Word of mouth: the invisible, powerful force that moves sales without being seen. Plenty of people have attempted to control it, direct it, harness it, predict it, generate it… and it’s worked about as well as doing the same to the weather.

Many, many “hot new marketing tricks” just come down to attempting to imitate or manipulate word of mouth. Paying high click rates to have your book splashed everywhere is an attempt to make it seem like it’s the popular thing people keep mentioning, since our back brains are less apt at filtering fiction form reality than we’d like to believe. Sending out street teams to talk up the book, whether in real life or in virtual, is trying to make it seem popular and desirable, and put easy talking point phrases in people’s ears, hoping it’ll comes back out their mouths.

The rest of marketing is for people who have heard of you, reminding them you exist if they hadn’t picked you up yet, or if they have, to recommend to friends who don’t know you’re what they need, or letting the prior customers know that there’s a new thing for them. (Substack / mailing lists are not an easy sell for brand new readers. It’s a great reminder for fans.)

In the end, it is impossible to successfully create a specific amount of positive word of mouth on demand, much less in a short time frame, or steadily over a long time. The people who have success often have less clue than those who’ve failed, because they don’t know what they did right any more than what they did wrong… and it’s easy to misdiagnose the reason, and credit the wrong elements.  (See: One-hit wonders, and sequels that suck.)

This does NOT mean that you can shrug and say “the rain, it comes, it goes, there is no hope of controlling it.” It means that you need to lay the groundwork and satisfy the preconditions for word of mouth working for you.

After all, you can’t catch lightning in a bottle if you have no bottles, and you never try.

If you are constantly chasing sales, and hoping This One Weird Trick is the silver bullet, then you are approaching every customer as though they will only buy from you once, and your business is sales, not your stories. You’re in advertising, not being an author… and the only way to grow is to grow your advertising.

Instead:
1. Get Better.

A. Write Better Books. This consists of growing in your skills as an author as much as it does putting out more books.

We all know that it is possible to grow as an author by writing more stories. If you look up any of your favourite authors’ earliest published works, (or, thank you internet, unpublished works), you’ll find that they are rough and clumsy compared to the skill, style, and voice you came to know and love.

We also know it is possible to not grow. That there are authors out there whom readers refer as “just phoning it in” and “rehashing the same plots and tropes endlessly.”

I approach each book with the express intention of working on one piece of craft and getting better at it as I use it in the story. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I learn from my failure, but I never hit publish without having worked on improvement.

You want This One Cool Trick for Exciting Audiences? Sure. Put all five senses in the book. Don’t treat it like a TV script, describe smells and the feel of textures, along with the taste of the air. It’s really basic. It’s really hard to do on every page without it feeling forced.  Given practice, it makes the world come alive. I know that’s not the marketing trick you were expecting, but when the current marketing trick is useless, putting all five senses in your book will still makes it awesome.

My last book, I was working on team dynamics, and making sure that even the bit players were not background cardboard-cutout characters. The current one, I’m working on tone, and on human antagonists. (I like fighting the impersonal forces of nature and weird eldritch aliens better, but I want to up my game with humans.)

Getting Better is critical, because without producing more content, you don’t have more things for people who like your work to buy… and the better you get, the more you’ll excite your audience into thinking about your work when they’re finished reading, coming back for more, and sharing their enjoyment with friends.

B. Get Better Formatting and Copyediting, Blurbs, and Ad Copy.

The difference between having a perfectly cool story in your head that doesn’t appear to have any flaws and a perfectly cool story you’ve written down is a hundred skill sets you have to work on mastering. The first stories will be really rough compared to the later ones as you get better at those skills.

The difference between having a story written down and a story published is yet another hundred skill sets that you must learn, and your first attempts are going to be rough. Even if you add money instead of time, they’ll still be rough, because you won’t know how to direct the person you’re paying in order to get the best results.

The difference between writing and publishing is that your first stories you’ve written are usually stuck in a notebook or computer file somewhere, out of sight. The first thing you’ve published is out there for sale, where the public can see it, and they judge the book by its cover and blurb.

So, keep learning. It is ideal to be learning more and doing mock exercises before it’s time to publish the next book, so you can integrate all that information and bring it to the table. Like many skills, you get better with more knowledge and more practice… and you can’t skip the practice.

My blurbs aren’t that great, but they’re functional. They’ve gotten this good because I’ve written well over a hundred of them. If you only write a blurb when you need to publish a book, then by the time you’re releasing your tenth book, you may have written a million words to get good at stories… but less than a single short story on blurbs.

2. Patch the Holes In Your Revenue Bucket Before You Try To Fill The Bucket

This business is not built on selling one thing per customer, one customer at a time; it’s build on backstock, on the long tail of sales of prior works.

If you have to spend $2 advertising to get a customer, you charge $4.99 a book, and they only read one book, your gross profit after advertising is $2.99 per customer.

If you spend $2 in advertising to get a customer, and they read 20 books at that $4.99/book, your gross profit after advertising is $97.80 per customer.

If you spend $2 in advertising to get a customer, and they read 20 books at that $4.99/book, and tell all their friends, 5 of whom also plough through all 20 books you have, then your gross profit after advertising is $596 for that customer.

But to get that, you not only have to have the book you’re advertising look its spiffy, shiny best, you need to find all the places that the customers will hit friction that stops them from finishing a book, or from getting the next one, and plug those leaks. Since you have no way of knowing which book a customer will pick up first, you need to do this for every book you have for sale.

A. Editing old books.

First off, Han Shot First. Do not try to go in and change any of the characters or scenes, because that book is someone’s favorite, and there’s no surer way to annoy your fans than to change what they loved.

However, I strongly believe that you should go in and make sure your formatting is good. If junk code in the first book you published has some pages randomly appearing in a different font or font size, with randomly mixed straight and curly quotes, or the paragraphing was a little weird, or you ended up sticking in hash marks that for scene breaks not because you wanted them, but because you couldn’t figure out the wingdings on your program… when you can afford better and are proficient with it, go back in and fix it.

Fix the typos. They throw some readers out of the story, and you don’t want the reader to put your book down without finishing it. If they do that, they aren’t enjoying it enough to buy the next story.

If there is a scene that is consistently throwing readers out of the book, or something that they are consistently complaining about, contemplate if you can fix it in the same tone and voice without breaking the story. I’ve done this – I did a re-read, sat down and thought about it, and realized that the scenes weren’t actually too rushed / out of nowhere (which was the complaint), they just lacked enough foreshadowing. So when I did an edit that took out a bunch of typos, I also put in several bits of foreshadowing, sliding it into places where it fit. The bits were small, a sentence here, a phrase there, and didn’t substantially alter the scenes they were in. When I finished, the problem scenes were now surprising yet inevitable by the time they appeared, and complaints about them stopped.

However, remember editing is a set of skills, just like writing. I do not recommend clumsily practicing editing in big obvious patches on prior books. Subtle. Subtle is better. You’re touching up a painting, not putting in new elements or redoing from scratch.

B. Changing the Cover Art

You should be looking at doing this roughly every 5 years anyway, because the market changes, and the styles of cover art change. If you go to a used book store or a friends of the library sale, you can tell as you pick through the covers what decade or fad they are from.

As you see this, my husband will be in the process of uploading a new cover for Shattered Under Midnight. Because when I published it, neither the artist nor I had a lot to work with, so we did a photo-collage from available resources, and decided the perfect was the enemy of the good. 6 years later, she has grown as an artist, has gotten a lot of new tools and practice using them, and can now make something that’s a lot closer to what she wanted in the first place. It’s also a lot closer to what the market is looking for, and far better at signaling genre and subgenre… which will make it easier for readers to look at it and know it’s what they’re looking for.

C. Updating Blurb and other Ad Copy, Including the Backmatter

Do this at least as often as you update covers. Not only are you going to get better at writing blurbs, but the styles and fashions in blurbs changes. It used to be extremely important in young adult literature to put the age of the protagonist first, and not doing so looked amateur. Now, it looks… old-fashioned.

The job of your ad copy is to suck the reader into the book, not to make them go “Oh, how quaint. This must be an old book.”

And once you’ve gotten them in the book and through the story, make sure your backmatter lists plenty of other things to read next, not just the things you had out when that book was originally published!

D. Updating Categories and Keywords.

Yes, these change, too. Learn what the best, latest version is, and do that when you upload the new version with its shiny new cover and contents stripped of typos, with freshly updated backmatter.

3. Get Better At Delivering On Your Promises

This has two parts: what you promise, and how well you deliver. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re selling the story equivalent of haute cuisine, down home cooking, or fast food… but it matters very much if your story matches what the reader thought they were getting.

A. Dialing In Your Genre and Subgenre

One of the most common mistakes writers make is to look at their story and add up the elements and tropes. “Well, it’s got action with all these fight scenes, and adventure as they’re exploring the unknown, but this dialogue is comedy, and it’s got this girl the guys are interested in, so it’s a romance, and it has magic so it’s fantasy, so I don’t know how to blurb it because it’s cross-genre.”

Please stop. You don’t decide genre by looking at individual elements. You decide genre by looking at what promises you made to the reader. Which genre’s readers will be happy with your promises, your tone, your plot arc and/or emotional arc, and your setting?

Setting, by the way, is LAST. If you write a story set in a fantasy world with the hero meeting the girl, wooing the girl as they learn to trust each other and fall in love, helping her escape from the dungeon and marrying, and then managing to defeat the bloodline curse by going back and killing the wizard before his firstborn baby comes, so their family can live happily ever after…

It’s a romance > fantasy. Your promises are all about the love story, your arc is about falling in love and creating a family, and you end with the HEA.

If you write a story in a fantasy world where your adventuring party is defeated by a sorcerer-king who throws you all in his dungeon in order to make you the carrier for a sorcerous plague and/or other curses, and while in the dungeon you meet the rightful heir of the kingdom he’s overthrown, and you two escape together… but you know the curse he put on her will kill your child, so you have less than 9 months to go find the shattered remnants of your old party, lift or temporarily nullify their curses so that you can train up and pool your knowledge to attack him one last time, losing half your guys to heroic deaths, but bringing down the tower and ending all curses once and for all, so you can retire to live happily ever after with your wife… though you’re keeping your sword and armor just in case a new adventure awaits…

That’s fantasy > sword and sorcery. Your promises are about action, adventure, wrongs righted, evil defeated, and heroic victories.

And no, just because you throw a wisecracking rogue in as a sidekick doesn’t make it a comedy.

Figure out what you are promising, and you know your audience. Target that audience, and keep your promises, and they will enjoy it and want more.

Deliver the wrong thing, or change your promises, and you get the “sequels that suck” syndrome.

B. Cover Art and Blurbs on Genre target.

Not only does your story have to deliver, you have to get it to the right readers in the first place. Make sure your cover art attracts the right readers. When a plant blooms, it doesn’t matter how lovely the petals are, if a flower doesn’t have any scent, it won’t attract a moth that searches at night by smell. (Yes, this is why night-blooming flowers tend to smell more strongly than day-blooming ones.)

Then make sure your blurb also makes the right promises.

C. And if you don’t do it right?

Negative word of mouth is a thing, too. You can actually infer that directly from sales – if you put a lot of effort into sales, and you get no conversion to buying, then you need to be better at selling, and possibly your tools of ad copy, blurb, cover art…

But if you’re selling book one, and nobody’s buying book 2, and there are no sales outside of direct links from your advertising? That indicates a problem with the product. People may still be talking about it, but not in the way that generates interest in getting it.

Note that no matter how much Disney got out the street teams and paid critics to swear it was the best thing since sliced bread, nobody went back to watch The Acolyte again, and they actively recommended not watching it to their friends.

If you have no repeat customers, it’s time to take a long, hard look at the promises you’re making, the promises you’re fulfilling, how well you’re doing it, and the audience you’ve targeted.

If you have six books out that are doing okay, and one book out that has a 1.5 star rating, angry reviews, and no sell-through… you may want to pull that book. It’s up to you whether you want to edit and re-release, or quietly trunk it, but there’s no law saying that it has to stay on the market once published.

…Okay, very tired now, so cutting this off for the night.

Summary:
Get Better. Once you have done that, as the shampoo bottle says, rinse and repeat. This isn’t a one-time thing, this is an ongoing process.

And the more you make readers delighted to read you, the more you give them what they want both in amount of product and in the product being very clear if it’s what they want, and then fulfilling that, the more they will go tell other people that they had a happy experience, and you’ll get those mysterious sales out of nowhere that just happen without a direct and easy link to an advertisement or other action you took.

Which is far, far better than chasing That One Weird Trick or the Hot New Marketing Tip.