Please feed the animals

I joined the Twitterverse today.

Everyone says you kind of have to, and I get it: name recognition is important. Someday, somewhere, someone will be scrolling through Amazon Fantasy titles and see my name and think “Hey, I follow her on Twitter and she’s not a total idiot!” and then maybe 1% of the people who do that and think that will actually buy a book.

That’s how the reasoning goes, anyway.

I am not so sure that really works, or, even if it does work, that it will make a real difference. Right now, most of the people following me are my Facebook friends who are already well aware that I write. They see those occasional (well, hopefully, they read them as “occasional”) posts about the books: where you can buy them what they are about, and where you can see reviews about them.

Of course, if I say something about the books and someone retweets that, and someone who follows them decides to check them out…

Sometimes it feels as though I live in a vast echo-chamber and all I hear are my own dreams and desires bouncing back at me.

And then, like the other day, a complete stranger, unconnected to anyone I know, buys, reads and REVIEWS one of my books.

You cannot imagine the dizzying delight when that happens.

I’m just going to go bask in the reflected sunlight now. See you later.

“Flashbacks” goes to Amazon

For all you Kindle-users.

Marketing Redux

Almost every day, I see posts about “How to market your book” or someone sends a link to a site that advertises a video to teach you the real skinny on book marketing.

Faithfully, I click. Hope ever, hope on.

And you know what? I never learn anything I didn’t know before.

The first piece of advice is that you were supposed to start your marketing campaign before you ever put pen to paper (or, as in most cases, opened that first Word.doc.), and that you have ALREADY LOST OUT ON VALUABLE PROMOTION TIME!!! because you didn’t.

Now, let’s leave aside the fact that this probably is the most negative start ever to what ought to be an upbeat article.

It’s backwards and idiotic, and I’ll tell you why.

Think about this: what if you do all that marketing for a “tender, delicate, coming-of-age story” and your book winds up being a horror epic about sexual repression and how vampires will suck you dry and leave your empty husk to wander the earth, moaning, forever?

You’ve just spent countless hours attracting a potential audience that is the very antithesis of your target market, and proved that you cannot be trusted.

What if you never actually finish your book, even? That’s a whole lot of wasted time and bandwidth – stuff you can never get back to use for making and advertising your delicious little crocheted dragons that you can sell on Etsy. Or, possibly more to the point, having a long, luxurious bubble bath or six.

The second piece of advice that is always given is to build an enormous social media platform.

Well, duh. If you got that from a Facebook link or post, you probably already have figured this out. And let’s not forget how much time is sucked up by that social media (I mean: Look. Here I am, blogging, instead of getting my main character out of the impossible pickle I put her in last week.)

If someone has a book on the way or already out, and hasn’t put up an author page yet, it is true that they are not maximizing what tiny influence they have within their control. But judging by the number of author pages I have liked just even in the last ten days, I am pretty sure that there isn’t a single writer in the western world who doesn’t have one. Some of them have separate book pages, too. That’s a lot of pages.

Pages and pages that are “Liked”, of course, by every other author in their genre and a slew of other authors, in exchange for you liking their page, too. And there’s a lesson here, which I’ll get back to in a minute.

Then, with fanfare, they give you the real “nugget”, which is to make some adverts with links and post them on a huge long list of Author Promo sites, and, as their special gift to you, they include an clickable link to a list of all the sites they know of where you can do this.

You know who posts on those sites? Every other damned author on the planet not currently actually engaged in writing something.

You know who is reading those endless promos?

No one.

Readers don’t go to them. Other authors, trying to sell books go to them for the 12 seconds it takes to add their promo. They aren’t reading other authors’ promos – why should they? They are there to sell books.

Social media, as far as selling books goes, has turned into one enormous echo chamber. It’s a whole bunch of authors screaming mindlessly at each other, ad infinitum.

Just the same as all of us “liking” each others’ author pages. It’s not really accomplishing anything in terms of reaching READERS.

The articles and videos and guides will also tell you to do free giveaways, another obvious suggestion of limited utility, because the culture of “free” is what is keeping a lot of people from buying your books in the first place. There’s so much “free” content out there that most people, consciously or not, are waiting for you to knuckle under and give your stuff away in desperation.

And finally these gurus give you what must be the most obvious and pointless “tip” in the universe. They tell you that “word of mouth” is the best advertisement. They really, really stress this, but when it comes to the “how” part, they are markedly silent.

I have, by rough horseback guess, clicked and read (okay, maybe “started to read” would be more accurate) a thousand of these articles and videos and free guide e-book downloads.

Not a single one has given me any new ideas. Not even one of them has told me something I hadn’t already figured out before. Not a single one of these “tips” has resulted in verifiable sales, except the word-of-mouth one, and that was simply my friends buying one or two books and then telling their friends about it, and yeah, social media helped this out, but what sort of person, armed with the most minimal of 21st century social skills and awareness would have been unable to parse this out for themselves?

So – enough already. I’m swearing off those “100 Surefire tips to market you book” sites and videos and free e-guides.

My new plan is to find ways to physically meet people who read books, and give them actual, personal reasons to try my stuff out.

It probably won’t do exponentially more for sales.

But it cannot possibly do less.

 

From the “Why Would You Ever?” file…

Apparently, people lie about the books they’ve read.

It seems ridiculous (and when I went through the list of books people apparently claim to have read I found only two that I really had not read: Anna Karenina and Fifty Shades of Tripe but I don’t lie about it) because the only person missing out when you do this is you, as a reader…someone’s bound to catch you out on it, anyway.

What they found was that people who have seen a movie or TV adaptation often say they’ve read the book. Maybe they say that so they can intone those sonorous words “The book was better…”

Or maybe they actually believe they have read the book. I paused on “Great Expectations”, because it was so long ago that it was pretty hard to be sure, until I remembered discussing it with my mom, afterwards. She wasn’t a big fan of Dickens, and we argued, which is why I’m pretty certain I did read it.

Anyway, I started to wonder if someday maybe people would lie about reading my books.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps they already do.

http://www.shortlist.com/home/the-20-classic-books-most-people-have-lied-about-reading#gallery-20