A couple of weeks back, I wrote a piece on marketing your books. The gist of that email was that you needed to generate meaningful Amazon book sales through your own means, through the course of a week or a little bit less. If you do that successfully, Amazon\u2019s own marketing bots will spring into action and take over \u2013 and, surprise surprise, Amazon\u2019s quite good at selling books. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s easily enough empirical evidence to demonstrate the power of this approach. It\u2019s how most (not all) indie authors conduct their affairs. Put simply: it works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that advice feels a bit narrow and technocratic. It doesn\u2019t feel as though it has much to do with books<\/em>. Your approach could well be the same no matter what you wanted to sell on Amazon. Dry cat food, mosaic tiles, novelty slippers, inflatable unicorns. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And maybe too that advice feels remote from the things that marketers normally obsess over: slogans, images, emotional pull. Don\u2019t those things matter? Isn\u2019t that the heart and point of marketing? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, OK. Let\u2019s try and knit these things together. Three observations: <\/p>\n\n\n\n One<\/strong>: books are an unusual product category. If you\u2019re selling inflatable unicorns or dry cat food, you probably aren\u2019t bringing out dozens of new products every month \u2013 whereas a large publisher is committed to producing thousands<\/em> of new titles a year. What\u2019s more, in the inflatable unicorn market, when you produce a new style of unicorn, you\u2019re probably retiring some older products at the same time. That\u2019s not true in books-land. The ocean of books you compete with gets larger all the time. Old e-books never die. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Two<\/strong>: when you buy your unicorns from Amazon, you don\u2019t give a horse\u2019s damn about the seller. I mean, yes, you want to know that the product will inflate, will look as pictured, will scatter rainbows, and all the rest. But you have no personal relationship with the seller. If the seller offered one (\u201cHey Inflatable Fan, Be so kind to sign up to my corporate mail-list so I can advertise you my great unicorns.\u201d<\/em>), I expect you\u2019d politely decline. Again, it\u2019s not like that with books. Readers like authors; authors like readers. The respect is two way and wholly genuine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Three<\/strong>: Marketing folks have a reputation for being superficial for a reason. In Banbury, the nearest big town to me, there\u2019s a Mondelez factory. That factory churns out coffee pods, amongst other things, but the multinational itself makes a gazillion different things. Oreos and Toblerone and Philadelphia and Milka and Cote D\u2019Or and Cadbury and Bournvita and very much else. Each of those brands has marketing people earnestly trying to deepen the brand values of Toblerone, or whatever else. But Toblerone isn\u2019t made by smiling Swiss milk-maids. It\u2019s made in giant factories like the one in Banbury. The marketing stuff is just glued on, cynically, to a mass-manufactured industrial product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You. Books. Readers. How does marketing work in the very unusual product category you inhabit? <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first thing to say is that your marketing work can\u2019t be skin-deep<\/strong>. The opposite. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve said it before and I\u2019ll say it again: <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you think of those books that have utterly nailed elevator pitch (for example, Twilight<\/em>, Harry Potter, Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>, Sherlock Holmes, Wolf Hall<\/em>), it\u2019s more or less literally true that the elevator pitch is present on every page. That deep promise to the reader is maintained always and everywhere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Put another way: if your book were chocolate, you really would have to make it using smiling milk-maids. With books there are no factories, no cheating. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, your marketing can\u2019t live on the page and nowhere else<\/strong>. The opposite. The book cover needs to embrace your central promise. The title does too. The blurb does. Good lord: your name does. If you were writing sweet romance and your name was Kelly McSavage, I\u2019d suggest changing your name. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And it\u2019s not just things-you-find-on-a-book which matter. It\u2019s your website. It\u2019s your social media presence. It\u2019s the tone of your mailing list. It\u2019s the images on your ads. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What you want to achieve is a perfect integration between the deep promise of the book (\u201cAmerican teen falls in love with vampire\u201d) and every other element that touches readers. I\u2019m not a huge lover of Twilight myself, but that book cover \u2013 black background, bare arms, a red apple \u2013 contains the whole promise. So does the title. So does everything else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Your marketing needs to be like that \u2013 only, pretty please, with fewer vampires. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And third: you.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019re not a factory belching out coffee-flavoured smoke in a medium-lovely south Midlands town. You\u2019re a smiling milk-maid. That apple-cheeked, full-skirted, tumble-haired miss skipping down from those flower-strewn pastures: that\u2019s you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To put the same thing just a wee bit more clearly: you are a core part of your book\u2019s marketing. So if you are writing sweet romance novels, your communications to your readers (via social media, or emails, or the author\u2019s note in the back of your book, or at a festival, or wherever else) needs to be in sync. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If people come to your Twitter feed because they like your sweet romance novels, they don\u2019t want to find you moaning about Brexit, or spreading covid conspiracy chat, or exchanging tips on how to make money at crypto. I\u2019m not saying you can\u2019t do all those excellent things, I\u2019m just saying you can\u2019t do that on your author-Twitter account, or your author Facebook page, or your author mailing list. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything has to line up. The elevator pitch. The book itself. The title. The cover. Your digital footprint. Your reader communications. You. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Do that, write well, market effectively on Amazon \u2013 and your books will sell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s easy when you know how, right? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Til soon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Harry<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple of weeks back, I wrote a piece on marketing your books. The gist of that email was that you needed to generate meaningful Amazon book sales through your own means, through the course of a week or a little bit less. If you do that successfully, Amazon\u2019s own marketing bots will spring into<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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