Book marketing is not easy.
When I signed the contracts for my first novels, I thought that after my many, many years in advertising (I won’t tell you how many, so you can’t figure out how friggin’ old I am), I would take to book marketing like a duck to water.
I was wrong. So very wrong. In fact, my advertising experience has probably distracted me from what I really should be doing.
In my day job, I’m a partner in a healthcare marketing agency. I spend every week with our team creating ads, commercials, and social media, some campaigns with the objective of building brands and others that move the needle with some form of consumer response. Money is spent, ads are produced, results are measured, and boom—we achieved something.
And now that I’m a published author, a lot of companies are dangling shiny objects in front of my face. Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Book Bub, and others want me to buy ads or pay for giveaways. The same goes for the publishing trade publications. There are dubious websites I have never heard of that want me to pay to have my book featured to their supposed followers. There are hordes of book awards with hefty entry fees. There are publishing gurus who want to sell their courses on how to sell my book. There are companies that promise to help me build my mailing list or get more Amazon reviews or achieve world peace. All at a considerable price, of course.
Okay, spend money and achieve positive results. It works for our hospital clients, so it should work for my books, right?
Not so fast. Just because I’m in advertising doesn’t mean that I personally am a good marketer. My trade is copywriting. I work with art directors to come up with creative messages meant to engage, entertain, and move people. It’s not unlike writing books. But other people at our agency devise the branding and campaign strategies. Others plan and buy the media. Still others conduct the research that backs up all these tasks and tracks the results.
What this means is that I have the ability to come up with clever ads for my books. But I don’t know the best places to run them, how often to run them, or whether it’s even worth it to run them at all. Based on my limited experience, some of the shiny objects above haven’t actually sold any of my books.
My publisher, however, wisely reminds me to stick with the tried-and-true methods for authors, such as building my brand by doing events, meeting readers, connecting via social media, hooking up with book bloggers, etc. It’s a slow, steady process that takes patience.
So, I’ve decided that rather than continuing to lose sleep and my remaining hair, I will focus on doing my best writing and then making it even better. I’ll put my energy into creating books that readers will be glad they bought and I’ll try to meet those readers. I’ll stop fretting over advertising and focus on my daily word count.
The ad guy within me is still convinced I’ll find a way to advertise that will give me a decent return on my investment. But for now, I’m telling him to shut the hell up and let me write.