Marketing Essentials

When I ask workshop participants to raise their hand if they got into writing because they wanted to be small business owners, I typically get no hands, and a whole lot of confused faces. This response isn’t at all surprising, but it is unfortunate. The reality is, regardless of your path to publication, being an author means building a business. The earlier you realize that the better prepared you can be!

For most of us, the blinders really start coming off when we start dipping our toes into the world of platform building – something indie and traditional writers benefit from. For many of us, perhaps for most of us, it’s a pretty painful realization.

This article is designed to shine a little bit of light on one small aspect of your author business: marketing. The concept is vast. There are entire degree programs focused entirely on marketing, and even more degrees focused on specific topics beneath that umbrella heading. While we won’t delve that deeply into the topic, it is my hope by the end of this article you’ll at least have a frame of reference, some language with which you can continue your journey into the darker depths of this topic.

For the purposes of our discussion here we are going to divide the concept of marketing into two general categories: organic and paid. You can think of organic marketing methods as things you do personally, generally low or no cost, but often time-consuming. Paid marketing, on the other hand, is something you pay someone else to do for you – like Google or Facebook ads.

The goal of both is to get eyes on your work. But how they go about achieving that goal is quite different.

Organic

The goal of organic marketing methodologies is to make it as easy as possible for potential readers to stumble upon you or find you out in the big wide world of the internet. You can also think of this as your author platform. The goal here is to get your name out there in as many places as possible and to connect all those nodes together into a vast web of you. This includes things like blogging or podcasting, guest posting on other blogs or publishing in magazines, creating unique content to share on social media, volunteering or working with organizations, and of course your books and stories.

This approach is passive in that you put out bait (your content, whatever form it takes) and wait for someone to find you, but it takes a serious amount of work and time for success. In the beginning, our nets are so tiny people can hardly find us on the internet when they are looking for us! But with a great deal of focus and discipline, in time, we can grow this web until it has massive reach.

Blogging

Blogging is often an appealing approach for writers given its focus on the written word, and it can be an incredibly powerful technique for building organic reach. Chuck Wendig is an excellent example of this. (*Caution, he is very fond of profanity, so this link may not be safe for work!) Yea, he writes books and stuff, but his blog is a powerhouse for his organic marketing efforts. For years I saw his blog popping up all over the internet and as writers shared his caustic and hilarious posts on writing, but you know, I never saw his books pop up ever until Wanderers.

That is the power of an effective blog. It can often have a reach far beyond your books, especially when your catalog has only a few or a handful of books in it. Chuck had something around 18 or 20 books out before Wanderers hit serious mainstream. But his blog has been snagging readers from all over the digital landscape and pulling them into his web for years, creating growing numbers of rabid fans who promote everything he creates.

Having a successful blog is a lot of work. You need to publish content regularly, with most resources suggesting weekly at minimum, daily preferred. To get your blog content seen, you’ve got to think about keywords and search engine optimization, not to mention creating the website and the blog itself. If you are willing to put in the time and effort though, this can be a powerful tool in pulling people toward you, and an excellent tool for getting folks to sign up for your newsletter.

Another consideration here – make sure you take a look at things such as a sales funnel when building out your newsletter. Growing your newsletter effectively requires more than a simple link on your homepage, and a solid newsletter audience is your key to future sales.

Podcasting

A podcast is essentially a blog in audio format, and just like blogging, it can be an excellent tool for getting your content into the ears of a broader audience. One of the best examples of a successful podcast is Welcome to Night Vale, a dark and dreadfully delightful story podcast. The episodes are bizarre and quirky and have grown into such a powerful medium its creators now tour with the show, have written three novels along with two volumes of scripts from the show, and have an entire store filled with gloomy custom merchandise from the creepy world of Night Vale.

But before all their success they were just some weirdos with a story to tell. Sound familiar?

Much like blogging, podcasting requires a great deal of focus and energy and a regular content feed. For most folks, there is also a learning curve involved and some expenses as well. Quality audio isn’t too hard to create these days, but editing takes some time to perfect. Additionally, most podcasts provide transcripts of their content to help them rank on web searches (see SEO and Keywords and such above.)

Social Media Influencer

Blogging and Podcasting are very labor-intensive endeavors. If their format is too long social media offers an almost endless opportunity for growing your reach exponentially. Which platform you choose is entirely up to you, with some being image focused (ie: Instagram) and others being more written-word-focused (ie: Twitter), and everything in between. If you can get a hashtag trending you win the prize!

On Twitter, I’ve seen authors writing extreme flash fiction with a surprising amount of success. I’ve seen other authors Tweeting out their books 140 characters at a time. The key here is to find a platform that feeds into an aspect of your passion – whether it’s writing-related or not – and run with it.

Summary

We covered a few of the more popular organic approaches to marketing in this article, but there are far more out there than this small list. Anything that gets your content out into the world, anything that helps build that giant net of you, falls under the organic marketing umbrella. Remember these are somewhat passive approaches. They are like sea fans and coral, sitting in the ocean looking fabulous, and waiting for the current (the internet) to waft some food (folks interested in your work) your way. As with all things, there are pros and cons to this approach.

Paid

The organic marketing approach is to get as much content as you can out in the world to build a web that catches passersby and pulls them to you. The goal of paid advertising is to proactively put your content right under the nose of someone that might want it. The most common technique under this umbrella probably has to be ads, whether you’re talking Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or some other. But there are other items that fall in this category as well.

Ads

The appealing thing about ads is that you can get them out there fast. In comparison with the slow burn of organic marketing, ads and paid advertising runs at supersonic speeds. For the reasonably technically savvy writer, you can have ads up and running within the space of a few hours (not counting the approval window your ad goes through, this varies by platform).

That said, ads are not all unicorns and rainbows. The name of the game with ads is quantity, quantity, quantity. The various platforms (ie: Google/Facebook) do work hard to learn as much as they can about their users so they can provide as targeted an ad as possible. But it still involves a large ratio of exposures for every click. The extra bad news is that it also requires a large number of clicks for every sale, and you pay for those clicks.

With paid advertising, ad copy is your bread and butter, the better you are at it, the tighter your click-to-sale ratio will be. To control cost you need to make that ratio as narrow as you possibly can, and if you didn’t major in marketing at university, this can be quite a learning curve. The good news is you don’t need to drop a ton of money while learning. You can set pretty small budgets for testing out ads to determine what sells best.

Book Promotion Services

This is a pretty broad category. It includes everything from our It’s a Book! mailer to third-party vendors that swear they know everything there is to know about Facebook ads, to social media influencers you can sponsor. A great example of this is a Bookbub ad or Kindle ad.

These services can produce huge results. You can also pay through the nose and get absolutely nothing in return. The key with these is to PROCEED WITH CAUTION. There are plenty of folks out there for a scam, happy to take your money and enjoy a nice meal out while you are fervently hitting refresh on your sales page (and seeing absolutely nothing). Most probably have the best of intentions, but really just don’t have much reach. A healthy number is reasonably good, and a choice few can seriously drive numbers. Look at reviews, talk to other authors, seriously look into whether the company is legit and can really drive numbers. But always keep in mind:

Here there be monsters.

Summary

As with organic marketing techniques, there are far more examples of paid marketing out there than what I’ve covered in this article. The key to remember is that with paid marketing you are proactively putting your content right under the noses of folks slightly more likely to find your work appealing, and then hoping they click it.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has cast a small bit of light on what types of marketing are out there and what some of the pros and cons are for them. If you are just starting out you have a long road ahead of you in deciding which approach works best for you! The good news is that road can be just as fun and rewarding as writing is. (Just as painful too, but let’s stick with the positive!)

My advice to you is to play. Don’t commit yourself to one or the other, instead, dip your toe in all of them and see what works best for you. You may surprise yourself which methods you prefer. You may uncover an interest or a gift you hadn’t realized existed before!

Once you have an idea of the direction you most prefer, zero in on it and perfect it. Set yourself a goal and work until you reach it. Over the course of 2020, as an example, I decided to focus on building organic traffic utilizing my blog. I wanted to hit 500 monthly visitors, just to see if I could. I learned a lot through that process – and hit my goal. (Then promptly stopped blogging from exhaustion!)

Ultimately you will likely find yourself utilizing a number of different approaches in both of these categories. Your strategy will differ depending on whether you are planning a book launch or just day-to-day sales. This is an area that is constantly evolving. What works today may not work tomorrow, and what didn’t work yesterday may rock your world tomorrow. You’ve got to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s working and what isn’t, be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice, and always have alternatives in your back pocket!

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What other questions do you have on this general subject? Our content here is always evolving, and we want to offer help where you need it most! If you would like to learn more about something in this article or on a different topic altogether, drop us a line at techchair@rmfw.org.

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