Let’s change the PR and marketing model…
Design your campaign to your book. Determine the audience for your book. Use social media. Give away freebies. Start a book blog. Accumulate hundreds of reviews. Turn your website into a sales engine. These are platitudes book PR reps and marketers throw at authors everyday. And not just at indie authors. Traditionally published authors who aren’t the prize stallions in traditional publishing’s stables—in other words, authors without the brand names (and formulaic output) of Baldacci, Child, Deaver, Grafton, Higgins-Clark, King, Koontz, and so forth—often have to create their own PR and marketing campaigns, while traditional publishing spams readers with full-page ads and TV promos for the afore-mentioned cash cows (yeah, I know, stallions and cash cows make for an amusing mixed metaphor—I just need the cowboys to have a Chisholm Trail).
Book PR reps and marketers give a lot of sophistic advice that’s often worthless, although they make promises like “Do it my way, and your book will make you rich.” DIY and how-to books, ditto. So-called marketing gurus running discussions on LinkedIn and elsewhere, ditto. Always the SOS, and to be nice, let’s say that means “Same Old Sophisms” (I know—I’ve reviewed a few of these books and read the gurus “sage advice” on LinkedIn and elsewhere, and I’ve concluded that Sturgeon’s Law applies well here). Most of these people don’t care what they say as long as what the platitudes they spew sound good enough to attract unsuspecting authors into forking over lots of money. The X-files advice rings true here: trust no one!
Not all PR reps and marketers are jerks, but Sturgeon’s Law does apply to most and their advice. You can gamble big and you can gamble small (they prefer big, of course), but beware the guru who says, “X is a bestselling author and s/he did Y; if you use Y, you’ll do well too.” Sophism or platitude is a polite name for that. X wrote a book that unpredictable readers loved. Ask those readers if they read X’s book because of Y, and you’ll be surprised at the answers. As a corollary to Sturgeon’s law, I’d be surprised if 90+% didn’t buy the book because someone told them about it—friends, family, or on social media (but not ads). Readers see most self-promotion via ads and so forth as spam; authors see it as spamming.
I won’t knock down those platitudes in my list one by one. They usually don’t work. That’s because readers, bless their souls, are unpredictable. And there are many other platitudes too, often accompanied by scare tactics, where the above positive messages become negative: “If you don’t do X, your book will be a failure.” What these gurus usually do is study up on the standard platitudes and then set up their scams. They want to make their money the old-fashioned way, as snake-oil sales men and women (readers might be surprised at how many women pass themselves off as gurus). If these gurus know what determines book success, I’ll vote for Donald Trump.
My worries about the current PR and marketing business model go beyond these gripes and this non-productive whining, though. I know the weasels are always out there. That’s life in this internet age. But the model is also wrong in so many ways. I’m going to call for a change here. Readers and authors should write me with their comments. Even if the gurus weren’t weasels, their model is wrong. YOU ARE the consumers and producers in the book business, and your opinions should count more than anyone else’s, certainly more than PR reps and marketers who spew out the SOS.
Let’s consider where the current business model fails:
One book per campaign is wrong. I generally do a PR and marketing campaign for a book when it’s published, basically a soft whisper like “Hey, this guy Moore has a new ebook out, folks.” The PR and marketing person who handles these campaigns is honest and does an impressive amount of work doing something I probably don’t pay her enough for, considering how I hate doing this stuff (many authors do). A new release is THE ONLY TIME an author should do a one-book campaign, though. Period. (OK, maybe you only have ONE ebook. What follows still applies.)
That said, why do PR reps and marketing people focus on one-book campaigns? In my case, I’d rather advertise an entire series (I have four) or genre (I write in three). No PR and marketing group I know of allows these options. (I’m discounting the $10K or more campaigns offered by Madison Avenue firms—traditional publishers use those, but only for the anointed.) Even Kindle Countdown Deals are book by book (and constrained by Amazon’s stupid 90-day rule). I’d do a lot more PR and marketing if this and changes indicated below were included in a new paradigm for marketing books.
One author per campaign is wrong. Many indie authors combine their novels into a marathon mystery or sci-fi edition, for example. I don’t know how effective that is, but why not do the same for a PR and marketing campaign? A consortium of authors can pool financial resources and have a campaign that benefits all of them, and their PR and marketing person can play the game of averages with all their ebooks at once yet only has one campaign for the group. This is especially appropriate for those marathon editions, even though there’s only one ebook involved.
Usually what happens for that marathon edition, though, is that one author gets stuck with setting up the campaign. That’s probably efficient and just as appropriate for an anthology of short stories by various authors. In both cases, author royalties are split among the authors, but the marketer only has to make one campaign, a savings for her/him. (With my proposal for financing—see below—the marketer would take her/his cut out of the total royalty pie.)
Restriction to published works is wrong. Whether you have one ebook or an extensive catalog, you should be writing the next book. Amazon has its silly Scout program, which requires everything to be ready. It has its silly Pre-Order program, which requires everything to be ready. How stupid is that? If everything’s ready, why not release the ebook? Amazon calls Scout crowd funding—it really channels American Idol because your book makes the cut via a popular vote. The Pre-Order program would make sense if the ebook were near release but not quite there, but that’s NOT the way Amazon set it up. Maybe it works if you want to time that release for the start of summer, Halloween, or the beginning of the holiday season, but people read ebooks all year. OK, sit on your ebook then. I publish mine when everything’s ready.
But before everything’s ready, before I have a final MS or cover, I might want to do some advertising. Sure, I can do that on my own. You know how advertising can create expectations: the new iPhone, the new James Bond movie, the new fall TV season, and so forth—Holy Cow, Batman, they’re coming soon! I do what I can in social media and on my blog, but a campaign describing the story, why I wrote it, its place in a series, its connections with other authors’ oeuvres, and including an excerpt—all that might be fun to do and create those valuable expectations. The current PR and marketing business model doesn’t allow that. In fact, it’s impossible.
How authors pay for PR and marketing is wrong. Many people in sales and services work on commission. Tort lawyers take their cut after a lawsuit is settled. Sales people might have a base salary, but they make their real money off commissions. Dentists and doctors are paid for services RENDERED. Book agents (now an endangered species) take their percentage after a book contract is signed. Even salaried workers receive their salaries AFTER they’ve done the work, NOT BEFORE. Why should PR reps and marketers be any different? Why should they receive money up front? Especially my money!
Here’s my suggestion for an improvement: I’m willing to hire a rep who works on commission. How will s/he make money off me? On a $2.99 ebook, I receive 70% royalties. I’m willing to knock that down to 55%, giving 15% from each sale to her/him. If s/he believes so much in her/his damn strategies, they should jump at the chance. Suppose I sell 1000 books. That’s already $450 for my PR/marketing person, far more than I usually pay (maybe you pay more—I run my business on a shoestring budget). I’d have 1000 readers; s/he’d make more money. OK, if s/he’s greedy, raise it to 20%. At any rate, in the unlikely event s/he helps me sell one million ebooks (maybe s/he has discovered marketings’ silver bullets, carefully guarded marketing secrets that work every time), we’re both rich. As an indie writer, I could afford that kind of campaign. I can’t afford to put a lot of money up front, though, but it seems like we’d both benefit with my paradigm switch, and s/he can work off the averages, something I can’t do.
What’s wrong with this? I’m being a wee bit sophistic myself. The hypothesis “if s/he believes so much in her/his damn strategies…” is incorrect. PR and marketing gurus don’t have the answers, and they damn well know it. In fact, they have NO answers—they just propose what they all propose and call it a marketing plan. Book success, however measured, is too much like winning the lottery. Readers ARE unpredictable. It’s like the stock market—once you add human psychology into the equation, it’s about luck as much as skill. The success of Fifty Shades is the obvious example—the author discovered a niche that no one, even the best marketing gurus, could have predicted. Same with the Harry Potter series. (Both show that it has nothing to do with quality.)
Marketing people know that’s what it’s all about—winning a damn lottery, that’s what. But in my plan, we’d both be lottery winners when it happens. Playing the averages should work for the gurus—not everyone wins Power Ball or Mega Millions, but there are many smaller prizes. Yet the gurus want us to pay up front so we, the authors, assume all the risk in this lottery.
The success of the indie paradigm depends on these changes. That’s a strong statement, but it’s easy to back it up. There’s very little investment needed beyond one’s time for most steps in the indie process. Konrath recently attacked the meme that for an author, traditional publishing is inexpensive and indie publishing is expensive (I call it a sophism, but let’s not argue semantics). Writing, editing, cover design, formatting, and proofreading can all be DIY. Although steps in that process can be outsourced to people specialized in them (I outsource cover design and formatting now), the author can either DIY or shop around for the best services—s/he’s in control.
PR and marketing are services that can be outsourced to professionals too, but the needed changes I’ve indicated are more in tune with the indie paradigm because they benefit both producers (the authors) and consumers (the readers). Readers benefit because they’re more likely to know about interesting series and groups of authors writing in one genre, or new ebooks about to be released; authors benefit because they can dedicate more time to their real job, writing, rather than trying to do someone else’s job, PR and marketing, because it’s not done right currently. And PR reps and marketers would be forced to become involved in the process and become more motivated toward making their client’s book a success, something few now do once they have the money in hand.
In elibris libertas…
