Category Archives: MARKETING

by | August 13, 2017 · 2:00 am

KENP, Click Farms, Overdrive, and Hand-selling at AMA-Con

First, a couple notes on things that have been happening in the field since last column:
1. KENP 3.0 – Normally Amazon’s big changes to KU come in July, but this year it came in August. While there was much sturm und drang, really, there doesn’t seem to be much appreciable change from 2.0 for regular indies. The KENP page counts shrunk slightly, to align closer to true page counts when the story’s in paper. The rest appears to be on the back end, invisible to us, mostly targeted at click farms and bought reviews.

2. Speaking of click farms, several indies have recently reported their accounts being locked / books taken off sale after buying “advertising” with a “guaranteed number of readers.” You know that picture of Batman slapping Robin? Yeah, picture that. Here’s how NOT to get your account locked and books delisted:
A.) You cannot guarantee buyers ethically. If buyers or readers are guaranteed, that means you’re paying a click farm to run a program on a laptop slaved to a bunch of stolen iphones, each loaded to an Amazon account, “borrowing” and “reading” them. Unless you’re paying a click farm in North Korea, in which case it’s a poor schmuck pacing down a table, manually finger-swiping every iphone.
B.) If you can’t sign up for their mailing list, it’s a click farm. Real promoters want everybody to sign up for their lists, so they can grow. Click farms say they have a list, but if it’s not obvious and easy to find, then it’s a lie.
C.) If they don’t have a website, it’s a click farm. ESPECIALLY if their only presence is a “closed facebook group.” Again, if they’re not soliciting more people to join them, they’re not right.
D.) If it’s too good to be true, it ain’t true. It’s more likely to be this: https://kotaku.com/inside-chinese-click-farms-1795287821

3. Draft2Digital is now able to load books on OverDrive – yes, that means Draft2Digital can now get your ebooks into a library. However, it’s not all wine and roses, and “can” is not the same as “will.” The comments at Passive Voice are illuminating: http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2017/08/draft2digital-adds-overdrive-to-the-fold/

And now, on marketing in the flesh:

The North Texas Writer’s Association, also called the Bugscuffle Shooting & Writing Club, ran a booth at Ama-Con up in Amarillo last Weekend. This means JL Curtis, Peter Grant, Lawdog, and myself caravaned up and Alma Boykin met up with us for the booth setup. We then spent two days hawking all our books (and the night inbetween, Jim & I got some sleep while LawDog & Peter were both furiously typing away on their latest books. LawDog’s “Africa & Other Stories” is now out for sale, and Peter’s “King’s Champion” is out to beta readers.)

If there’s anything more painful than an introvert trying to hawk their wares, it’s five introverts trying to hawk their wares. Fortunately, I have plenty of sales training, and everyone else has some “dealing with public” training. So Alma and I wore our spiffy dressy clothes (She went Edwardian, I went ren faire & steampunky with exterior corsetry), attracting eyes and cameras, and the guys took turns pitching in on sales. And we had a bowl with mints and bouncy balls, which attracted younger kids (and their parents, dragged along).

It was excellent at distilling books down to their essence. Jim’s Gray Man series quickly became “Modern westerns, with cowboys versus drug smugglers!” and Alma’s Alexi’s Tales became “Urban fantasy, but with Russian mythology instead! …And a texting cat!”

Interesting divide: People over 40 bought books, and people under 40 wanted to know if it was in ebook. We sold just enough physical books to cover table rent, but not enough to cover hotel, food, and time off work. If we do this again, we’ll have book cards (cover, blurb, QR code & URL to book on Amazon) for the ones on sale, as well as the ones not there!

Also, people may pick up the entire series at once (That happened twice with Jim’s series), especially if you take credit card. (Square worked fine.) So, bring bags! We ruthlessly dumped Office Depot supplies (sharpies for autographing, pre-printed business and book cards, books stand boxes, etc.) in order to present the bag to the happy customer who’d just bought stuff. On Day 2, Alma brought a handful of grocery bags, and life was better!

However, if you don’t have book 1 of a series, people will look interested, and then put the book back down. Most casual readers do not want to start in the middle of the series. I was really kicking myself for not having book one of everything there – or a card with book one to point them toward Amazon.

(I don’t have a good feel how we did on ebook sales. For one, LawDog is through a publisher, so I can’t get those numbers, they may be buried in the tail of a sucessful release anyway. For another, I’d have to get the other 4 of us to all check our KDP accounts and check in. I should do that. Instead I spent two days not talking to anyone, because I had used up all the extro in my vert, and needed to recharge.)

You can see our table setup here: https://oldnfo.org/2017/08/06/ama-con-update/

And for new releases this week, we have two!

Tom Rogneby has taken his talents into noir, with a few hints of supernatural in the background, with The BoogeyMan:

Martin Shelby is The BoogeyMan, a private investigator and fixer for folks who get into trouble too tough and too strange for the police. People only bring him the jobs that require the body of a linebacker and the face of a gargoyle.

Now, he’s been handed a job that pays double, but that can only mean double the danger.

But when the things that go bump in the night look under their bed for HIM, how hard can it be? To The BoogeyMan, it’s just another job.
—

Alma Boykin has released hilarious and lighthearted stories of witches and wizards dealing with the parts nobody ever mentions in urban fantasies: taking your familiar to the vet when it’s a 100-lb skunk, the IRS won’t let you deduct robes as professional expenses, and typos in the spellbook’s latest edition mean that students get some spectacular results from the example!

Familiar Tales, by Alma Boykin!

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Filed under BY THE MAD GENII, FYNBOSSPRESS, MARKETING, PROMOTION, WRITING: PUBLISHING

by | August 12, 2017 · 7:41 am

Breaking into New Markets

This last week I did something I have meant to do for a while, but haven’t had the time to contemplate doing: I paid for advertising, and coordinated a big promotional push for one of my books.

Most of my marketing is near-passive. I have my blog, and my social media presence, but I don’t use them to push my books in people’s faces. I’m a big fan of content marketing, and I prefer to have people want my books without me jumping up and down shouting “I write books! You must buy!” because that will turn them off and I’ll lose readers rather than gain them in the long term. It’s the project of years, not days or months. Peter Grant and I sat down shortly after we first met, along with our respective spouses (and I’m going to interject a big veering-off-track here and say that both of us are blessed in our spouses. You all know Dorothy as a marketing guru and a writer in her own right, but those years ago she wasn’t yet writing, she always has been brilliant about marketing, though. My own husband is the Evil Muse. I don’t think I need to say more!). During the course of that conversation he told me his own strategy for marketing, and it was a long-term one – spend five years, give or take – blogging regularly, then release his first book. It worked beautifully, and I have been following in his footsteps to some extent (I had already been blogging, but on his advice took it up to a daily blog and much more regular than it had been. Which was a huge challenge during college).

Above and beyond the slow audience growth a blog affords, I had decided a few months ago that I wanted to do some aggressive market growth and actually shell out money for marketing. Before I started, I had to figure out some things: What form of promotion I wanted to do, what audiences I wanted to reach, and what my budget was going to be.

The first thing I want to make clear is: I was not spending money for an immediate ROI. This is, like my blog, a long game. I could – and still may at some point – buy ads. Targeting an ad is a tricky business. You can buy ads on Facebook, on Amazon, on Project Wonderful… heck, you could buy ads in your local newspaper or TV channel, if you’re willing to really shell out the dough. I opted not to buy ads, not having the time nor the inclination to sit down and design one, research where would be best to buy eyeball time… and most important, because I don’t think they work. Advertising slots are the opposite of permission marketing. There is a reason I use adblockers and FBPurity, and I do not doubt that my readers use those, too. Which means buying an ad is nearly akin to making confetti out of my money and throwing it off a bridge. So….

Where to find readers who want to read a book?

Book promotion sites and emails, of course. BookBub is the big one, but when I looked at the cost for the genre I wanted to promote in, I decided that although it might be interesting to experiment with another time, it was out of my budget for this particular push. So I started looking at the smaller ones, the ones I’d used before, like Fussy Librarian and EbookHounds. There are a lot of them. Dorothy Grant was good enough to send me a link to a list of them, and between ones I’ve used before and that list, I picked out a total of six I wanted to try, and they fit into my budget.

Which brings me to that. I set a very modest budget for this promotion. I wanted to spend no more than $100. I spent $89, placing my book in eight different places. One was a freebie. One was a freebie, but didn’t run my book, which is what happens when you’re doing promo sometimes, so I didn’t sweat it.

Choose what book you want to promote wisely. If you only have one or two books published, do not do this. I did this knowing that I had a complete trilogy to sell, by giving away the first book in the series. In addition, I had a new release in the same genre (although not the same sub-genre) which I thought might attract the readers who liked my promo book well enough to read the whole trilogy and start looking for my other books. So I picked Pixie Noir to giveaway through Amazon, offering it for free for a total of five days. I chose to schedule the promo over a weekend, although interestingly the highest day was Friday.

Pixie Noir Giveaway
August 3 August 4 August 5 August 6 August 7 Promo cost
Fussy Librarian x $6.00
Ebook hounds x $45.00
MHI Promo post x $0.00
Awesomegang newsletter x $10.00
FreeDiscountedBooks.com x $8.00
The Kindle Book Review x X X x x $10.00
AccordingtoHoyt promo post
       x   $0.00
Daily Bookworm x $10.00
total cost $89.00

This ranking would climb, but there is the first stage…

 

It would peak at #2 in Paranormal and Urban, but I couldn’t get a screenshot at the time. Still!

Over the five days, I gave away a total of 4394 books. For me, this is four times the total of any previous free book drive I’ve done. On Friday there was a huge spike of 2637 books given away, which I attribute to the book having been pushed up the charts at Amazon the day before, and the momentum continuing into Friday and pushing it up the charts even more, which meant more eyeballs on it at Amazon… and so on. It was sort of exciting to watch! Saturday I left on a four-day trip, so I wasn’t able to watch as closely, but books given away did taper off and finally come to a stop. So… over four thousand new readers, right? Wrong.

The peril of giving a book away, rather than offering it at a steep discount, is that people will scoop up free books, not read them initially, and then forget they own them. Personally I have about 780 ebooks on my Kindle, and that’s not my full ebook library. I know there are books in there I got free, forgot, and will likely never read. Amazon has really fallen off the ball on offering readers a way to curate and organize their own libraries, but I digress. Even if I could create a collection of ‘books I got free’ it would be a lower to-read priority than the books of Siberian and Alaskan folktales and mythology I’ve been reading for research. So my point is that giving away free books is not a direct one-to-one correlation of a book and a set of eyeballs on that book. Still, some will read PN, and like it, and I know this because…

That’s the graph of Kindle Unlimited reads across all my titles. You’ll note that it was doing ok, not great, up until the giveaway was a couple of days old. Now, this is not what I’d call a peak. Sales are up, for the other titles in the series, but not dramatically so. I was surprised by the KU increase, I was not at all surprised that the sales weren’t – yet – up. This is probably going to take another week to see it play out (and I’ll do a small follow-up next week as well, along with another topic).

If – when – I do this again, I won’t buy the highest level promotion from Ebookhounds. It wasn’t worth that much more money than the others. I’d also start working on this further out – I wanted to do this over the first weekend in August after releasing Snow in Her Eyes during the first week of August, but I didn’t plan ahead very far. It can be done, but it would be better to start researching and planning a month out. The Fussy Librarian and Kindle Book Review between them accounted for 730 freebies on that first day, so they were well worth the fees and planning in tandem, as I think that pushed the ranks up enough to create momentum at Amazon itself.

Overall I’m pleased, and will do this again – but not soon. If I do another promo, it will be a discounted book. But I don’t have a series to do that with, so I’ll wait until I have either the rest of the Tanager series complete, or perhaps the next of the Children of Myth series. Both of those will take me a while! In the meantime, I’ll be watching my sales and reviews to see what the long-term payout on this modest investment is. For one thing, in this last week I have seen three new reviews pop up for Pixie Noir, all of them from new readers. On a book that has been out for four years, that’s pretty good.

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by | July 22, 2017 · 6:30 am

On Demand

As a Purveyor of Fine Publications, I have to be constantly aware of how the public is consuming media. It’s not a surprise, I think, to those who visit the Mad Genius Club to hear that consumption of entertainment is in the throes of another sea-change, and has been for a while. You will still, however, run across those who wonder who moved their cheese, or who think that consuming media in one way is the best way and no other way is valid. Friends, we cannot think like that. We have to remain nimble, and ahead of the curve, or at the very least just behind it. We cannot afford to remain at the flat bottom shaking our fists at the wave telling it to stay off our lawn. Not only is the general public not interested in our lawn, they have moved past lawns into xeriscaping and polyculture and are wondering why we’re still insisting on that boring old monoculture of grass. Grass doesn’t do anything, except dry up and get brown when it stops raining every August.

I published a blog post yesterday – and how long have blogs been around? I mean gosh, I remember publishing the school newspaper on the stinky printer in the principal’s office and if a paper jam happened we were flat out of luck. And it wasn’t that long ago fanzines were mimeographed, and now they’re on efanzine and delivered  conveniently to your email (I highly recommend Uncle Timmy’s The Revenge of Hump Day, by the way). But I digress. I published a thing, about books and how cranky I was about certain trends (speaking as a reader) and a lively discussion was sparked in the comments and on social media. Time was, you’d have to go to a con to have that many geeky voices chatting on one subject in that time frame.

One of the facets of the conversation was about Kindle Unlimited. I know we’re all familiar with it here, and have discussed the pros and cons as both authors and readers, but I still find that I have to explain it when I bring it up on social media, and there are a lot of misconceptions out there surrounding it. One seems to be that if a person reads in KU, the author isn’t compensated – we are. We might not get as much as we would were the reader to buy the books, but frankly I understand limits to book spending money, and I’m happy to get a little money than none at all. I suppose if the reader really wanted to support an author for their work (or for, say, their nonfiction outside of paid-work) they can look at the author’s website for a tip button like I have on mine in the upper right corner. Ahem. Or they can read and return the book on KU and then buy it outright. We get paid twice!

Kindle Unlimited, I explained yesterday, is like Netflix, for books. It is, in short, part of the new trend in media consumption. On Demand.

Consumers demand what they want to watch, read, or play right now. They don’t want to wait, they don’t want to sort through what’s on the shelf of the bookstore or video shoppe, and settle for second choices (or third, or fourth, or…). They don’t want to check and see if it’s in the budget. And they aren’t too concerned about re-consumption, if you think about it. Netflix offers the ability to binge-watch a TV show (check out Father Brown if you love crime and humor), a series of movies(Captain America is the best superhero), or discover stuff you didn’t know was out there (Australian crime shows are a lot of fun). As Netflix became more and more popular Hulu came on the scene. You can now purchase passes to most TV channels on-demand. The days of having to subscribe to a $200 a month cable package are gone, folks. And it’s the same way for books. You could buy all the titles you wanted individually, or you can get a reading pass subscription to something like KU (I haven’t tried the others out there, like Scribd) and binge-read to your heart’s content.

I think that’s the way of the future. I watch my kids, and I see them reading. A lot. Not always what I’m coaxing them to read, but they read massive amounts of fanfiction. My Junior Mad Scientist showed me her open tabs on her laptop the other day, and um, yeah. She’s my kid. I didn’t know you could have that many open tabs without crashing the browser. I strongly suspect that as she gets older and her tastes more sophisticated, she will move (as I did, around her age) to a different reading format that isn’t so… unreliable. However, I don’t think that she’ll move on to bookstores and libraries, at least not as I knew them as a teen and young woman. I suspect her world will look a lot more like on-demand access to books, movies, and games. She already has a Steam account, for videogames, as does her brother. I have the admin rights to both, so I can give them games (and see how much they are playing). She has access to my Kindle Library and I can buy her books… like Howl’s Moving Castle by Dianna Wynne Jones (I got a dual SQUEE! over this one. My girls had seen the movie and didn’t know there was a book).

I appreciate and understand the love for paper books. Heck, last week I was posting glamour shots of some of my dead tree collection here on this very blog, and I’m likely to do so again. (Pulps, anyone? LOL) The reality is that paper is dead, and in more ways than just one. E-ink readers, which I remember reading about a mere 15 years ago as being novelties presented at some Japanese tech convention, are not only common, but relatively cheap. Tablets that can do more than my first computer are so ubiquitous I’ve given one to my 11 yo son, repeatedly. I read on the computer, on my tablet, on my phone… and rarely, in paper. I know I’m not an outlier in this.

So I put all my novels and most of my short works in KU. For the moment, that restricts me to Amazon, but frankly my sales outside Amazon were not sufficient to offset the ‘reads’ I’m paid for through KU. It appears that my monthly royalties are about a 50/50 split between purchases and KU reads. It’s been well worth the move to having my work in KU. And as a reader, it’s great to have access to on-demand books.

 

 

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by | July 11, 2017 · 9:05 am

Oops, it’s Tuesday

You’ll pardon me if I’m a bit scattered this morning. The past week has been interesting — yes, that’s the word. Nothing serious has happened but nothing has happened on schedule either. The writing and editing have been suffering as a result. Between company — which I loved but, damn, I don’t love the prep for having people over — my neighbor doing something in his back yard that has required 3 days of jackhammering, any attempt to concentrate has been futile. Add to that the fact the installers arrived at 1830 last night to put in my storm doors — and couldn’t finish because they’d never installed a door like one of mine — and I’m tired and frustrated. Again, not conducive to writing.

Yet, I have to write. I also have to figure out why I’m having issues converting a book to put up for pre-order. Oh, the life of a writer. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.

While trying to figure out what I wanted to write about today, I came across this post from Bookbaby Blog. It asks the age-old question, when should I publish my book? It’s something many indie authors angst about. There is so much information out there, much of it contradictory, about when a book should come out. Sure, a lot of us follow the simple rule of “publish it once it’s done.” But there really is more to it than that.

I agree with a lot of what Bookbaby has to say in the post. Now is the time to publish your work. Don’t let it sit there gathering virtual dust. The only caveat Bookbaby gives, and it is one I agree with, is that the holiday season isn’t the best time for a new indie author to release a book. Yes, it is a time when many of us are buying books, either for ourselves or as gifts. For the latter, most of us don’t want to risk giving a book we aren’t sure the recipient will enjoy. So we tend to go for authors we know they read or who we know write in much the same way as those authors our friend or family member likes. Newbies aren’t even on the radar.

But that leaves the rest of the year.

Now, I know a lot of us suffer what we call the summer doldrums when it comes to sales. Reading the linked post had me thinking about that and then nodding. Summer is when a lot of readers are looking for what can be euphemistically called beach reads. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be fluffy romances, even though that is often what we see the traditional publishers pushing at this time of year. But escape seems to be the theme most wanted. For the summer months, Bookbaby suggests we follow what the trads do and publish books focusing on adventure, fantasy and travel.

It makes sense, especially if you are marketing your books properly. Why? Because these are the months readers in the U.S. traditionally “escape”. School is out. Families schedule vacations to get away from the pressures of daily life. They don’t want to be reminded of everything they left behind. They want to escape. It’s why movie makers release their blockbuster films during the summer. Escapism is the name of the game.

As indies, that means we are competing with the trads for those precious readers. But we can and often do win. The challenge is making sure we are doing everything the trads are doing when it comes to insuring our books looks as professional as theirs. We also have to make sure our metadata is set up properly so readers can find our books using whatever their favorite search engine is. Sure, we also have to promote (gag, ick). But we can and do grab our share of the market — we just have to work at it.

Something else we have to look at is the timing of our books if they have a certain theme. A book where your main character runs away for the summer can come out any time. However, a Christmas themed book probably needs to come out close to the holiday season. That’s not a hard and fast rule. After all, the first rule of indie publishing is not to sit on your work. However, there are a number of readers who, as we get close to the holiday season, want holiday themed books. They will risk buying an indie author they’ve never heard of if the book conforms to the holiday theme and if the blurb and sample look interesting. That said, they don’t search those books out at other times of the year. So, weight that along with all the other factors when writing a holiday themed book.

A couple of other thoughts — and yes, I know I’m all over the place today. Sorry — about when to bring out your books. Whether you are writing a series or stand-alone books, you need to have a publishing schedule. Sure, you can alter it because life happens. But you need to stick as close to it as possible. Why? Because your readers need to know they can count on you to continue to produce in a regular fashion. Going hand-in-hand with this is something I am seeing with my own work. If you can put out a new title (and it doesn’t have to be a novel. It can be a short story.) every three months, you may be able to keep your sales from taking that dramatic drop they seem to do all too often a few months after a new novel comes out.

As for what day of the week you should bring your books out on, you can do what some of the better selling indies and trads do and publish on the first and third Tuesday of each month. I don’t always do it on those particular Tuesdays but I do try to come out on Tuesday. Why? Because most folks are too busy getting back in the swing of the workweek on Monday to worry about buying a new book. Tuesday lets you grab them and you have the rest of the week to remind them you have a new title out and come get it for the weekend. You also avoid the end of the week “all I want is for the weekend it get here” attitude so many of us have. Will it work for everyone? I don’t know but it has seemed to help my sales.

And, joy of joys — not, it looks like they are about to start the jackhammering again. So, before that happens, let me close this out. As an indie, you are in command of your professional life. Do your research and don’t be afraid of releasing your book when it’s ready. Push the baby out and start working on the next one.

Until next week!

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Filed under AMANDA, MARKETING, WRITING: PUBLISHING

by | July 8, 2017 · 7:01 am

Writing to Market

This is a perennial author concern. Will what I am writing sell? Will lots of people want it? How do I know what the market wants?

One of the fantastic things about writing Indie is that you are freed from strictly writing to Market. In theory, there are readers for everything out there. It’s just… Can you find them?  As an independent, you have the freedom to publish and look. To test the market. Traditionally published? Not so much. There you are at the mercy of what the marketing gurus hired by a massive company are telling that company. Or, from a small-press publisher, no research, just riding coat-tails. I’m unkind – there are small presses that set up niche markets. And there is Baen, who carved out a market from the ashes of science fiction after message fiction burned it down.

We here at the Mad Genius Club tend to be a bit insulated from the traditional writing world. Other than the Passive Voice and Kathryn Kristine Rusch’s business blog, I rarely look at other writing advice outlets. For good reason.

Their view of writing is, well…

Pessimistic.

The author of this article describes what the interior of a magazine written by writers, for writers, looks like. I think the readers here will find it a stark contrast to the general good humor and helpfulness of the MGC. “Whyman said, “I had a lot of questions in my mind about what would happen to fiction and how we would go on working. Does it really matter now?” Luckily we don’t have to wait to find out. Seltzer informs us that Whyman launched a new international online journal “intended to foster artistic expression in the face of political repression and fear.”

Which brings me to the other problem I have with so many writing advice outlets. Their view of writing is:

Expensive

In the article I linked above, a flood of writing workshops, conferences, retreats, contests (pay to play, natch), and MFA programs are offered. Boy and girls, ladies and gentlemen, ants and squirrels… These are little more than elaborate marketing ploys (autocorrect, ploy is SO a word!). But not to help you market your work – unless of course you intend to sell your work to other writers who are desperately trying to be the next big thing – no, in this case to market TO you, the writer. And can you blame them? Their too-precious lit-fic doesn’t sell, so they have to afford their lattes and avocado toast somehow. But you do not have to buy into their world of desperation.

Here in this blog we bring you daily articles about writing, marketing, nitty-gritty how-to articles about formatting and covers and more. Rather than the magazine he references at 9.95 a year (such a bargain, darling! Oops, let me wipe up that sarcasm I dripped) we’re always free. And we answer comments, we write posts in response to specific questions… Heck, we ask you all what you want help with, we don’t assume you’re angsting over some political polemic and needing encouraging to keep writing. Real writers don’t need coddling. You can’t help writing: it oozes out from every pore. Except on the days you get blocked. We’re not perfect, we Mad Geniuses. In fact, you might say we are insanely optimistic.

I can live with that. My market doesn’t consist of the literary darlings who buy writing magazines anxious for reassurance that the Resistance will go on. Resisting against what, I’m not sure. Lack of sales? Because my market is real people who read real books. So I can afford to take an hour a week writing a free blog post helping other writers out, and more time answering comments.

Write to your market: readers. Don’t abuse them, and they will come back for more. Amuse them, delight them, make them connect with your characters and cry. Arrest their attention with your cover, hook them into opening the book with your blurb, and they will read. Further, they will tell friends and family and even strangers about your book… That’s marketing of the finest kind.

 

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by | July 2, 2017 · 2:00 am

How to Successfully not Market your Book: Or Doing it All Wrong (Almost) By Alma Boykin

Alma Boykin here. I have been successfully getting in my own way and not marketing (fiction) books since December 2012. In the process, I’ve managed to make pretty much every mistake you can do as an indie author, bar one. Dorothy Grant, Cedar Sanderson, and others have written a lot about how to market your books and stories. So here’s a quick guide on how to successfully not market your book, thus ensuring that only the most selective, discriminating, or lucky readers will ever find it.

1. Have absolutely no online presence of any form other than an e-mail address and occasionally chiming in on certain websites. This was my technique after I released A Cat Among Dragons in December 2012. No social media, no blog, no web-site, nothing. Just write and release and see what happens. I was pretty successful at not selling the book. Today, summer of 2017, this technique would be even more successful since so many more people have begun publishing their work.

2. No social media presence ever. I did give in and start a blog, Cat Rotator’s Quarterly,(Alma! I added the blog name and link! You should promote it! -Ed.) in February 2014, but I have no Twitter, Facebook, G+, LiveJournal, Snapchat, Pinterest, or whatever other social media platforms are out there. This is another great way not to tell people about your books. What they don’t know about, then can’t find. HOWEVER! If used properly, social media can help not-sell your work. Some of the best ways are to overload anyone who follows you with near-daily announcements about “Only three years, two months, and a day and a half until the release of [book]!” or “Hey, boy my book! Buy my book!” The more often you remind people to buy your work, the more they will drop your feed and flee the company of your works. Think of it as the electronic version of the whiney 5-year-old in the back seat asking “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? I gotta go. Are we there yet?”

2a. Make it hard to find your books on your web-site. You can use white on black text, busy backgrounds that readers have to read over, page tabs that are hard to read… The options are nearly endless (see the blog link above).

3. Ignore the current conventions for cover design. Let’s say you wrote a dark romance novel with a little tasteful D/s in the plot. Sure, use that great landscape photo you saw on Pinterest for the cover art! The cheerful yellow and red flowers in the meadow under soft, puffy white clouds in a blue sky will do an excellent job of leading to very surprised readers once they get your book and open the cover. Another option that seems to help not sell books is to cram a cast of thousands (think some of the art-by-the-yard historical paintings from the 1600s-1800s) cover onto your book. Oh yes, the one that looked so good on your desktop monitor? Go for it. Thumbnail, schlumbnail, it’s your book and your cover so why not? Genre and designs are challenges to be overcome, not guidelines to work within.

4. Don’t market. Do not use BookBub, E-book Soda, the Amazon marketing tools, link exchanges with other writers, a mailing list, nothing. Do not tell people your book has been released. To paraphrase Fight Club, “The first rule of Not Selling the Book is Don’t Talk about the Book.” What people don’t know about, they can’t buy. If you truly feel compelled, put up a small blog post, without links to your sales platforms, saying “Um, yeah, so I just released the next book.” Granted, if your sales criteria and genre do not meet the requirements for things like BookBub, you have a major advantage in not marketing, but if by unhappy chance you do manage to get 50 decent reviews and have a sweet romance releasing during Romance Week, avoid marketing sites like the plague. The unmentioned book doesn’t sell, which is your goal, right?

5. Ignore genre trends. Dang it, you are going to write the next great angsty vampire teen romance. So what if everyone says that subgenre is no longer selling? Or you have a Fifty Shades-ish idea for a romance between a billionaire businessman who “knows the ropes,” ahem, so to speak, and the city restaurant code inspector who fails the kitchen in his private club? Do it. Don’t let anyone tell you that a market is saturated. The more saturated the market, the lower the odds of readers seeing your book on the real or electronic shelves. That’s your goal, remember?

6. Ignore pleas and offers to alpha read or edit your noble, pristine work. It is perfect just as it is, fresh off the printer (or screen). Those are not tyops, those are just alternate spellings that have not been discovered yet. And formatting is for wimps.

7. Wait until the middle of the series to release novel-length works and to offer them in print. Nothing chases away readers like finding that the first dead tree book is #7 in the series.

8. Release series out of order, although this technique is not as effective as some others. The last Colplatschki book (#8) will actually be the first in in-series chronological order. Which leads to …

9. Allow bad reviews to determine what you release and if you “finish” a series. Although this may fall more into “How to Chase Off Readers” than strictly not selling books. This also falls into traditional publishing’s bailiwick, since they are very good about stopping series in the middle if the publisher’s lack of marketing has hurt sales of the earlier books. Learn from the Big 7, er 6, ah 5. They have spent the past few years laboring hard to become masters of not marketing.

10. Ignore release dates of other books. Let’s say Brandon Sanderson, Brad Thor, Larry Correia, Michael Z. Williamson, and Stephen King and Nora Roberts and Danielle Steele are all going to release books August 1-4. Of course this is the best time to launch Angsty Teen Vampires from Tacoma! No one will have any money left to buy your book, and they won’t see it because of the full-page ads and Amazon sales blitz and big posters at Barnes and Noble. That’s a great way to not sell books.

I’ve also written so cross-genre that no one is quite certain how to categorize or market my books. I’ve written alt-history that is closer to secret history except for the heavy sci-fi elements, but that has so much actual historical background that it almost needs footnotes in spots (almost). I’m going to release a YA (but it’s not, really) in September that is sci-fi but also coming of age and exploration and school-drama and planetary exploration and hunting and oh heck, YOU figure out how to sell it. And I released a steampunk story, Language of the Land, that lacks a bunch of the “things you have to have to call it steampunk.” And urban fantasy set in Colorado and rural Kansas that includes a texting cat and Russian mythology but no elves, vampires, werewolves, or the other now-seemingly-standard UF elements. (Links added. Would it kill you to mention your book names and add them now and then? If people are interested, let them know where to go! -Ed.)

The few things I’ve not done yet to not sell books include getting into hissing fights on-line, insulting readers or saying that if readers disagree with my politics they should stop buying my books. I’ve noticed that the latter technique seems to work very, very well for not selling books, but it does imply that you had readers to begin with. And I’ve never, ever gone after anyone who left a bad review of my work. Even I don’t want to replace the author of You Know Which Book on the Marketers’ Wall of Shame.

And yet, despite my valiant efforts at not marketing, people still find my books, like them, and tell others. If I marketed, I’d do better. I know this. I have lots and lots of excuses for not marketing. I marketed my non-fiction. And I survived, and sold.
But if you want to not market, just follow my advice above, and you too will successfully not market and not sell books. Unless people like your books. I can’t help you then.

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by | May 21, 2017 · 2:00 am

Managing Viewer Expectations with social media

No, not reader expectations in books. Y’all are authors, and there are better authors than me to talk about that. Let’s talk about your online presence. How much social media do you have to have?

Well, actually, you don’t.

There, I said it. It’s heretical in the age of Everything Always Online!, but it’s true. There are some authors who have an almost entirely offline presence. There are some who barely check in on one or two forums, and their websites were last updated in 1998, and still they sell. This doesn’t mean they don’t market; it means any marketing they do may be in person, or by selling short stories to magazines and anthologies, or by placing ads in trade magazines with their target market. One lady has almost no online presence for her cookbook, but when she shows up at a gun show with a gingham checked tablecloth and plates of lemon bars as free samples, recipe is on page such-and-such, she sells gangbusters.

Anyway, your online footprint. First, the most extreme case: don’t be That Gal On Twitter, the one who hadn’t published yet but was sure Larry Correia was a total loser, because she had way more twitter followers than him. *migraine salute* Yes, they exist. And folks like that are a useful lesson that having a million followers doesn’t pay the bills.

Second: the writer who has a website for the planned sweeping book series, a presence on twitter, facebook, google +, you name it, he’s there. He’s poured 500,000 words into facebook arguments in the last month alone! But nobody’s buying the one book he has out, despite spending 12-15 hours a day building up his online presence! What marketing trick is he missing? *full frontal facepalm* Write the next book. Seriously, get off mytwitface, and write the next book.

Here’s where viewer expectations start to come into play. You see, if you’re active all over mytwitface, and suddenly you disappear off to go write the next book, two things are going to happen to the people who follow you, and you get to decide which is worse: most people won’t even notice you’re gone, and some people will constantly try to drag you back because they miss your content.

If you could steel yourself to taking a full week off mytwitface, without some Dramatic Announcement that you’re going offline, you’d find when you got back that the majority of folks never even noticed. Social media platforms are designed to make the user feel like they’re drinking from a firehose of content, and they don’t notice when something’s missing.

Personally, I’ve varied facebook from daily to once a month, and people don’t notice when I’m gone; they only notice when I post and they see it. So no, you really, really don’t have to be on them as much as you think you do.

As for the people who try to drag you back? That tells you a lot about what kind of content you’re known for. “We miss pictures of the lambs and how the dogs are doing!” vs. “Hey! This guy is wrong on the internet! Let’s you and him fight!” Neither one of these is bad, just different – but they are different, and let you know a lot about how you’re known. Think about what sort of time, emotions, and energy you want to put into that.

On your online persona: Alice Cooper has, when mentoring young musicians, been extremely firm about the need to seperate your stage persona and your private life and sense of self. If you don’t, you’ll burn out and crash hard. Turns out it’s true with social media personas, too, when you start performing for the public.

I have an acquaintance who’s known for being Angry On The Internet. She’s constantly called to come pour vitriol on trolls, knuckleheads, Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, whatever. I’ve seen her on a slow day when there’s no one to be furious at… and she literally was reaching out to people, trying to find something, anything to be vitriolic at, and getting desperate, because her online persona was her true self, and she couldn’t cope without being furious. Now, that works for her, but I sat and wondered what the long term mental, emotional, and physical damage has to be of living All Drama, All The Time. (Other than teenagers, and even those bouncing balls of out-of-control hormones manage a lot of chill and happy moments.)

So think about what you’re known for, and what toll that takes, and if that’s what you want. If you don’t… change it! You’re not dead, you can too change.

Third online footprint: the daily blogger. Blogs work at optimum for crowd draw if they have new daily content 2-3 times a day, to keep people coming back. This is, however, not feasible for most people. (Even Mad Genius Club is only a daily blog, and that’s with all our contributors writing!)

Generating enough means finding or creating content, and that can take hours of a day itself, to the point that the blog rapidly becomes a chore instead of a joy. Several ways to make it much easier are to build a buffer, mine your archives, acquire contributors, have cross-blog conversations, and grow commenters.

If your viewers expect new content daily (or multiple times a day), it’s just not human to expect that you’ll never have disruptions to your schedule – so generate your content ahead of time, and schedule it to appear on a regular basis. (I am, for instance, writing this early last week, and scheduling it so it’ll post while I’m busy dealing with a funeral.)

If you have sufficient archives built up, feel free to mine them for material: audience turnover & new audience growth ensures that something three years old will be brand new to the viewers who just started coming regularly in the last 6 months. (Whether you label this as old material or not is up to you: I’ve seen it done both ways, but haven’t yet talked a daily blogger into running an A/B test to see which generates more traffic. I suspect it’s when it’s not mentioned as being a rerun.)

Other contributors, often called guests posts, take some of the content-generation burden off your shoulders. Even aggregators like The Passive Voice has people with keys to the blog to manage comments and contribute posts while the blog host is on vacation. The main drawbacks of guest posting are that your fans come for your material, so traffic goes down proportionally with the number of guest posts run, and getting / filtering guest posting offers appropriate to your blog. On the bright and shiny, hey, free material your viewers will like, and driving eyeballs to nifty people who ought to get more exposure and sales. Can be awesome!

This, by the way, is where “blog tours” come in. Originally conceived as guest posts across several high-traffic targeted audience blogs, they can work… as dashing out a bunch of posts and then posting them in sequence to low-traffic blogs that are nothing but guest posts, they’re hard work and heartbreak.

Cross-blog conversations are one of the great things about writing blogs online: it’s a chance to take somebody else’s blog post, and explore it in depth on your own, then engage in an extended conversation with them. I’ve seen a bunch of first responder blogs do a round-robin where they came up with a 911 call scenario, and then each person wrote about the fictional incident as it passed through their part of the first responder world – police dispatch, police, EMS, ER Doc, hospital nurse – from both a technical “Here’s how it goes down” and a emotional impact on the responders, and on the community, level. Don’t be afraid to engage in the social part of social media, and link to others for more than just an excerpt. More than one daily blogger maintains a sidebar of folks they find awesome and interesting – and if life happens, they can post “No free ice cream today – go check out the folks on the sidebar.”

Finally, growing commenters: a few minor notes.

first, the shorter and smaller your comment box and comment space, the shorter the comments your audience will tend to leave. The bigger the comment box / comment space, the longer people tend to be. The longer the blog post or comment area, the more in-depth discussions tend to get, and the lower-drama they get. Twitter’s 120 characters is optimized for bumper-sticker philosophy, and the road rage levels of stupid drama that engenders. Facebook’s promotion of “shorter is better” by putting more than 120 characters below the fold, and increasing font size on shorter updates, again promotes drama at the expense of clarity – by design.

Second, the way to get comments is to ask questions, and to respond yourself in comments. Even then, its’ very hard. And the questions can’t be obvious comment-bait; that doesn’t work when a masseuse is going “If you like the new tattoo, like or favourite this video!”, it doesn’t work on the blog equivalent, either.

Third: moderation in all things. Whether you plan to have a comment section where only sycophants are allowed (I don’t recommend it; it’s generally unhealthy and vicious), or one where anyone can join in, you will need moderation. Because trolls exist – they range from a psychopathic stalker with a fixation on short Asian chicks and some of the worst writing known to man, to paid positions whose job is to show up anytime a product, service, company, or political position is mentioned, and either promote it or denigrate any opposition to it. Neither of these are interested in conversation or growing your web presence, and should be removed from the comment stream. On the other hand, even the best spam filters often catch innocent commenters, and need to be regularly checked.

And yes, this takes time and mental energy. Factor that in to your social media plan.

And when all else fails, manage your viewer expectations with the Big Dramatic Announcement that you’re cutting back, and here’s the new schedule. Make it a manageable schedule for you, and then stick to it! Webcomics still thrive on a M-W-F release schedule (Girl Genius), and some even on a Tue-Thu release. (However, you must stick to the schedule. Nothing kills site traffic faster than inconsistency with updates despite a posted schedule – and kills the discipline and motivation to continue updating!

Accept that you’re going to have a steep traffic hit when you implement, because you will – but again, while eyeballs are important, having books to sell to those eyeballs is far more important than eyeballs alone.

Peter recently did this on his blog, Bayou Renaissance Man – he took his lowest-traffic day, Sunday, and announced it would be a one-post day, focused on music. While it did drive traffic off a cliff on Sunday, it didn’t affect the rest of the week – and he has one day a week now where he can be offline, recuperating and working entirely on other projects.

He’s also, as I type, working on other posts and queuing them up, and there’ll have been a notice that due to death in family, posting will be light and inconsistent. This way, even if we are completely swamped with real life and not near, or paying no attention to, online – the viewers will be informed, happy, and come back when there’s more content.

…

So bottom line? You don’t need nearly as much social media as you think, but if you’re doing a blog, you need consistency and consistently good content to keep people coming back. However, you don’t always need fresh, original content created by you. And no matter what, the most important part is writing the next book.

…

Speaking of the Next book, Tom Rogneby just released Lady of Eyre! Swinging between high fantasy and everyday adventures related in a high fantasy tone (The derby of the pine chargers! Yeah, anybody who’s been a boy scout or a boy scout parent knows where that one’s going…), it pretty awesome. Fair disclaimer: I wrote the blurb. I wrote the blurb because I like the story! I did not write the story – it’s better than if I had done it!
https://www.amazon.com/Lady-Eyre-Minivandians-Tale-Book-ebook/dp/B071HWPNYK/

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