This month I’m thinking about content marketing. It’s all the rage. It’s one of the key squares in Buzzword Bingo – Marketing Edition. It’s the thing you do in social media where you put out interesting and relevant content to attract customers for your products.
I wasn’t able to write that with a straight face.
My problem comes back to a fundamental of marketing. You need to know what you’re selling and to whom you’re selling it.
Content marketing drives product sales. Everything from lawnmowers to tomatoes to games. If you want people to find your widget, content marketing works really well. Content marketing involves writing blog posts on subjects of interest to the people who might want your product. It’s Tweeting and Facebooking. It’s having Pages and Pinterests and Instagrams (oh, my).
All of those efforts generally fall to whomever has the job of selling the widgets. It’s not something the actual widget makers do. They have people to do it for them.
I know a lot of writers are freelancing articles, selling writing advice, and even working on extended creative nonfiction. I’m not talking about them. Nonfiction – subjects that require bona fides and the like – that’s cool. Yes, you need to do this content marketing thing because what you’re selling is your expertise. You need to establish credibility and build your reputation a little bit at a time. You are selling your work product as an exemplar of that expertise and reputation.
Content marketing works for those writers, too, even when it’s the same person. Demonstrating your expertise in a blog post or a newsletter or a snappy set of Instagrams is the actual work. You’re establishing yourself as a subject matter expert. Writers of nonfiction will probably spent a lot of time doing content marketing when compared to the amount of time they spend actually writing the nonfiction work they’re trying to sell.
This is where writers of fiction run into the “I spend 90% of my time on marketing” problem. I maintain that if you’re not spending 90% of your time writing, you’re doing it wrong. Almost everybody I’ve talked to with this problem is engaged in content marketing – often without knowing the term but only the advice that you must blog X times a week and have a “strong presence on social media.”
Here’s the problem from where I’m sitting.
If you’re a novelist, what you’re selling is not your expertise. It’s your story. You’re not selling it to people who want your expertise as a writer. They want your work. Your expertise can only be established by your work, not by writing about your work.
Sure, you can write a blog post about why your antagonist hates spiders, or why your main character loves puppies but is flawed by her longstanding fear of dogs because she was bitten by a rabid wolf when just a baby. I submit to you that what your readers – current and future – want is the story. What they see when you spend so much time content marketing is that you’re not getting the next story out, the next book published. You’re spending time on a marketing model that’s based on lawnmowers and household appliances, on memoirs and histories and travelogues. You’re telling them about the story, but you’re not telling them the actual story.
If you like doing this and it helps you produce more work faster, then rock on with your bad self. You can’t be pounding words into the WIP every hour of every day, even if you’re a full-time writer. I’m not suggesting that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. What I am suggesting is that you need to examine what you’re doing, where you’re spending your time. If you’re spending more time and attention and focus on trying to sell the last book than on writing the next one, take a deep breath and remember that what readers want is the story.
What they’ll come back for is the next one.
Image credit: Ferdinand Keller (Public Domain)
After reading your post, I’m, like, Yes! I have one book, self-published. I spent a lot of time getting it ready to be to in readers’ hands. Marketing, and research about marketing, has taken away what valuable writing time I have. So I’m now back to writing, and plan on staying there until the second book is finished. Thanks for your post!
I’d plan to stay there until you’ve got at least three. Five is better.
For most new authors the real cost of marketing isn’t the actual cost of advertising (although that’s bad enough). It’s the opportunity cost of spending time not writing.
Once you have a back list, you can better amortize that opportunity (and actual) cost because you’ve got more product to distribute the cost over.
Glad you found the post helpful. 🙂
Amen, brother. I write a blog article *maybe* once a month, and it’s usually on subjects tangential to my science fiction. As for other social media, I follow a 1:10 ratio–10% of posts might relate to my books, 90% relate to other topics, many of them neutral and non-personal, such as current events in astronomy or Hawaiian history and the like. I write almost every day, and check in with the business side (media interviews, sales, bookstores, AMS, etc.) once a week. Write on, write on!