Part 1: The Goal Of The Book Marketing Exercise
In which we take a fresh look at the challenges authors face in marketing books
By Michelle LaPointe
My friend and colleague Becky Remy and I have decided to conduct an experiment. We want to find out if there’s a different way to do book marketing; one that is effective, practical, and sustainable for authors and for booksellers, especially independent booksellers. We have no idea if it will work. But we want to use our careers’ worth of skills and experience doing other kinds of marketing to find out. We also hope that others will weigh in with their experience and insights.
Here’s what we mean by the terms effective, practical, and sustainable:
Effective
Whatever strategies we come up with or approach we develop should sell more books, as measured by…books. And as measured by the revenue generated by selling books. Likes, impressions, shares, followers, size of your mailing list are not important as measures of success. They’re tools—and not the only tools—that can get you there.
Practical
Not every mix of tactics will work for every author, every book, every career. But there should be enough options in the mix that most people will be able to find tactics that they can use without having to learn a dozen new skills, spend a fortune, or devote thousands of hours to the effort.
The oft-repeated expectation that “anyone can do it”, with the “it” being the wide and baffling array of commonly recommended book marketing tactics—anything from building a huge mailing list to churning out a constant stream of promotional content in multiple media to mastering technical platforms—is technically true.
But it is technically true in the same way that “anyone can build a motorcycle” is true. All you need is unlimited time to learn, the right parts and equipment, many thousands of dollars to spend on the effort, and people to hold the bits while you weld, screw, solder, wire, or whatever them together. You also must be willing to make unlimited numbers of mistakes until you produce a motorcycle that will get you from Point A to Point B without sputtering to a stop every ten feet, or, alternatively, bursting into flames.
Feel like that is asking a lot? Slacker! Anyone can do it! All the Internet gurus say so!
Sustainable
We don’t mean “sustainable” in the eco-friendly sense. We mean “sustainable” in the sense of writers being able to effectively promote their work while also being writers, with the time and space to continue living, observing, and creating new work.
“Sustainability” has two elements: temperament and time. Maybe you’re an extroverted author, like Dorothy Parker or John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester. (You thought I was going to say F. Scott Fitzgerald, didn’t you? But I have the Internet, so I dug up a hard-partying 17th-century poet instead.)
Maybe, if he’d been born in the 21st century, the Second Earl of Rochester would relish being in the social media spotlight. Maybe he’d be the Randy Rainbow of poetry. But a lot of writers—perhaps most of us—are much more comfortable behind the keyboard than in front of the camera. It makes no more sense to expect introverted authors to become social media gadflies than it does to ask the CPA who reads the rules at the Oscars to replace a professional comic as the emcee.
It is equally ridiculous to ask authors to devote vast quantities of time to promoting their own work. One case study on Substack describes an author who is able to sustain her audience on the platform by working on it “just” three days a week. Three days is 60% of a normal workweek. If that’s what’s needed, that leaves just two days for day jobs and new writing.
It’s also a standard that’s often asked of other creative professionals (including independent filmmakers, artists, and artisans) and small businesses, but never of larger enterprises. No one would ever suggest that the CEO of one of our client companies spend 60% of their workweek making TikTok videos instead of doing what they do best, which is running their company.
Then there is the big chunk of time that authors need to write without promoting. This isn’t a challenge for everyone. There are authors out there who can easily split their days between creating their work and engaging with other human beings. But there are other authors (I am among them) who can’t talk to anyone else while they’re writing—and don’t want to, either. These writers need to “check out” of social media, marketing efforts, and even talking to other humans in order to finish. We’d like to quantify that, if we can. Is it possible? Is there a threshold of time, posts, engagement that are critical? With the exception of, perhaps, YouTube–where it’s widely known that if you stop swimming daily in the content current, you drift to the bottom and die–we don’t know.
So, is there a better way for authors to market their books? Our instincts and experience tell us that their must be. We just want to find it.
About the painting: 17th-Century partier and poet, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. by Jacob Huysmans. The Earl is shown in a hold-my-beer moment, as he dangles a laurel wreath over the head of a monkey while daringly looking the other way. Painted somewhere between 1665 and 1670. Painting of the Earl is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Background image is from Envato Elements.
Leave a Comment