Surprise! I Have No Idea Your Book is Coming Out

[Philip Overby]

Interesting blog post by author Kameron Hurley. Touches on a lot of the pitfalls of marketing and/or not marketing your work. Lots of Not Safe for Work language, so you've been forewarned.

Surprise! I Have No Idea Your Book is Coming Out | Kameron Hurley

 

[Feo Takahari]

The more I hear about all the time and effort I'm supposed to put into promoting my books just for the possibility that someone might read them, the happier I am that I have a real job that actually pays per hour of work.

 

[Philip Overby]

Marketing seems to be the number one part of being a writer people hate. Some think going the traditional route reduces the amount of marketing they have to do. I'm hearing more and more that's not necessarily true. There are advantages to just putting your stuff online and letting people read it that way.

I think I can best relate writing to farming.

(I love analogies!)

A farmer buys land, plants their crops, takes care of them, hopes for rain, hopes bugs don't eat everything, wards off crows, etc. etc. At the end, they have their crops which they hope they can then sell to make a living. But depending on the market, if a farmer has tons of awesome tomatoes and no one wants tomatoes, then all that work may feel pointless.

I think getting people to buy books is the same way. You come up with an idea for a paranormal detective story, write it, edit it, get critiques, do other writerly things and then hope you can sell it. But guess what? Oh no, paranormal detective stores are old hat. Go back to the drawing board or try again later. Or, shift your focus and try promoting in different ways.

More often than not, unless you're lucky you've gotten exposure some way earlier on (which is also a crap shoot), people aren't always going to jump on your case and say, "When is your next book coming out?" I don't really do that with my favorite authors. I hear about a release and say, "Oh cool, so and so has a book out." If no one says anything about it, I don't hear about it, therefore I don't know it exists.

Some may err on the side of not promoting anything and that works for them somehow. You have to be satisfied with what you put in one way or another. If you don't like going crazy with promoting, then don't do it. I think this article is just saying don't expect to break any sales records that way.

 

[Chessie]

The article has some well made points. My one thing about marketing is this: everytime I have tried to market my business, following some model an expert gave me, it didn't work. Granted, my little natural healing business is different than selling books, but I still have a good amount of competition to face. When I stopped marketing and just focused on doing workshops and providing higher grade yoga classes, I received a boost of patients.

Perhaps its the wrong way to look at it but I rather write more books than spend a lot of time marketing. I don't mind marketing but it seems like a waste of time. I suppose when self-publishers are doing it all themselves its a good idea to choose where time is wisely spent.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I started reading it, but it seems like it's similar to other posts on the topic I have read so I dropped it after a bit. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't it boil down to her telling us that we need to put in some time, effort and work in order to get our work read and that it won't happen automatically?

I'm in a bit of a cynical mood today, but this seems almost like a bit of a fad at the moment; trying to tell people they need to put in effort in order for their dreams to come true. Is it really that bad out there in the real world (svrtnsseland is all purple prose and butterflies) that this is news to people? I guess it is.

I'm in the same fortunate and comfortable spot as Feo. I've got a half decent, full time job that puts the food on the table. I can take my time to write and I don't need to stress about selling my work. This is a good thing, because I'm not going to bother with promotion.
Once I'm done with Enar's vacation, I'll publish it and put it out there. I'll tell my friend's it's done and I'll start working on the next story. Hopefully, by that time I'll have more of a clue what I'm doing. I'll be able to write a slightly better book in slightly less time. If I'm happy enough with it I might try and promote that for a bit to see what it's like. Maybe I'll learn something.

Third book, if I get that far. This should be the good one. This should be a book worth selling and worth promoting. I'll put that out there and I'll put some time and effort into getting it to actually sell. Hopefully, people will like it enough that they'll check out my previous works, which they'll almost certainly never have heard of.

That's my plan. It might change or it might be stupid, but for now I think it's a good one. Most importantly - even if it's not a good plan it allows me to not worry about publishing and marketing while I'm still trying to figure out how to actually write a book.

Yes, I'm new to this. No, I don't know what I'm doing. Feel free to take me with as many pinches of salt as you want.

 

[Philip Overby]

I agree Svrtnsse, figuring out how to write a really good book should be every writer's ultimate goal. We have to figure out all this other stuff as we go along.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I'm on it!

I've calmed down a little now. Was a bit worked up around lunch when I wrote the other post (unrelated reasons). I guess what I'm saying is to take it one step at a time. First learn to write, then learn to market.

 

[Chilari]

Isn't there some advice out there that says, for books 1 and 2, spend 20% of your time marketing and 80% writing books 2 and 3 respectively; for book 3, switch this around to 80% of time marketing and 20% writing book 4. I feel this is an awful lot of time to marketing, both for the earlier books and the later. 20% of book-related time is a lot, actually, when you come to think of it. Even if, like me, you're working full time and only working on your book an hour a night, that's one hour of marketing every five days.

Maybe it depends on how you define marketing, but I'd have thought updating yoru website (half an hour, one off) adding an entry on Goodreads (same again), posting a blog post (1 hour, one off) and the occasional tweet or Facebook message (2 minutes, once a week) isn't going to fill an hour every five days across an eight or ten month period. Around launch, I can justify the 20% figure - a weekly guest blog, maybe three or four tweets a week, a discount promotion, and let's count in a short story to publish for free two weeks before the novel goes live, that's still only going to be, let's say, 30% of your book-time for maybe two months. After that, five minutes here or there will be enough to tweet reviews, reply to comments and so on. Maybe 5% of your book time? And that assumes that posting on forums with your book in your signature counts as book promotion and no, you know, as general internet activities.

As for 80% after book three, that sounds excessive. Again, around the launch period obviously your activity is going to be more, and for book 3 then it makes sense to me that your marketing should be more than for books 1 and 2 because you've got more to stand to gain from it (three sales instead of one or two), but 80% of your time doesn't leave much time for writing. Assuming we're still on the hour a night thing, that's four days in five where you're writing guest blog posts and articles, tweeting and Facebooking, doing AMAs, writing promotional short stories, arranging reviews and promoting them. Now, again, maybe that's an appropriate marketing workload in the two or even three months leading up to the book launch - getting your name out there, etc - but after launch day, but for tweeting a few reviews and maybe a couple more blog posts, I can't see marketing taking up 80% of your time - again, 5% would seem reasonable. That's 3 minutes a day out of your hour on book-related activities. Oversaturation will just annoy followers and drive them away. But once the book is out there, aside from the odd tweet, maybe a promotion or two, you'd be better served writing the next book.

Not that I have any experience on this, and maybe that's what meant by the 20/80 split - in the two or three months around the book launch only, before returning to a more 95/5 writing/marketing split. But if it'sintended to be continual, then only spanding 20% of your time on book 4 means it takes four times as long to write than book 3 did, and that certainly can't be beneficial to your marketing strategy.

 

[GroundedTraveler]

I really wish I could find the original source for the quote, but I remember reading once "the best way to market your book is to write the next book." Somehow it fits into the the idea that writers hate to market and like to write. So it feels comforting to market using the skill you are good at (or at least like), writing. The idea behind it is that if you eventually write enough books, people will find you and you will have plenty for them to read. The downside is that if you do 0 marketing, the likelyhood that anyone finds you is minimal. There needs to be a balance.
I have not heard the exact formula from Chilari, but it sounds reasonable as at least a starting point for the balance.

 

[Devor]

Time. Hard work. Such last century constructs.

Writing takes a different energy than marketing. If you had all day to write, taking an hour to do something else like marketing probably wouldn't change your wordcount because most of us would need that time to rest anyways. In fact, you might be able to habitualize many marketing techniques so that they don't take much energy at all. When you view it that way, many people will find that time isn't the problem they thought it was. They're wasting so much of it wearing themselves down when they should be resting that side of their energy.

The difficulty is finding marketing techniques that work for you. I'm of the mind that many people sink a lot of time and energy into a marketing strategy that's off the mark. You can't stop with blogging and posting. You have to find ways to work with people to expand your reach. Opportunities don't just happen. You have to create them.

 

[Feo Takahari]

Time. Hard work. Such last century constructs.

Writing takes a different energy than marketing. If you had all day to write, taking an hour to do something else like marketing probably wouldn't change your wordcount because most of us would need that time to rest anyways. In fact, you might be able to habitualize many marketing techniques so that they don't take much energy at all. When you view it that way, many people will find that time isn't the problem they thought it was. They're wasting so much of it wearing themselves down when they should be resting that side of their energy.

Maybe I'd feel more hyped about marketing if I wasn't sick. (Hell, maybe I'd feel more hyped about a lot of things if I wasn't sick.) I'm already down to part-time at both work and school, because even in remission, I still spend a lot of time meeting with doctors (and a lot of time--sometimes hours at a time--on the phone with insurance bureacrats, trying to convince them to put a few thousand more dollars towards my treatment.) I can write, because it's okay if I take weeks or months to finish a short story, but I just don't feel up to taking on another job.