Marketing Versus Publicizing

I was at the local Jot conference and I heard something that's wrong about "marketing." This bears on my earlier remarks about the business conversation between successful writer and editor.

When you're writing and hoping to make money doing so, you hear about an author's platform.

I think we make a mistake to focus exclusively on author's platform, and we make a mistake to call that "marketing."

Well, yeah, it's getting your work in front of the people with money who might spend it on your work. Those people are called a market. And you want them to know what you have for them.

But it's telling, not listening.

The writer should think of marketing as a dialog. When you speak, but not listen, it is not a dialog, it is a monologue, a speech, a sermon. Maybe you ought to do some listening.

I want you to imagine you've got all the people who buy books in a comfortable sitting room. (More likely a stadium, but please suspend disbelief for a moment.) You know that book buying people are hungry for something cool to read. They've got money and they want to exchange it for a way cool story.

Some of those people will say, "I like C. S. Lewis or I like Robert A. Heinlein," so you can get their money by simply being that guy. And after you're established as a famous author, you can get people's money by just being you regardless of what you write.

But since both of those guys are dead, and the people in this imaginary sitting room have read all their books, you want to find other things they like. You can only find out what they like by LISTENING to them.

Do those people in this virtual sitting room like sparkly metrosexual vampires? OR are they sick of them and want someone to stake the twee nitwits?

Most likely both answers are yes. Learn what folks like, and if you don't naturally grok the market, talk to someone who does. I'm not suggesting you write trash just because the public demands it. You know better than anyone what you can do a good job at, and if you're like most creatives, you have more ideas than you have time to implement them. I'm suggesting that listening will improve your target selection.

Apples to Eat vs Apples to Sell

This post is a sort of "why I am not writing" apology.

Some years ago a friend at a company I was working for related a conversation he'd had with the Vice President of Sales. The guy said, "You're worrying about 'apples to eat,' not 'apples to sell."

When my friend told me a bit later, he was in high dudgeon. He regarded this as sleazy--a sort of cheat. Like the software my friend was building didn't have to work, it just had to look good. I thought the same until recently.

My grandmother's house passed to my father when she died, and it was part of his estate when he died. And for reasons it would be tedious to read about, I have to manage this property.

Previous tenants left the house in something of a wreck and I've been spending every available hour there effecting repairs, cleaning, painting, and replacing trim. Among the many problems this property has is its drain field.

If you don't live in the country, you may not know what a drain field is. When your house is not attached to the city sewer, you need a means of getting rid of dirty water. I'm most familiar with disposing of dirty water with a drain field.

Water flushed from the toilet goes into a septic tank and from there it goes into a drain field. The drain field consists of a layers of sand, gravel and/or crushed stone with some means of supplying waste water to it. Septic waste water soaks into the ground, percolates through the soil, and is purified in the process.

This is centuries-old technology and the county health department manages inspections and issues permits for everything. This is the proper role of government.

The house can not be occupied, and it certainly cannot be rented out without a properly functioning drain field.

This project is a big deal because it entails a huge number of discrete tasks in addition to fixing the drain field. We've gotten a lot of things done and quite a few things remain undone.

The secret of managing residential rental property is getting good tenants. And good tenants need to be actively sought out. The goodness of a tenant has nothing to do with skin color, race, creed, or sexual proclivities. It has to do with taking care of things, living like a civilized human being, and paying rent on time. Good tenants generally have no urgent need to move. If someone is urgently seeking immediate housing, you definitely want to know why before you rent to them.

This translates into lead-time. To rent a house on June 1st, you want to be advertising in the middle of May. And to be advertising the house, you'll need pictures. Thus, last night I was putting up trim and my wife was going around behind me staging rooms and photographing them. And I'm composing ad copy when I have a few spare neurons.

 I gave my brother a status report last night and he pointed out the drain field wasn't ready.

That's when it hit me. That Vice President of Sales wasn't advocating a shoddy job papered over with glitzy cosmetics. My project will be complete when I have a nice house with good tenants. Right now, to get good tenants, I have to start advertising before everything is set. I need "apples to sell" so that I can start advertising. I can use the time between advertising (now), and renting to some good tenants to make the substance as good as the appearance. At the end of the day, I'll have "apples to sell AND eat." But right now, I have to get the cosmetics right.

You probably don't have to prep a house for rental, or build a complex software solution, but your writing may be in a state of partial completion. It'll take a while to find an agent, or editor, or do the things you need to bring it to market yourself. However, getting that person or persons on board  can be achieved with a polished synopsis and a double-polished first chapter. This is the "apple to sell" which you need today in contrast with the "apple to eat" you deliver tomorrow.

It is not a cheat, if you really do deliver on the non-cosmetic substance.

Create Marketing Pieces

(This is step #15 of my How To Publish An eBook thang)

What's the number one thing you can do that will sell your ebooks?

You could get an interview on Oprah Winfrey's show, but that's hard since I think that show is off the air. And all the other forms of mass marketing and merchandising can also drive sales. If you can get Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh to read your book and talk about it on the air, you'll sell a boat load of books to their listeners. Same goes for not just right wing radio commentators, but for anyone who has a big broadcast voice. If you can do this, God bless you. And you're buying lunch next time, OK?

Before I got distracted by that last paragraph I had in mind the simple process of one-on-one selling. You've done a great thing writing a book and you should be proud of it.

If you were raised right, you learned it's not nice to toot your own horn. Let another person sing your praises and all that. Yet there is a time and a season for putting your best foot forward and you've got to be ready where it concerns that ebook you've published.

The big advantage of going with a traditional publisher is marketing and distribution. Amazon has done a good job of empowering you where distribution is concerned, but you still have to proactively engage the demands of marketing.

Even if you are as bad at marketing as I am, someone is going to ask you what your book is about. You will need to have your elevator pitch ready: cast your work in its best light in the span of 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This elevator pitch cannot be composed too early in the writing process. You may run into an editor or publisher with a suitcase full of money to induce you to NOT self-publish your work after you wow them with a boffo elevator pitch.

If that goes well, the person you are talking to may not be able to buy your work immediately.

You want to put something in hand that serves as a reminder so s/he can go back later and buy your work.

For The Aristotelian I had a local print shop make up a bunch of  postcards. That was OK, but I found that most times when I was having a conversation about it were times when I did not have any of those postcards on my person. Thus, when it came time to make up something like that for Finding Time, I decided to have business-cards made up instead.

You'll want to put your cover art on the front, and you'll want to put some kind of contact info on the back. I was going through a QR code kick a year or so back and I decided to have the hyperlinks in the last two paragraphs encoded as QR codes and fit my name and email beside it. Next time I'll probably quit the QR code business. It's cool, but nobody uses it.

It's very easy to keep a dozen of your work's business cards in a holder you keep in your coat pocket so that after you deliver your elevator pitch, you can give out your card.

Someday, you may find yourself manning a table at a book fair, trade show, or convention. You might want to get bookmarks printed up. I haven't done that, but some of my friends have. Other writers I know have had pens, calendars, and key rings made. You'll want to have these little bits of swag for you to hand out. It's also a good idea for you to have a few book-on-demand printed paper copies of your book for sale. If you're really ambitious, you can have those huge six-foot-high by two-and-a-half-foot-wide banners made to hang up behind your table. Or maybe set up a big-screen TV with your book trailer running on continuous loop.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)