Welcome to Hell
Promotion, for a writer, is the seventh ring of hell. By nature we are quiet types who like to sit at home in our PJ’s, eating things like cereal and wine out of boxes and inventing people to talk to. (Yes, I’m aware that’s also the description of crazy people, but I don’t think we need to point that out at this juncture – thank you very much.) So promoting the book, being out in the public, is a terrible fate. Only slightly less awful is talking about promotions in front of other authors. (Oh God, oh God, oh God, what if I’ve been doing it wrong? They’re all going to know I’m a fraud!) But since my other job is a graphic designer, I’m privy to a great marketing secret: you can’t do it wrong because none of it works. Or all of it works depending on your point of view.
Legend has it that when Google presented all their brand new ways of tracking online digital ads to Viacom President and one-time ad man Mel Karmazin, he blurted out, “You’re fucking with the magic!” But the paradigm of ads and marketing being more art than science is still more true than anyone would like to admit, even in this age where digital data practically streams from our ears. Digital tracking will accurately tell you when and where a sale was made, but it never fully encompasses why a sale was made. But at the end of the day, one thing is still true, the only sure fire way to make a sale is to tell someone that you have a product for sale. Marketing is just selecting how you’re going to tell someone about your product.
I’m not a marketing expert, but I know enough to get myself in trouble. So I’ve tried a variety of promotional vehicles that break down into three basic categories: on-line, print, and person to person. By far and away the most successful vehicles are person to person. People telling other people, or the author telling someone to go buy their book works better than just about anything else. (I once sold a book to my state representative when she came doorbelling for votes.) But in the end, you can’t reach everyone you might want to reach in person.
My print experience has been minimal and I think we can all agree that newspapers are dying, so I’ll just skip straight to on-line. I’ve tried Facebook ads & boosts, newsletter ads, and google ads, just to name a few. And in my experience, very few of these things work optimally alone. I get the best results when I do multiple things at once – run a sale and an ad, and then boost the sale on Facebook. This shotgun approach makes it hard to track the mythical beautiful data of click-throughs, but it is very clear when I take one channel away that sales dip. The hard part comes at the end, when I must assess the ROI (Return on Investment) and whether or the sales justify the expense of a particular marketing channel.
Each author must find what works for them. My only real words of advice are to keep trying. Keep talking. And keep writing. And by the way, have I mentioned that I have a book on sale? An Unseen Current – a great late summer read for only $4.99.
