marketing

There’s No Honor In An Unread Book

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

We write for many reasons, but almost always a writer wants someone to read their work. The reader may be themselves because it’s pure self-expression. The reader may be given a book as a gift, as the writer had targeted an audience of friends and family. The reader may be “whoever may like it.”

But either way, writers want their book read, even if it’s just “hey someone liked it.” That means we have to make books findable, it means we have to market them, it means making sure the right audience gets them.

I meet people who avoid marketing their books – not for the lack of time or money (which I understand). Some feel it “lowers” themselves, or is less artistic. Others fear turning into self-promoting jerks or being obsessed with marketing (fears I myself have had before). There were people I’d meet that had these fears about marketing, often a mixture of misguided principle and fear.

I have come to this conclusion.

There is No Honor In An Unread Book.

Books exist for reading. A book’s goal is to record, inspire, interest, help, thrill, whatever. The purpose of a book is to be read by someone.

Your goal is to find the someones and make sure they get it. It could mean buying a hundred copies for your friends so they have your memoir. It could mean a sophisticated marketing campaign. It could mean just throwing money at Amazon ads. But the goal of a book is to be read, and you do yourself no favor as an author not trying to get it into the right hands.

There’s nothing to be afraid of in marketing. Trust me, if you’ve seen what gets published “professionally” you’re probably better than you think. In fact, a book may be not-good but still right for some people.

There’s nothing gained from avoiding marketing, no principle embodied or morality followed by avoiding getting your book into people’s hands. There’s terrible methods, bad ideas, but the basic idea is fine.

I want people to read my books. To be helped, to be thrilled, to learn, to grow. I want to reach out to them and help them. If my writings have flaws, I want to learn.

There’s no honor in an unread book. There’s plenty in reaching your audience.

Steven Savage

Marketing For Self-Published Authors and Artists (March 2019)

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

So as promised, every few months I’m going to update my findings on marketing for indies.  Most of this is oriented towards self-published authors like myself, but a lot of it should help artists too.

The Core Principle: The Web Of Connections

To promote yourself your various activities, giveaways, social media, and so on need to connect and reinforce each other.  If a new book comes out, promote it on your website and give away a few copies in your newsletter.  If you’re speaking on art, give out bookmarks with links to your website.  Everything ties together.

This does make finding what works a bit challenging, so I take these steps:

  • Do what is easy, like cross-posting sales and stuff among my social media.  Hey, it’s easy.  Then I monitor what seems to work.
  • Do what seems rational because let’s face it, this is complicated.  Also see if there’s any useful results that tell you what to do or what not to do.
  • Advance my marketing with small experiments to see what gets results.  Usually that takes a month or two to show, so I tend to do my experiments every month or every other month.
  • Record what I find from above.  What do you think this post is?

Over time you’ll find what works for you, what doesn’t, and how elements interact.  It might help to keep a list like this!

Have A Website

Have a website, period. A website is a place you can send people to that acts as a “hub” for your marketing efforts. It doesn’t have to be complex (I’ve got some tips below), it has to be a place that acts as a hub for finding out more about you. The goal of a website is to have a one-stop-show for people to come to for information, and leave from to go to your various portfolios, books, social media, etc.

Follow these steps:

  1. Get a domain name (networksolutions.com, tierra.net are recommended). Make sure the name is unique, fits you, and can be re-purposed if your plans change (FrankDoesArt.com is a bit specific, but FrankGetsCreative.com is more general).
  2. Set up a website. Most people I know use www.dreamhost.com or www.wix.com. Just start with one page to make it easy – I’ve seen successful authors whose page is a blurb and a list of books.
  3. A fast way to do it is buy a domain and redirect it to one of your social media accounts or a portfolio setup (like Twitter or LinkedIn).  You can build the site later.
  4. Link to all your books, art, portfolio, and social media from here.
  5. This website should be mentioned in your books, social media, etc.
  6. Link to all your social media from the website – LinkedIn, Goodreads, whatever.  Well, whatever is appropriate, like maybe no one wants your photo collection of antique pots on that photo sharing site.

Other things to add:

  • A schedule of speaking engagement.
  • Reviews of your books.
  • Testimonials.
  • Helpful downloads – like character sheets, guides, etc.

Have Appropriate Social Media

Social media is a troublesome subject. Yes, it can let you market – or be annoying. Yes it can let you meet people – or it can waste time. However, done right it’s a great way to connect with people.

Your social media should always link back to your website and in many cases, your other social media. This helps create a “web” of connections, so people are able to go to one social media source, find your others, and of course buy your stuff.

My takes on social media in rough order are:

Twitter: Twitter, for it’s many flaws, has a lot of use, its simple, and with lists and filtering (and learning when to ignore it) you can meet authors, promote yourself, and be found. I’d determine what approach you want to use (from marketing to just goofing off) and do it.

LinkedIn: You should have a LinkedIn profile anyway, but how much of your “creative” life you want to share or link to depends on your goals and personal image. I also will say if you use LinkedIn don’t forget all the great posting and stuff you can do there, and the communities.

Instagram and other photo-sharing sites: Some people use this to promote their work, others use it as a sort of photoblog. I’m mixed on it myself.

Facebook: Facebook keeps having issues, but it helps to have a presence. I’d keep an author page on it at the very least and see how you engage.

Amazon Author Site: Set up your Amazon Author Site at Author Central.  This also can be a place to point your web domain.

By the way, a good way to manage social media in one go is www.Hootsuite.com.

Have A Blog

Blogs are ways to post thoughts, essays, and more, turning your web presence into a kind of personal magazine/announcement/discussion board. Most authors use them, though at various rates of usage, from constant posts to “occasional speaking updates.”

A blog is usually part of your author website, and thus is another reason to come there – and to go and check out your work and your other media. Most blog setups can act as your author page as well (which is what I do).

I use blogs to:

  • Give weekly updates on myself.
  • Post various essays and thoughts.
  • Review or promote interesting things.
  • In a few cases, blog posts then became other books, or I round them up to publish free “compendiums.”

You can set up blogs at the following sites, with various advantages and limits. Some allow you to use your own domain name, some don’t.

A few techniques:

  • You can get a domain and just point it at your blog or a similar site (like your Tumblr) and save time.
  • Some authors and artists do blog tours where they post across each other’s blogs.
  • If you have related social media accounts (LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) consider posting your blog entries to all of them when appropriate. Just make sure they redirect to your site.
  • Set up an RSS feed (or find it’s address in a standard setup) and put a link on your blog. I also recommend www.feedburner.com despite it being sort of static by now.
  • Mailchimp.com and some other mail software programs let people subscribe to a blog feed so they get email updates. You can also load those with helpful extras and information.

An important caveat – if you’re a prolific writer, you have to find the blogging/writing balance. It’s not an easy call because a few long blog posts can take as much time to set up as a small fiction piece. In some cases small books may be like blog posts so you have to ask “write a book or write a set of blog posts.”  I cover that more later.

Have A Newsletter

A newsletter is the way to engage with readers and keep people informed, as well as give them cool reviews, interesting updates, and more. In some ways it’s like a mailed blog, but I separate them as a newsletter is more focused and like an update, whereas blogs can be more freeform. If you don’t do a blog, do a newsletter, and if you only have time for one do the newsletter.

The ruler of newsletters is www.mailchimp.com, which has an amazing free service and reasonable paid services.

Make sure that your newsletter subscription form(s) are linked to from as much social media as possible and, of course, your website.

Some newsletter tips:

  • Don’t overdo it or underdo it – I do it twice a month or so.
  • Find a “feel” for your newsletter – a roundup, personal, chatty, serious, etc. Judge what works.
  • Include any vital updates about your work. Link to your blog, new books, cool things.
  • Give away “Lead Magnets” – basically free stuff like samples, an occasional free book copy, downloadable cool stuff, etc.
  • Use it to promote other cool things – help folks out.
  • Remember that most newsletter software gives you all sorts of statistics and data – you can use this to improve reaching people!

Physical Media

Many authors and artists give away cards, bookmarks, etc.  I find these different giveaways vary in effectiveness, so I’m not sure how well they work for me or you.  However, it doesn’t stop me from doing them as they’re easy, and sometimes expected.  I also figure saturating the world with references to my work helps.

The one challenge is that this costs money, and you may not want to spend money on business cards, bookmarks, etc.  So you want to balance your choices.

Here’s what I try and what I find works:

Business Cards – These are a must if you’re serious, and the only physical media I can truly say that about.  Business Cards are cheap to get, easy to give out, and even expected.  Most print shops and office supply stores have quick options.

Bookmarks – This is popular among the book crowd for obvious reasons.  I’m not sure how well they work, but they do make it easy to set out information, give them away in panels, leave at interested shops, etc.  They can be a bit pricey depending on the deal you swing,

Mini-pictures – I’ve seen artists give away small cards with their art and contact information, sort of a sample/bookmark/business card fusion.  This may be worth trying.

For printed bookmarks and the like I recommend www.clubflyers.com.

I always have business cards with me, keep some bookmarks in my car, and take bookmarks to any events I speak at.

Giveaways And Promotionals (Mostly Authors)

A great way to get people’s attention is to give out stuff like free books, extras, samples, and more. With these properly done (and linked back to other works), its a great way to get attention, meet people, and of course get sales.

There’s two services I recommend for authors.  For artists you may have to look for other methods.

Prolificworks.com – having both free and subscription modes, it lets you give away work and join (or create) promotionals. The paid version lets you tie giveaways into your mailing list as well. It does get a bit pricey beyond the Free level ($20 to $50 a month), so I recommend paid tiers for serious authors nly.

www.bookfunnel.com – Is a cheap ($20 a year to start) way to do book giveaways in a variety of formats, and higher tiers include features like Prolificworks.com. I’m fond of the starter tier as its a great way to make book giveaways easier (and if you don’t want to host your giveaways).

To make these work you have to obviously be dedicated to it and work out strategies. I use them to:

  • Give away free stuff and samples to my newsletter subscribers.
  • Give away a few copies of new books via Prolificworks.com
  • Have promotional giveaways (often samples) that people can sign up to my newsletter to get.
  • I join groups on Prolificworks.com to do team giveaways.
  • I use both – Instafreebie lets me set up easy giveaways, and Prolificworks gives me all sorts of options.

If you use KDP, there’s a KDP Exclusive you can use for eBooks. In exchange for making your work exclusive with Amazon, you get some tools to set up sales and giveaways.  It’s easy for starting authors.

Have A Portfolio

If you’re a visual artist of any kind, have a portfolio. Put it on your website, use a social media site like Deviantart.com, whatever. People want to see your work and maybe buy it, so make it easy to do. If you take commissions, it’s pretty much a way to market yourself.

Non-visual artists like authors may want a portfolio as well. This would contain:

  • Cover art.
  • Sample works.
  • Free giveaways.
  • Summaries of your work (with links to purchase it). For instance, I have a press website a lot like this.

Do Series

If you’re doing fiction, you probably already have a series in mind. If your books are non-fiction, you may want to group them into series, because various bookselling sites will remind people that “X book is part of Y” series.  If you’re an artist, this may help as well.

It’s near-free advertisement.

My general finding is that series help get people’s attention.  If they like something, they check the series.  If they like the series idea but not a specific piece, they may check the rest of the series.

It also shows commitment.  If you’ve got a series, you’ll be around.

I do think it takes time for a series to “take off.”  Once it starts getting attention and people buy other books, then they get more recommendations, more attention, etc.

Calculated Distribution (Authors)

This part is pretty much only for authors – and for book distribution.

For print books, your usual choices are Amazon and IngramSpark (or IngramSpark via Lulu).  Amazon doesn’t charge, the other services do, but bookstores don’t always like to stock Amazon books as it’s a competitor.

For ebooks, your choices are:

  • Go with Amazon’s KDP Select, where you only go through Amazon but get marketing tools like sales.  Amazon is the majority of the market, so if you go Amazon its easier.
  • Distribute incredibly widely.  This takes time, and you don’t get Amazon’s marketing tools, but you get the chance to make more sales.  Some authors I know find they sell more books outside of Amazon, but I haven’t figured out any rules or principles to this.

If you go broad here’s my take

  • Draft2Digital is the easiest way to go broad, but only does eBooks.  I also recommend managing your Amazon account separately.  Draft2Digital doesn’t have the broadest range, but it’s free (taking a cut of your sales) and very, very well done.
  • Smashwords is also free, but takes a larger cut and doesn’t have the extras of Draft2Digital.  It does get into a few unusual areas of distribution.
  • Lulu.com will do full service, but partners with Ingrahm, and there are charges.
  • Ingrahm is full service as well, and charges.  It’s probably a better choice than Lulu these days.

Publish Lots Of Stuff

Like it or not your goal as a creator is to be noticed so people get ahold of your work and benefit from it.  This means that you may need to create lots of works to get attention – or use work that you aren’t making public to do the same.

For instance, I realized that a lot of my blog ideas were better off as books – or could be turned into books.  There was far more benefit to turning certain ideas into small books (or expanding existing work into books) than letting things sit.  Some things just work better as a book anyway, and I have more works that people can get their hands on.

(Plus, the polishing that goes into a book made them, honestly, higher quality.)

If you’re an artist it’s probably the same thing, depending on your market.  If you have lots of different things to sell and buy and do you increase your chance to get more sold. 

Advertising (Mostly for Authors)

I’ve used both Google ads and Amazon for books, though it’s been awhile since I’ve done Google (and I may want to try again).  I have done a lot with Ams, or Amazon Marketing Services.

AMS lets you set up promotional ads to appear during searches, and you can set up keywords, target them, and even decide what to pay for a clickthrough.  It’s a pretty advanced tool, and though it obviously only targets Amazon, that’s a pretty big market!  The challenge is that you have to figure out the right words, monitor progress (to avoid overspending or waste), and tweak marketing for each book.

I’ve found it effective, but it takes a lot of work.  What I do is update AMS every month or so with new terms, shut off ones that aren’t working, and try to get an idea of what works.  You can download data from each ad you set up, and then make a new ad with just the data that worked.  You honestly need to start with 100-200 search terms to get it working.

AMS works, but it takes effort – and obviously you pay for ads even if you don’t sell anything.  It’s a good advanced practice.

More To Come

So these are just what I’m doing now (and what I wrote up, I’m sure I forgot a few things). I’m always trying different promotional efforts and other ways to help people find my books.

Steven Savage

Geek As Citizen: The Marketing Only Life, Culture, And General Annoyance

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Tired Cute Pug
This little guy is tired of everyone overmarketing themselves.

Earlier this week I discussed how we have to accept the fact that marketing is part of our lives as geeks, careerists, and people living in the 21st century. Marketing is not an anomaly of the human condition, it is necessary, and frankly you have to learn how to do it avoid being overwhelmed. However there’s three sides to every story (if you get the reference), and there’s a flip side to our need to market ourselves and our businesses that enters into the whole ethical/citizen sphere I talk about.

I’d like to put this in an academically appropriate manner, but I can’t.

Don’t let your life and career become a (bleeping) pile of Marketing and Marketing only. Pick your own favorite obscenity or set of obscenities to use there, I couldn’t find an appropriate one. Also of course, my own discretion keeps me from swearing on this too much.

But seriously, don’t become a 100%-all-the-time-Marketer.

Yes, We Hate This

You know exactly what I’m talking about, even if you’re still selecting choice obscenities. You know that some people just become marketing and that’s all they do. They may be enormously popular stars who just exist to move merch and apply their names to things. They may be the would-be authors we know who have become hustle, not writers, and their writing reflects this pandering. They’re at times even us when we look at our next round of Personal Branding for that career move and realize how much of our time has been promoting ourselves and how much time hasn’t been spent being ourselves.

That nodding sensation you have? It’s something a lot of people experience. We all know someone famous like this, we’ve known a friend like this, and/or we’ve become it before.

We hate it, of course. We may understand, at least intellectually, the value of marketing. We know some of it is unavoidable. We can laugh it off. But when someone is just marketing, it engenders a kind of contempt because at some point you stop selling yourself and only become the selling of yourself – and less and less time is dedicated to actually being you.

Such a person is literally a lie.  They aren’t anything but a sale of an image.  We despise it . . . and we’re kind of afraid of this.

Yes, We Fear This

I’ve encountered people who fear this in my geek career work, and in general my thought is “good thing to be afraid of.” The idea of waking up one day and being only an image is enough to make you want to start preemptively developing the drinking problem you’d probably have if your life got that far down the hole of self-promotion. We can think of many a star or famous person who is just marketing, and we really don’t want to be that – though let’s face it, we’d kind of like the money.

Of course thinking that only fuels the fear.

The fear is understandable as mega-marketing and over marketing is a hallmark of our time. We’re used to bizarre publicity stunts, pandering reality shows that have anything but reality, star-worship, entitled musicians strutting around, and would-be Next Famous Authors pimping their latest questionable works. We seem to be in an age of marketing beyond the wildest dystopian fantasies of parody writers, coupled with clueless celebrities that don’t seem to know or care how shallow they seem.

(This is another chance for me to mention Twilight of the Elites, which will help you understand this).

The fear is understandable, and as citizens of our countries, communities, and subculture we know how dangerous this is.  We despite it because it is damaging, because it is shallow, and also because it annoys the hell out of us.  It’s a perfect storm of despisability.  It’s something I’m sure most of us would like to see addressed.

But when it comes to the geek community there’s a few specific issues we face.

Welcome To The Popular Place

The first issue, is now Geek Culture is in. Videogames are everywhere, Marvel is piloting a juggernaut of movie success, tech is hip, geeks are cool, Silicon Valley is filled with rock stars. Best of all our culture is both popular and part of it is actually doing stuff, from cool programs to making films, it’s the kind of popularity that feels – and in many ways I would say is – validated.

Except we also know it can be taken too far. We can witness the pundits of Valleywag waiting for the next Silicon Valley guru to say something stupid and entitled. There’s the arrogance of the I’ll-be-the-next-big-thing authors we encounter (and, yes, I’ve had people share personal horror stories). There’s an air of entitled sellout around geekery, not a prominent and widespread stench by any means, but that hint that it could get worse.

We are popular now. It provides temptations. It provides role models that aren’t a good idea to emulate as all they are is popular/controversial/person of the hour. That popularity puts us at risk of falling into the Marketing Trap because we ride the popularity wave and start selling ourselves . . . and then we fall into what always happens.

(I used to note if someone told me “Why don’t we do what X-Popular-Company-Of-The-Moment does” I was not going to be responsible for my actions. Though for me that usually means “extra snarky comments.”)

Rightful Revenge Of The Nerds

As part of the fact that it’s so fun that we’re popular is the fact that we may over enjoy it. I know I do, though I keep it to moderation.  Or I try.

It’s awesome that technology and geekery is validated, and it’s a nice partial antidote to anti-intellectualism in culture (even if we’ve got a serious problem with it still). It’s neat to see geek things being cool like we knew they were. If anything, I think the members of geek culture have been amazingly restrained in their critiques of mainstream culture as our ideas and images and works have been adopted, accepted, and lionized.

Thus it may be tempted to take a run and really promote your work.  It may be fun to strut a bit.

Videogames and vampires, paranormal romance and card games, all these things are so hip now and it feels so right that they’re popular, you might want to run with it because “now is the time.” This is in a way true, but you can run too far end end up with a Marketing Only Life (or Marketing only Hobby and then your one thing that gave you A Life is gone).

This is not a major concern of mine, but it’s there, echoing around the edge of my conversations and discussions and examinations. Enough I bring it up to be appropriately paranoid.

Technophile Paradise

The third issue geek culture faces is that we’ve kind of created and definitely are intimate with the tools that let people promote themselves. We use them, we make them, we get them. Technophile is part of Geek culture, and a good chunk of Geek in general.

This makes it easy to market ourselves and sell ourselves. In fact it can be fun and heady to have all this power, to use these tools, to run these numbers. It’s like a game, and there’s a definite high to it that’s seductive and frankly just a lot of fun.

It’s easy for us to fall into the All Marketing All The Time Trap because of that – because we make it and because it is Really Freaking Cool. You can so easily get lost in marketing your book or your indie game or your web magazine because the technology and the power is just awesome.  I can acknowledge this from personal experience as well, because even a few simple tools give you this massive rush.

But when it’s so fun, and engrossing, and neat, and something you know it can end up being all you do.

The technology also can abstract us from human concerns and understanding. When it’s numbers and hits and neat toys we can forget about people. When we forget about people, we may not realize when we’ve become All And Only About Marketing.  We forget how we look to people, and we may not have the kind of contact we need for them to tell us to stop doing it.

All Things In Moderation

As noted, I am all for Marketing ourselves, our works, our fan works, and so forth. It’s part of human culture, part of industry, and is not a bad thing at all.  I am all for good marketing. But it can be overdone as we’ve all seen in the media or encountered in people personally turning their lives into Pimping That Thing (which would be a good reality show name).

For we geeks, there are specific concerns I have, and bring up as a warning to make sure our specific temptations and inclinations don’t lead us into this trap. I’d hate to see us, now that it is “our time” end up having too many of our community fall into the Marketing Only Life, and have that potentially damage our subculture and what we can do.  Sure it can happen in any community, but I’m addressing mine.

The Overmarketed life is toxic to community. Everything becomes about moving and selling. Everything has a price, everything is sales, yet nothing is important. The enthusiasm we have for what we love shouldn’t be worn away by these things. If anything good marketing just helps us to more and spread our works.

But taken too far? Well, I’d rather not see a geek equivalent of the Kardashians or have us be associated with Yet Another Harry Twipotter ripoff. We can do more.  We do.

– Steven Savage