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Writing Process: Marketing (part 2)

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BUY MY BOOK the AI image yelled with nonsense signs…

My Writing Process Series

Howdy Freeholders,

So here we are, the last in the planned series of posts about how I create, publish, and market a book.

Last time we left off with the 1st tier marketing company I use (hint: it’s BookBub). Today, I’m going to talk about the 2nd level of marketers I work worth, which is pretty much everyone besides BookBub. But first, I’ll briefly explain why I separate them into different groups, or tiers

First Tier

BookBub stands heads and shoulders above everyone else in terms of how much they cost, and how much they bring in. The only other company that comes close would be Amazon itself, if you are selected by them (there’s nothing you can do, they make all the decisions here).

Second-tier All the other marketers offer pricing that’s much lower than BookBub, but the consequence is despite their great numbers, they can’t match the sheer volume that BookBub drives (we’re talking millions of readers). Each of the next level of marketers has their strong points, and I have my favorites, and your mileage may vary.

Every author will have their own favorites, depending on their genre and how well they perform in their targeted demographics. For me, writing in the post-apocalyptic genre, there are not nearly as many options for marketing platforms as there are for someone say, writing romance novels.

Romance, being the biggest chunk of the writing industry, naturally has the lion’s share of marketing platforms catering to those authors. But that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. I have, over the course of the last decade or so, used trial and error that the only way you can sort out which advertising agencies work for you and your books, writing style, and readers is to just give it a go and see what happens. I have collected lots of data—and spent lots of money—to find a core group of second-tier companies I rely on.

For me, the next best thing the landing a BookBub ad is a combination of Robin Reads, ENT (E-reader News Today), Fussy Librarian and anything from Written Word Media (they run Freebooksy and Bargainbooksy among others).

Each one of these are proven performers for my books, and I have found there’s a much greater chance of getting selected for these, smaller marketers than I do with book Bob. However, it would take landing a killer time slot on each one of these, and maxing out each one of these every day—for several days in a row—to match one BookBub. Yeah. They are that powerful.

Third tier The next level of marketing (remember, this is for me personally) includes Book Barbarian, BookRaid, KND, and eBookHound.

When I place my ads I don’t tend to just throw one out willy-nilly and hope for the best. I use a staggered approach to create not just a single day of ads, but a week-long event.

What is this look like? Well, over the course of my career I’ve discovered that Amazon is a double-edged sword. If you have a sudden spike in sales, you are rewarded by the algorithm pushing your book out to more Amazon readers—evidently people like your book, so the algorithm wants to make Amazon more money and send your book to more people.

Fair enough.

However, if that spike in sales happens over just one 24 hour period, another Amazon algorithm kicks in, scrutinizing those book sales and pondering if you’re trying to manipulate data somehow. I personally don’t know how to do that—I’ve heard of other people getting caught, and still others getting away with it, but I have no clue how to do it myself, nor do I even want to think about it.

However, that doesn’t mean that if I have a big sale—say with a BookBub ad—that does extraordinarily well on one day, those pesky algorithms might start sniffing around thinking that I’ve done something wrong, when I’ve spent every waking hour trying to make sure that I do everything on the up and up, especially with Amazon, the 900 pound gorilla of indie publishing.

To avoid having that happen, authors have learned to spread out the joy. Instead of creating a giant spike by stacking up all of their promotions on one day, we figured out to gradually increase our expected returns over the course of several days, and allow it to taper off.

You’re aiming for a bell curve, not a spike.

To do this, you have to know which advertisers work well for you, which work only so-so, and which don’t work very much but still bring in the sales. For me a typical advertising week would look something like tier 2 advertisers on days 1-2 and tier 3 advertisers on the few days before and after the main event. If I can swing a BookBub, that will go in the middle. [1] This will hopefully generate a good amount of downloads over the first couple of days, a bigger increase in downloads in the middle with the top performer of the week, and then maybe not as high as the beginning of the week level of downloads toward the end of the week. By the weekend, (or whatever the end of your promotional period is) sales have likely almost returned to normal, thus the algorithms will ignore you as a threat.

Hopefully, the good algorithms, the one the ones that like to promote your book, will pick up on the gradual increase and the bell curve and start sending your books to other readers automatically, which would then add another layer into the mix, maybe making that tail end of your promotion last that much longer. See? There go those tails I’m always chasing again.

Okay, that’s all well and good, but you just said that you can’t get a BookBub every single time. So if your promotional week is scheduled around a BookBub, how does that work?

I simply look at the numbers. Whatever the next best performer—on any given book…for some reason, some advertisers work better than others on Apache Dawn vs Solar Storm. I’ve tried this on almost every book I’ve published. ENT or Robin Reads or Freebooksy (if I’m promoting a perma-free book) will be the best performers for me. I know which one works best with which book in which series, and I throw that one into the big boy slot for the week, and then use the rest to round out the beginning and the end of the promo. My tier 3 advertisers are the closers. They’re important, but not as glamorous as the others.

Social Media

Adding another layer of complexity to the marketing problem is social media. There are some authors who use social media exclusively and don’t even bother to mess with advertisers like BookBub. To me, that’s like leaving money on the table. Sure, you might not hit it big with email advertisers, but if you don’t try, you’re definitely not going to hit it big.

The same rule applies to social marketing. It’s a royal pain in the ass to keep track of all the different apps and posts and forcing yourself to stay out of rabbit holes and political arguments, but there’s no doubt that Facebook and Twitter (or X or whatever the hell it’s called), and Tic-Tok all drive sales for books.

Some genres have a much better track record—looking at you romance books, again—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. In fact, as much as I hate to say it, I’m getting into Tic-Tok myself.

Social media has its own set of problems which relates to the concept of literary citizenship.[2] Social media is slightly different from regular email marketing because you can make ads on Facebook and Twitter and such, but the real gold is to engage with people online. It’s not an overnight thing, not like what you can achieve with hitting it big with a single BookBub ad. No, I’m talking about the long game, muchachos.

What else?

Other authors have podcasts, video channels on YouTube, or speaking engagements at conferences and conventions and blog posts (ahem). All of these things drum up support for your books and can help bring in revenue. But they take a lot of time—I mean a lot of time. Editing video is extremely time-consuming unless you have a perfect take. It’s something that I have no experience with, so I’m not going to talk much about, just know that it’s out there, I looked at it, and I don’t do it. Yet.

What’s the hardest part about marketing?

Honestly, the hardest part is gathering the initial data to figure out what you’re supposed to do and how. In other words, waiting that first month for the numbers to come in is frustrating, but then again, you could just write the next book!

In the beginning, it took me six months to a year of placing ads with random—to me at the time—email marketers with funny names because I had no knowledge of what they would do for my readership. The only way to find out is to spend money and try. But because I don’t have a tree that grows money in my backyard, I couldn’t just drop $10,000, test all of them in one month, and figure out how to go forward from there.

No, I took a slow, methodical pace and spent a couple hundred bucks a month, trying this one and that one, then next month trying this one and that one. Over time, I slowly whittled down the thousands of email marketers out there to the handful that I’ve talked about in this post.

There are probably a dozen more that I’ve used in the past, but the ones mentioned in this post are the big ones. The others I rotate on and off as the mood strikes me or if it feels like I’m not getting the same return that I used to with certain marketers.

I’ve also started to learn—based on my data—when marketing works for me, such as summer versus the winter. I’ve discovered that most of my readers don’t sit down with one of my books at the beach. My people are out there getting things done. When the warm summer months hit, they’re probably outside cutting grass, fixing up the house, camping, taking kids on vacations, etc.

My readers really start turning the pages when the weather turns and it’s time to retreat inside for the winter. So I’ve learned to focus my ad campaigns in the winter and early spring. By the time late spring and summer rolls around, my people are still reading, but they’re not as voracious as they are in the winter.

You can only learn things like that through data, and the only way you get data is to experiment. And experimentation cost money and time. For almost all of the vendors mentioned above, you have to book your advertising about a month in advance or you won’t get a slot when you want to. That requires some planning. Which will be the topic of another blog post, because it’s hard to run a writing Empire like I do without some detailed planning, and I know there’s at least a few of you out there that, like me, are addicted to planners and organizational tips and tricks!

Anyway, this concludes my 12 part series on how I publish a book from idea to finished product. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the series and maybe learned a little something along the way. If you’re publishing your first book and took some inspiration from my posts, let me know! I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time my friends, keep your heads down and your powder dry, for we live in interesting times.

Notes

[1]: The Problem is BookBub takes a while to get back to you and they book a month or two in advance…so you kind of have to wait to hear from BookBub and then scramble to fit everyone else around htem. Is it easy to do? No. Is it possible? Yes. I’ve done it twice now. But far far easier is to apply for a BookBub and schedule your tier 2 and 3 advertisers as if BookBub didn’t exist. If you don’t get the BookBub, then no harm no foul. If you do…then you’ve got a bonus and it’s a big one.

[2]: This is a topic for another day, but one I’ll definitely circle back to. Basically it’s about begin a good member of the community. Don’t go on social media and shout “buy my book” from the rooftops. Join in conversations with other authors and readers and let them get to know you — the real you — and eventually people will come around to buying your books, because they have a personal relationship with you. Not because you yelled “Buy my book!” on 305 Facebook posts.

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