A simple approach to book writing, selling, and marketing
How years of tests have dispelled Conventional Wisdom and helped me focus on what's important - and what works.
I'm late to getting on the bandwagon about marketing my own books. And just off a three-year sprint of writing fiction flat out.
So I've now realizing that in order to achieve a better income, I need to take over my own marketing. Marketing is, in its basics, enabling people to discover and exchange something valuable for your value. (Like buying your books by giving you a commodity called money.) The key point is in that for book authors is said to be Discovery.
But where to begin? There are so many, many options. (Amazon, Facebook, Draft2Digital, Streetlib, PublishDrive, Lulu)
In reviewing many of these, I noted a difference which seems to be giving an edge to tiny minority of these: author-centric and book-centric.
Amazon sells books plus everything else.
Facebook rips off your and everyone else's private data by default, so their advertises can pitch their product to all their users.
FB also aggregates that advertiser data, too. Then sells access to that aggregated data. (Amazon buys access to that data and uses it, too.)
Amazon is not for book discovery - it's for their own book sales. Whatever makes them the most money. It is actually a newbie author graveyard. You're buried there faster than anywhere else.
Facebook doesn't sell books, it sells advertising access to users. The aggregators above (D2D, SL, PubD) ship everywhere for a piece of your action, but don't particularly allow you to merchandise your books there - although they are getting better.
I’ve bought these expensive courses in how to run ads. And still didn’t. Because it would take me away from my writing. It wasn’t simple. And made my life far more complex.
I've been helped in all these realizations by cracking the books again. (In my “copious” spare time.)
At first, I figured that I had to learn all there was about Amazon and it's new "author tax" of promotions. So I picked up David Gaughan's books. The series.
Gaughan has a recent book "Book Bub Ads Expert", and the opening pages were a revelation. I'd already heard about Bookbub now running simple ads at the bottom of their emails and elsewhere, but the amount of their expansion was astounding. Of course Mark Dawson, of FB Ads fame, speaks of his books highly - they have that reputation.
Gaughan showed me how concentrating on just Amazon was a fools errand. And also how only running ads there was just more foolishness.
There is one emerging platform just for ebook discovery - Bookbub. And they are improving their ads - which go to their buying clientele. Yes, again - people who get Bookbub emails are looking to buy books.
I found in my recent tests in writing original fiction books that discovery (or lack of it) has been a big issue. I wrote hundreds of short stories over three years, and their collections, testing the idea that simply building up a backbench of “short-read” books would enable organic discover. (The theory was to “feed the beast” and so beat the Amazon 30-day, three-cliff algorithm.)
But, no. My ebook fiction sold poorly on Amazon (and elsewhere) compared to my non-fiction paperbacks that continued to support my research. And recently I found from an old 1944 book by Walter S. Campbell exactly why non-fiction sells better. The reason paperbacks sell better is covered elsewhere, but essentially the reason is that fiction markets have a big demand for ebooks (they are cheaper) and so sell less paperbacks than non-fiction, where people buy more of all formats.
(Oh, and the one “guru” who told me about the “short-read” success route admitted finally that it only worked if you were exclusive on Amazon - sigh.)
All those tests complete, this leads us to the one ad platform devoted to book discovery - Bookbub - and similar avid-reader newsletters. Essentially: drop your line where the fish are really biting.
And I long ago discovered aggregators with Print-On-Demand - where the current leader is Draft2Digital. You pay them to get your book everywhere. And there is truth in publishing wide. Overall, I make about 60/40 split in income between wide and Amazon. Both ebooks and paperbacks. It’s just simpler and less time-consuming to send via one platform to all the hundreds of others. They take their split, but get sales I would never have had otherwise. Consider these as affiliate sales, and it makes sense.
Just Staring Out - or Need to Start Over: Do This
Simplify your publishing. Use an aggregator.
Concentrate your efforts on improving your author craft. And your marketing/promotion craft.
For starting authors, consider marekting your books through newsletter swaps and newsletter recommendations. Ads will come later.
Keep studying how other Substack authors increase their subscriber-ship.
Learn to discern and ignore conventional wisdom.
Become prolific, which is having a schedule and keeping it - and writing daily.
Review, proof, publish everything. Everything. You never know what will be a big hit, despite your best guesses. Just work on making every book better than the last.
Above and beyond - enjoy what you write. Or change things until you do. Your enjoyment comes through for your readers.
If you want to start advertising, check out newsletter swaps, promo sites. And studying real copywriting - Schwartz, Schwab, and other classics. That’s what I’m doing right now. Fascinating stuff.
Best of luck.