Let’s kill some book marketing myths…
Whether you’re just a reader interested in how the current publishing business works, or an indie or traditionally published writer wanting to know what works in marketing, in this article I consider some book marketing advice that I call myths. With 10+ years in this business, these are still just opinions. Yours might be different. Here we go:
Low-price books sell better. First objection: A reader might just think your low-priced book is crap. If you set the price at $0.99 or worse, give it away, you’re sort of implying that, after all. Let’s consider indies: you’ll pay $500-$1000 just to get your book to market (you shouldn’t be 100% DIY, after all, if you want a professional product), so you need to sell at least 600 copies of your book to break even—that doesn’t happen on the average. (I’m talking about nominal prices, not sales prices, but you still shouldn’t give your book away).
Second objection: A reader might wonder why you bother to write a book and wrap it in a nice, professional package if you don’t put any value on all that hard work. Are you some kind of masochist?
Third objection: Free and low-priced books often appear on websites looking to advertise them for a substantial fee (will you sell more than they charge plus your production costs?), so you’ll be hawking your cheap ebook with many other similarly priced ebooks, and your book will just become part of the noise.
A related myth is that the ebook sweet spot for indie prices is $2.99 to $3.99. Readers will pay more if they’re interested in your book, something the Big Five counts on because their ebook prices are almost as high as the ones for print versions, which makes no sense at all (small presses are usually smarter). What’s common sense (for fiction) is to charge proportionally to the number of words, in steps starting from $2.99, but $6.99 isn’t out of the question for long novels (whether anyone wants to read anything anymore, especially long novels, is another question). At least that would be using a logical measure of your hard work (we can argue about that base price for 45k to 55k words—it’s increasing—but even small presses should have a similar pricing model).
Amazon is essential to sale books. Penny Sansevieri, well-known book marketing guru, says “…Amazon can also be an author’s best friend,” my emphasis on “can.” They’re usually not! In fact they exploit both readers and writers. Take Prime. I don’t care how much you read, you can probably get more for your money if you just watch for sales and avoid that Prime fee. Book borrowing? You’re better off with your public library or Smashwords’s affiliated lenders. Amazon’s KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited aren’t an author’s friend. No way.
Authors get little help from Amazon because they (1) artificially drive prices low (as I’ve noted, you’re your low price, even that 70% royalty means you still need to sell a lot of books to break even), and (2) they spend no money on marketing until the book has lots of reviews (most of which aren’t really reviews, of course) and a high rank, a vicious circle that’s obviously difficult to break out of. (For the second point, there are orgs who ask for 5 or 10 5-star reviews and/or low prices and still require you to pay quite an advertising fee, like BookBub, but you’ll require a second mortgage to pay for their services even at that).
Mark Coker has called December 8, 2011, Dependence Day for indie authors—that’s the day Amazon announced KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited. He states, “Today, over one million ebooks are exclusive to Amazon via KDP Select and KU [Kindle Unlimited]. Those books are like leeches to slowly drain other booksellers of their livelihood.” A recent TED Talk considered the situation with Amazon, Google, and so forth and their negative influences on American retailing.
I’m not saying that you should skip putting your book on Amazon—readers do go there to look for books, after all, and they dominate the retail market, but Amazon trains authors to undervalue their hard work and readers to expect the same. But it’s time to join the Revolution! Declare your independence and don’t be exclusive to Amazon. (Oh, and by the way, I’m tired of authors like Eisler and Konrath or marketing people like Sansevieri who sing praises to their Amazon god, but you might have figured that out already.)
Books that don’t sell a lot of copies are bad. Amazon and the Big Five would like readers to think that. That’s a bunch of malarkey too. There are many good authors and good books that aren’t bestsellers, and bestsellers are just as likely to be of inferior quality as books that don’t sell well (I could name some representative titles from the entire spectrum from 100% DIY self-publishing to Big Five books, but I’ll not do so). On the flip side, books that win literary prizes often don’t sell well at all either. If you can believe Amazon stats, they’ve stated that most books (on Amazon) sell no more than 300 copies. That “most” implies they can’t all be bad, can they?
What’s this mean to a reader? Maybe you should avoid jumping onto some of those bandwagons, especially those Amazon ones that are so artificially created. I’ve been impressed with only about 10% of the books on Amazon I’ve read that have 1000+ reviews (again, that goes for indie as well as Big Five books). And Amazon’s 4- or 5-star rank is in doubt when I buy a book with 2 or 3 stars and like it. (A major reason why I don’t pay attention to reviews or rankings as a reader—see below.)
Advertising sells books. Depends on the kind of advertising. The Big Five seem to think mega-advertising sells books, but endorsements by other Big Five authors from their stables of old mares and stallions who they think are sure bets on the race course, full-page ads in the NY Times (the paper enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the Big Five conglomerates, to state it nicely), and TV spots of some old author pimping his new release (so far I’ve only seen ones by old stallions, who are frankly ready for the glue factory), turn me off. (For every such book…or author…I can always think of at least ten better ones that don’t get this kind of marketing help.)
Here’s the praxis I now follow: I’ll avoid any author of a marketing book or publicist who focuses exclusively on Amazon. I’ll purchase ebooks preferentially on Smashwords over Amazon too, just to tell the author I celebrate his choice for independence. And I’m no longer exclusive to Amazon, so you’ll only find sales of my ebooks on Smashwords. Bottom line: I’ll support Smashwords over Amazon in any way I can.
As a reader, I ignore a book’s provenance (whether it’s self-published, small press, or Big Five) and consider the blurb and “peek inside” as the only factors in my buying decision online (or doing effectively the same thing in a bookstore). As I stated, I rarely look at reviews, except my own (for promo purposes and the occasional useful criticism—few and far between these days where reviews, especially on Amazon, are either snarky or glowing but with zero information content of any use to an author).
Marketing gurus would like you to think advertising is important because they want authors’ money. Some advertising at book launch is good—authors have to let people know their book exists—but the best advertising is free—just good old word-of-mouth or its equivalent on social media (yeah, an author might need help with that—it’s time consuming).
Website SEO is important. This is just a variation on the last myth-motif: website gurus would like you to think this. Your website can be a lot of fun for you, but the best thing you can do is make sure you put new content on it every week. Nobody knows anymore how the little evil Google bots work, especially website gurus (unless they work for Google—God help them!).
Take out the acronym “SEO” and this is no longer a myth. Your website is the center of your publishing universe, especially if you’ve written a lot of books. You can give away free short stories and write interesting articles on your blog, talk about past and upcoming book events, and so forth—none of that requires SEO, just a wee bit of your time. SEO—meta data, for example—is just not that important any longer.
Statistics show…. While I believe that people like Mark Coker and Jeff Bezos have book stats—their sample sizes are certainly large enough, assuming book stats obey the law of large numbers (they might not)—but we can never prove the conclusions they derive from them or even analyze their biases. OK, maybe general bookselling trends are obtainable, which are worth absolutely nothing for you and your books. Nada. Zilch. Nil. Ничего. If you only sell a few copies of your book, you’ll never know why. And, if you sell a lot, you’re usually trying so many different marketing strategies that it’s impossible to decide which ones did the trick. Selling your books isn’t a science, by any means. Just keep doing your thing and don’t worry about stats.
If you disagree…. You might—with all or parts of this post. If so, tell me. Comment on this article. Discussions about what works and what doesn’t are important in this business. And that’s not a myth!
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Note: My candid (and controversial?) views about fiction writing and selling books are summarized in my “Writing Fiction: A Course on Writing and Selling Your Fiction.” That’s only one of many PDFs free for the asking. See the complete list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” webpage—it includes a lot of my short fiction (novellas and short story collections). For more free short stories, see the blog categories “Steve’s Shorts” and “ABC Shorts.”
In libris libertas!
