Marketing books

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Climbing the Marketing Mountain

The first month of 2019 is trundling by at a great rate of knots, and I’ve only just started my to-do list.

In theory, taking my day job to part time is going to give me heaps more time for writing and marketing books. So how is that working out for me?

Write more and better

My personal romantic hero gave me Dragon dictation software for Christmas. In theory, that should speed up the writing. I’m using it at the moment, and certainly this blog post is appearing on the screen far faster than if I typed it.

To meet my self-set deadlines, I need to average around 15 to 18,000 words a week in the first draft. Typing, that’s around 18 hours work, and I can do that if I don’t do much else. In theory, once Dragon and I get up to speed, I should more than double my writing speed.

I can spend the extra time on all the other stages. Editing, proofreading, commissioning or making covers — and above all marketing.

Market more effectively

One of my top jobs for January is to finish the marketing plan I’ve been talking about for at least two years. I’m still using the trailing elements of the one I created when I first started, adapted and extended as I learned more about the bazzillion book marketplace, but still demonstrably inadequate.

Readers have downloaded more than 90,000 copies of my books (most as ebooks, but a few as print) from the major retailers. It sound like a lot, but the margin is so small that I’m just treading water. I make enough so that my writing mostly pays for itself. I pay for subscriptions to web hosts and research sites, cover design, proofreading, and all the other stuff I need from my author account, though I occasionally have to pay for a workshop or accommodation for a conference out of the money from my day job.

Must do better. To really fly, I need to reach more readers.

The product counts

Top task, of course, is to write and produce the best books I can, and to do it often. What with one thing and another, I’m way behind on my publishing plans. Everyone tells me that, to sell books, you need to be seen in the marketplace with a new book. Around this time last year, I’d had a book out every month for four months, and was beginning to see some results. Then I got sick again.

Another is to have complete series to sell. I keep getting distracted, and I need to focus and finish the two series that I’ve started. One major goal for this year is to get Unkept Promises out and at least write the next Redepenning. Another is to publish the first four in the series that begins with The Bluestocking and the Barbarian (which I’m rewriting as a novel).

This way, I can finish both series in 2020.

But so does visibility

But it’s still only a hobby to amuse myself and a few other people such as yourself if the rest of the reading public doesn’t know I exist.

I’m working on it. First step, write the Marketing Plan.

You can help

Meanwhile, if you’d like to help, please recommend my books to your friends, and ask for them at your library. I’d also love more reviews. If you had time to leave a couple of sentences of honest review wherever you buy my books or on BookBub, that it be a great help.

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Road to a better mousetrap – part 3: Tuesday Talk

Mari Christie and I are writing a series on marketing in the bazillion book marketplace, and this is part 3 of the chapter on creating a marketing plan.

Most of the first post was about knowing your reader. You need to know who you want to sell to, what they want to buy, and how much they will spend. The second post talked about knowing your product and finding your readers.

In this post, we talk about how to keep your readers and how to get them to sell your books.

stand-outHow not to become rich and famous

Writing books is no sure way to wealth and fame, as every writer knows. Wealth and fame, or even a modest income and privacy to write more, means selling books. Selling books eats into your emotional and creative energy: energy you could be pouring into your books.

But not selling books, for those of us without a private fortune or a rich spouse, means doing some other job to put food on the table, and the job eats into your time and very likely your emotional and creative energy.

You already know that finding buyers (other than your closest friends and relatives) means writing a good book, having it well edited, and giving it a gorgeous cover. Do these things and you’ll find a few buyers. A few.

Sales figures for ‘the average book’ are no more than a guesstimate, but a few brave people have made an attempt, basing their figures on reported sales from a variety of sources. And those figures come out somewhere in the region of 200 to 500 books in the first year, depending on genre, with an upper average of 1000 in the lifetime of the book.

Of course, a very tiny fraction of one percent of all books do spectacularly well, selling 10s, even 100s of thousands, which means the average of all of the rest is probably lower, closer to the 200.

That’s the average. And you wouldn’t be reading this article if you didn’t want to beat the odds.

Don’t find buyers; attract (and keep) fans

It’s a vicious cycle, but there is an answer.  Find other people to sell your books for you. Convert your readers into followers, and your followers into raving fans.

We’ve discussed in other posts the need to interact with readers. This post gives three steps for making those interactions count. When you write your marketing plan, document how you intend to do these things.

  1. Make it easy for them to find you.
  2. Make it worthwhile for them to follow you
  3. Provide interesting stuff

Make it easy for them to find you

Sell your books where the bulk of your readers are. Whatever you might think of Amazon’s business model, learn how to make the most of the platform they offer. Taylor your keywords, the bio on your author page, and all the other tools they provide to get your book noticed. Do the same with other eretailers, too.

Your print audience is going to be smaller. I cannot give much advice on print. My books are available in print, but I haven’t been pushing the print copies because I only have a certain amount of energy.

Give away a free book—short stories, excerpts, or a novella. Before you can convert that reader, you first have to put a book in front of them. My novella, Candle’s Christmas Chair, was downloaded 53,000 times in its first six months. That’s 53,000 readers I have a chance at converting.

In your free book, as well as your books for sale, give your readers a reason to go looking for you and a way to connect with you as soon as they finish the story. On your next pages, put  links to your social media and subscription services, teasers and excerpts for your other books, buy links for the books already on sale.

Make it worthwhile for them to follow you

Okay, you’ve given them a reason to click. Now give them a reason to subscribe, to buy, to join, and to follow.

Here are few that work well if you do them well.

Have a newsletter. Make it easy for people to sign up and give them interesting content. Reward them with coupons or insider information, and special contests. Keep your newsletters brief and informative, and don’t send them too often.

Have a blog. Blog about things that interest your target readers, and blog regularly. Use your blog to inform and entertain. Watch your blog stats to find out what posts do well and what topics people consistently ignore. Do more of the one and fewer of the other.

Post often. Themed days can help if you have trouble thinking of what to say. Visitors can help, and people love to be hosted on other people’s blogs. It’s a win-win; they reach your audience and you’re introduced to theirs. One idea is to invite other novelists to post a themed extract in comments. Exquisite Quills does this brilliantly.

Encourage people to subscribe to your blog, so they get notified when you put up a new post. And post often. Visitors can help. Themed days can help.

Have a twitter account. Tweet about things that interest your readers. Reply to people’s comments. Tweet about interesting blog posts. Link to free books and excerpts.

Have a Facebook fan page and post stuff about your books, research you’ve done, places you’ve been, and your cat. Facebook loves cats. Ask questions. Join in conversations. Post interesting memes and idea.

Provide interesting stuff

Don’t be a digital billboard, constantly trying to sell something. Engage, inform, entertain, intrigue, delight. Put the effort into writing quality content, whatever you’re posting: hot men, useful recipes, research into royal mistresses, castles, cute cats, questions about romance tropes.

I’ve been trying to do all of these, though not as consistently as I’d like. Torn between the day job, the fiction writing, family commitments, and marketing, I lurch from too much focus to too little. Still, in the first three months after the release of Farewell to Kindness, I’ve sold over 900 copies. Not enough to retire on, but considerably over the odds.

In the next road to a better mousetrap post, Tools and tactics?