REALISTIC BOOK MARKETING — Finding Your Reader 4

3 Important Author Lessons

Book marketing is almost a dirty word, at least to many authors. The very idea of thinking about marketing ALL THE TIME, even when we’re writing, seems abhorant. At least it did to me. But understanding the realities of publishing, and the goals of my writing, helped me to view marketing in a new way. Here are the lessons I’ve gleaned as an author and publisher.

Lesson #1

YOUR BOOK ISN’T ABOUT YOU, IT’S ABOUT THEM (the reader) You have to make your book fit into the world. Your book isn’t the news, how does it fit into the news? Anna David, author of two novels and six non-fiction books, says only two of every 10,000 AGENT REPRESENTED books submitted are picked up by any of the Big 5. Her book: “Make Your Mess Your Memoir” gave her an opportunity to follow a different marketing strategy. Instead of announcing “here is my book” she recommends that you make your book the news. Her strategy: She looked up stats on depression in 2020 and wondered, does writing help with depression? Then she wrote her press release (a press release requires ‘news’.) This is the news: writing helps with depression (a book on writing in 2020 is not news), but “depression stats are terrible, writing helps with depression” IS NEWS! Nothing in her book is on this topic. Her press release announced “this author is available to speak about it.”

Lesson #2

WRITING IS WORK AND IT IS ONLY HALF OF THE JOB. “Most authors fail because they have completely unrealistic expectations.” According to Anna David, they don’t know who the book is for or how they will reach this reader. And so they don’t. Marketing starts with writing. “Make it for the smallest group of people possible.”

Lesson #3

“Nobody’s buying books any more.” THE AVERAGE AUTHOR SELLS LESS THAN 300 COPIES OF THEIR BOOK.

TAKE THIS TEST

Q1 – when is the last time you purchased a book?
Q2 – what book did you finish reading most recently?
Q3 – how many books have you read this year?
Q4 – how does you answer to #3 compare to number of books you’ve read in years past?

We’ve entered the era of constant video where you can literally watch plants grow

Advice/antidote: pre-orders, events and immersive experiences, branding, community building, short books, simple messages for a 15 second reader.

The Sad News:

The book marketplace is shrinking, despite the explosion of books published. Book sales rose in 2021 but then they fell back by 6.4 percent in 2022 and book industry revenues overall declined by 38 percent between 2000 and 2022.

The Average Book Sells Less than 300 copies total. 2/3s of all books sell less than 1000 copies. Combine the explosion of books published with the flat total sales and you get shrinking sales of each new title. Of 789 million print books sold in 2022 in the US in all categories, only 6.7 percent of the new titles sold more than 10,000 copies in their first year of sales, only 12.3 percent more than 5,000 copies, and only 33.9 percent sold more than 1,000, meaning 66.1 percent sold less than 1000 copies.
A book has far less than a 1 percent chance of being stocked in a particular bookstore. For every available bookstore shelf space, there are 100 to 1,000 or more titles competing for that shelf space. Bowker found that 197,372 business and economics titles were self-published just in 2021
The Market is Saturated. It is getting harder every year to sell new titles. Each title is competing with millions of others, while other media are claiming more and more of people’s time. In a crowded marketplace, brand-name authors and books stand out, and an increasing portion of the limited sales are going to mega-bestsellers Result: investing the same amount today to market a new book as was invested five or ten years ago will yield a far smaller sales return.
Most book marketing today is done by authors, not by publishers. Book proposals from experienced authors now have an extensive section on the authors’ marketing platform and what the authors will do to publicize and market. Publishers still fulfill important roles in helping craft books to succeed and making books available, but book sales depend primarily on the author.
No other industry has so many new-products. Every new book is a new product, needing to be acquired, developed, reworked, designed, produced, named, manufactured, packaged, priced, introduced, marketed, warehoused, and sold. Yet the average new book generates only $10,000 to in sales, which needs to cover all of these expenses.
The book publishing world is in a never-ending state of change. Let’s see how the lawsuits turn out.

Excerpted from: The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing Steven Piersanti, Senior Editor, Berrett-Koehler Publishers Updated March 1, 2023

So what is an author to do?

Get real about your sales expectations and why you write
Find your niche! Find specialty stores and organizations that would love your book.
Find a platform, network, and create content – find your peeps!
Create new content regularly that is relevant to your audience
Network with other authors! Read their books and leave a review!
Participate in “read local” programs
Get accidentally noticed (Elf on Shelf)

Book Marketing Success Stories

ELF ON THE SHELF – still going strong

1. New content is essential.

In the Elf Story, everyday the elf moves to a new area of the house. Mom and Pop have to generate new ideas daily in order to keep the kids engaged. This couldn’t be more true with marketing content

2. You must be relevant and know your audience.

I know what my kids find funny and amusing, potty jokes, knock-knock jokes, spider stories… Content must be relevant to the reader. What turns your reader on?

3. Use your social networks.

You need to be tuned in to your networks. Your best content ideas will result from the conversations and ideas of your readers. Approach your audience and friends for shared content, guest blogging, and feedback.

“Six years of development and branding went into Elf on the Shelf. Though they were consistent with their product, the creators never could have anticipated that a photo of Jennifer Garner’s child holding “Elf on the Shelf” would appear on the Today Show. Lesson learned: While Elf on the Shelf’s popularity soared via a serendipitous sighting, prepare your business for any amount of publicity by creating a consistent image and branding. The easier your product or service can be identified by customers and prospects, the more likely your brand will affix itself in customers’ minds.”

SUMMARY OF THE RECENT BIG GUY PUBLISHING COURT CASE:

The United States of America brings this civil action to stop Penguin Random House, LLC—the world’s largest book publisher—from buying its publishing rival, Simon & Schuster, Inc. https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1445916/dl

We heard that an “unreliable narrator” was “what readers were craving”; that “psychological suspense” is “very big”; that “historical fiction is red hot”; that “sexy vampires” can yield a “franchise author”; that “it’s very hard to make a success out of short stories”; and that it’s “very difficult to create success out of whole cloth just through marketing.”
The United States v Penguin Random House, LLC

The Big Guys argued: “Publishing is a risky business. Only a fraction of books published become commercially successful. Publishers pay significant advances to authors whose books they expect will have commercial success. In most cases, the advance represents an author’s total compensation. One reason the Big Five are able to offer authors higher advances than smaller publishers is because they can spread the costs—and risks—of their investment over a larger number of books and authors. They also are able to offer authors the extensive editorial, production, marketing, and publicity support generally needed to produce a top selling book, and the sales and distribution networks necessary to place books into readers’ hands.

“Self-publishing also does not include the breadth of editorial, distribution, and marketing services that are important factors in whether a book will become commercially successful. Indeed, an internal Simon & Schuster document acknowledged that ‘[s]elf-publishing is not viewed as a threat to [our] core business.’”

Penguin Random House first filed the Iowa lawsuit in November 2023, and is also a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed with PEN America against the Escambia County (Florida) School Board over books that have been unconstitutionally removed.

WHAT WAS SAID:

it takes about two thousand hours of labor to bring a book to market
books that yielded advances of $250,000 or more—the top two percent of all books, representing only about 1,000 authors
most full-time authors earn less than $20,000 a year. Authors Guild survey said 30 percent decline in author income since 2009 and more than half of the respondents earned less than $11,670.
The average book sells less than 300 copies
We heard that an “unreliable narrator” was “what readers were craving”; that “psychological suspense” is “very big”; that “historical fiction is red hot”; that “sexy vampires” can yield a “franchise author”; that “it’s very hard to make a success out of short stories”; and that it’s “very difficult to create success out of whole cloth just through marketing.”
We heard that “if you write science fiction, there’s this endless list of sci-fi conventions you can go to..”
“What is literary fiction?” response, “Not commercial. Might win a prize.”

There are marketing success stories. Books DO sometimes find the love of readers and earn authors an income.

Regardless of the lawsuit evidence or the sad sales reports, writers gonna write.

Keep Scratchin’

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