinion.

What "the market" is doing doesn't really matter.

What you do matters.

Some people might get frustrated with that, but I think it's empowering.

You get to decide what you spend your time on. If you hate Amazon Ads like I do, then simply don't do them; there are other ways to reach readers, other ways for you to spend your time.

For more specific advice on how all these different paths to readers function, and which might appeal to you personally, and how to use them effectively, then check out this comprehensive book marketing post (and the embedded video too). It's from last year, but still totally relevant.

So that's product, and promotion. But if you really want to sell books like a pro, your work doesn't stop there.

Probably some retention as well...

It's far easier to retain to keep an existing customer than to find a new one. Infinitely cheaper too. It's also a much more efficient use of your time, which is an important consideration when you are juggling the twin masters of learning marketing and writing those pesky books. (And whatever else you have going on in that life of yours, I guess.)

This is especially important in a world where readers have such ridiculously granular tastes.

Finding your own reader-unicorns is hard enough without burning through them carelessly. It's much better to have some clever way of retaining readers, instead of having to beat the bushes each time you launch a book.

There are any number of ways you can approach that problem but the two most obvious are social media and email.

Social media might be the more obvious choice because it's hot and flashy and new. And there are a ton of bogus experts out there encouraging you to go all in with Instagram or stake out some virgin territory on Pinterest.

In truth, fusty old email is by far the best tool for the job here – which is why I focus on it so much. Social media has its uses for sure, but for the specific task of retaining customers email beats the pants off everything else, and it's not even close.

Email has unique advantages over the alternatives and if you haven't read the freebie you got when signing up to this list, my book Following goes into that a lot more. Download your free copy here if you missed it the first time around.

Putting it all together!

This is the Grand Mystery of Book Marketing – explained in one simple concept: you need product, promotion, and probably some retention to make your life easier.

Exactly how you put those pieces together is up to you. There are more effective ways, and less effective ways in my opinion. But you could make a strong argument that choosing the pieces that make you happy is most important of all.

If you want to be super hard-nosed about the books you write, analyzing the market, looking for gaps, and then filling it with some kind of aggressive rapid release strategy… you can totally do that!

Or if that very idea curls your toes, and you simply want to write books from the heart... and then maybe try and squeeze them into a slightly more commercial package to make marketing a little easier, you can do that too.

When it comes to promoting your books, you can tame the wild beast that is Facebook, exclusively working the many angles on that platform, and you might never need to look at any other form of promotion if you crack the code.

Or you can eschew the world of advertising altogether. It's really your call.

Finally, when it comes to retaining your readers, you can totally ignore my advice and completely skip the world of email marketing and use your social media channels or something like Patreon to retain readers and foster engagement instead.

I don't recommend that personally, for reasons we will surely explore when we continue the series on email marketing, but you can totally do that if that's what makes you happy. Again, it's your call.

Choose your own bookselling adventure, skip the stuff that makes you unhappy.

You are the captain of your authorship.

Dave

P.S. Rocking out this week to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Mysteries.