Promotion: @#$%^&*@#$!!!!

My publisher brain put itself on hold recently:  I’m still writing my ass off, but there is no urge whatsoever to put it up.  Granted, I’m working on a couple of novels right now, but believe me, I have plenty of back material that still needs to go up.  So what’s going on?

It turns out that being a publisher requires creativity.  Which sounds obvious, but it isn’t, not when you’re in the thick of it.

Here’s my internal monologue:

  • Okay, covers, covers require creativity…pretty interior layouts…yes, yes…I get very creative with blurbs…
  • Wait, promotion?  Promotion needs to be creative?!?!
  • But I only have so many creativity points today and I want to spend them all on wriiiiting!  (I think this is the place where a lot of writers stop and say, “I think I’ll just hand all this off to a publisher.”)
  • No, wait.  There’s something else going on, rumbling around down there…

There’s something trying to come out from the subconscious.  It’s not here yet.  But, interestingly enough, I can see a little bit of the shape of it.

I ended up at Beth A. Grant’s website the other day, based on a friend’s recommendation, twice removed.  (That means, I read the stuff at the original recommendation’s link, and the original link led to another link, which led to there, which, on second thought, needs a new phrase for it so you don’t have to explain that it’s not a friend twice removed but a link twice removed–“two jumps removed,” maybe?)  It’s a marketing and promotions site.  (Most writers will shudder there.)  But she has some good stuff.  My favorite point so far is the idea that not everyone should market the same way…which she breaks down in a more analytical way into personality types.  It may be foolish, but I love me some personality types.  When I hit the sorting hat in Harry Potter I cheered.

If you’re curious, you start here.  But in short there are two axes–and I end up on the nerd end of the boxes, where I think the best thing I can do is make good content (versus being a good “speaker” or a compelling salesperson).  But this site is all about…providing people a service.  Not about writing and selling fiction–not about hustling art.  So there’s no cut-and-dried plan there that fits my creativity.  (And yes, art provides a service–but if you take a look at the concrete marketing tips, the concept just doesn’t carry over clearly.)

But it does help explain some things.

I have a hard time formulating my “brand” and selling it, because my brand is my content; either you like it or you don’t.  But if I look at it a different way–in a nerdier way, although that isn’t the language she uses–and I’m pretending I’m giving a book recommendation to someone out of my own work, it becomes much easier to identify who should get what.  My kids’ fiction?  Is for smart kids who are bored with reading; it’s very mischievous writing.  You shouldn’t give this to your kid if they are the kind who always obeys rules, if they’re horrified by scary movies, and if they aren’t constantly pushing buttons to see what they get away with.  So if your kid is a brat from 8-12 years old, they’ll probably like at least some of what I write.  Which is, um, a brand, although when I try to fit the two ideas together they just don’t work.

But.

I don’t see any really good “Marketing for Nerds:  The Book” floating around.  There are marketing nerds, yes, and marketers are learning from nerds, but mostly nerds who need to market are treated as people who need a crutch, rather than people who need to find their own voices.  I do like Seth Godin, but there’s something subtly off for me about his work.  It’s inspiring, but it’s not concrete–How do you promote book X?  Rely on the long tail!  Provide good customer service!  Don’t worry, you’ll find a niche!  All great philosophy, but…what do I do about it?  How do I make a jump toward something practical?  Or something fundamental, some core idea that I can use to form a specific plan?

I look at the way other writers are marketing, and…wow, I could copy what other writers are doing (and I have), but is it really a way to stand out?  I could chase the latest “thing,” but…well, no.  That’s not actually what I want.  I don’t want to play the numbers.  I don’t want to calculate the best time of the year to release.  I don’t want to figure out the best sites to put up ads on.  I don’t want to hound people to buy books on Facebook and Twitter.  I don’t want to obsess about new release lists.  I don’t want to go on the Endless Blog Tour.  I don’t want to give away bookmarks and Kindles…I don’t want to bribe people to like my work, and I don’t want to pound them into giving up and buying my stuff in the hope that I’ll shut up about it already.  I mean, I sound really negative about it, but it’s about me, not you.  I don’t like these things.  They might convince me to buy stuff, but I don’t want to be the one doing them.

Yes, I’ve run into the idea that I just need to be (essentially) more woo-woo about the whole process and accept what the universe gives me–but I’m a nerd.  I analyze.  In fact, I analyze so that when I get down to the real meat of the matter, I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m doing the right thing.  I analyze in preparation for walking out into the woo-woo, not so I can avoid doing so.

So I both don’t want to analyze (at least, using the analytical tools that other people are using), and yet I must analyze.  Which means I need to start thinking about new tools.

I don’t have them yet.  Sorry:  I feel like this will be really useful if I can pull it off.  But I got nothing so far.  I’m running through the writers I follow online…and they aren’t the ones that I read, except for Stephen Brust, and the fact that he writes amusingly online isn’t why I first started reading him.  I’ll pick up a book IF another person recommends it to me and IF I like the opening page…but that doesn’t seem to be something that, as the writer myself, I can directly control–other than going on the Endless Blog Tour.  (I don’t mind writing blogs, but I’d rather they be nerdy ones, not interviews about my books themselves.  I wrote it already; my interest has passed on.) I am already working my ass off on writing better (and thus attracting awards and sales and whatnot that will speak for me).  I got that.  If I wrote a “Marketing for Nerdy Writers” book that would totally be a chapter, but it can’t be the only chapter, because it won’t tell you what else to explore, what principles to follow.   “Write better” is a sine qua non, not an action plan.

…And I fully expect that whatever I find will not actually be reinventing the wheel, just rediscovering it personally.  Heh.  I know I have a really good idea if I can trace it back to Neil Stephenson.  He’s a nerd.  I should look at his promotional prowess.

3 thoughts on “Promotion: @#$%^&*@#$!!!!”

  1. Pingback: deannaknippling.com » Blog Archive » Flaws & Honesty

  2. Here’s the thing. No one knows what they’re doing when it comes to marketing. I like a lot of the so-called experts because they have a lot of great ideas. Some of those ideas work sometimes. Often, some of those ideas stop working. When it comes to selling books, no one really knows what works and what doesn’t. This is why publishers are so selective (and why traditionally published books go out of print).

    This might be the gateway to the road to depression, but stick with me a second.

    There isn’t a magic bullet, but there are some truths. The key ingredients that I see in all of the successful authors are:

    #1: They keep writing and releasing more work.

    #2: They have a dedicated email newsletter that they update regularly.

    #3: They have a website on a domain that they own where readers can always find them.

    I’ve been thinking about these things a lot lately, maybe because you and I have been talking about promotion. Maybe you don’t need to worry about the other things. Maybe you just need to concentrate on those three.

    My strategy for the next year is:

    Write my face off from September to December of this year so that, starting in December all through 2014, I can release something new every month.
    Send monthly newsletters updating my readers on my works in progress. Give new readers an incentive to subscribe (a free short story in the world of Crazy Comes in Threes).
    Maintain an organized website where my readers can find information about me, my books, and upcoming events. Try to blog regularly about normal, non-writing things. Throw in writing advice from time to time for those who liked the posts I used to write.

    Perhaps you can do something similar.

    You said you’re working on quite a few projects at the moment. Do you think you’ll have them ready in time to do steady releases?

    You already do a great newsletter. Maybe it’s time to focus on bringing in new subscribers. Face-to-face events are a great way to do that. You can set up a signup sheet at your table or hand out business cards encouraging people to sign up for a free short story.

    You have lots of great content on your website, but perhaps it needs a little organization, like a single page listing all of your books so that new readers can find them all in one place.

    Try these, rather than forcing yourself to think of creative things. I agree that that approach is a little too abstract.

  3. This could be. I do feel like a kid at a high school dance who has a cute girl come up to him and can only say, “Hur hur hur” at times, though. Maybe my task is to know what I don’t know.

    I have enough backlist that I could stop writing for a year and still have enough for steady releases for that year; it’s a matter of time/focus.

    See–I go, “I wrote a newsletter, but nobody buys things because of it.” I don’t see numbers go up after I release a newsletter, so I assume it’s not working, and it slides on the priority list. And I never would have gone, “Maybe I need to make signing people up for the newsletter a goal for F2F stuff.”

    Organization, yes. I have identified what I want to do next there, but I’m having technical difficulties. But again–I don’t see benefits after I reorganize, so the priority slides.

    I’m not making sense again…I’ll think some more. Thank you 🙂

Leave a Reply to De Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *