A vase hidden beneath velvet

This email completes a messy quartet of emails around selling books. If you’ve missed them (and – what? – you’ve missed them? YOU DON’T READ MY STUFF???), you can catch up:

• here, on how to make Amazon work for you
• here, for a more holistic view of book marketing, and
• here, on why you need, as a very first step, to get people engaged with your book offer at some very minimal level.

But look. Advice on all this stuff has a useful, wholesome feel to it, but there’s always a gap between wise advice and implementing the stuff yourself – especially if the wise advice in question is full of nonsense about time machines and inflatable unicorns.

So this email is going to try to join up some of the thoughts we’ve collected so far. The obvious thing would be to do that in relation to obvious bestsellers: books which have clearly nailed their marketing. The trouble is partly that those books now sell themselves in large part on their own aura. When Harry Potter was first marketed the core pitch was “orphan goes to wizard school.” These days, the pitch is substantially different. It’s more “What do you mean you’re undecided? This is Harry ****ing Potter.”

Also, of course, I can’t tell you what was in the mind of Bloomsbury’s original marketing folk, but I can tell you what’s been in my mind in relation to my own novels. So I’m going to use my Fiona Griffiths work as an example of marketing. I’m not saying it’s perfect – just that I’ve tried to get it right.

For clarity, the elevator pitch for these Fiona books is something like: “Crime story, where the detective once believed herself to be dead.”

Is that pretty? No. Does that sentence appear anywhere at all in my marketing? No, of course not, it would be terrible. But could that phrase be a useful memo-to-self stuck above my computer screen? Absolutely yes. And does it intrigue enough that the average crime reader would want to know more? Hell, yes.

So it’s a good pitch.

But marketing doesn’t depend on a pitch alone. You also have to map out your book in terms of some broader co-ordinates, most notably genre.

My books are:

• Police procedurals. A bad term in my case, because Fiona isn’t really one for following police procedure at all. But my books still count as police procedurals because they’re set around police offices, feature police detectives, have a police investigation at their centre, and so on.)
• British-set. That sounds obvious, in a way, and obscures a more interesting point, which is that the books are set in Wales. But from the point of view of international readers – and I’ve sold way more books in the US than in Europe – the books are British first, and Welsh second. It’s also relevant here that Amazon has a specific category for British-set police procedurals, which means there’s an actual sub-bestseller list that British crime addicts can haunt.
• Led by a female protagonist. Again, this matters to some readers and Amazon has a specific sub-categorisation for readers who want a female cop at the centre of things.

But of course, procedurals come in all kinds of flavours and, as I’ve just mentioned, my books take the ‘police’ part seriously and the ‘procedural’ part not seriously at all. If I were analysing my books not by genre, but by tone, I’d say they were:

• Literate. I don’t mean my books should win the Booker Prize, but they are read by the sort of people who do also read literary fiction – as well as people who just like a good crime yarn. My books demand a kind of literary intelligence in the reader. They care about the prose and expect the reader to notice.
• Dark. My books aren’t bloodthirsty, but they’re very much not cosy crime. They take the reality of crime, its darkness, seriously.

And that’s it, really. To market my books, you have to tell the reader fast and effectively that they are:

• Dark
• Literate
• British-set
• Police procedurals
• With a female protagonist
• Who used to think she was dead.

Ideally, you want to communicate that message as briefly as you can. Remember last week’s email: your elevator pitch isn’t there to sell the book. It’s there to prompt the next level of engagement.

You can do that with titles. My titles clearly refer to crime (“Talking to the Dead”), to darkness (“This Thing of Darkness”), and to a female protagonist with an unsettling relationship to death (“The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths”). Given that the second title there deploys a quote from Shakespeare, I’d say that the ‘literate’ box was ticked as well.

So much for the titles, but your communication also needs to run visually through the book covers. Here are mine (the US versions, which I commissioned myself): US book covers.

Those covers communicate crime. (Not thriller, by the way. There’s a stillness about the covers which suggests crime. A thriller image needs to suggest explosive action.)

They also literally communicate darkness – the covers use plenty of black.

The topmost quote, which is drawn from a British newspaper, quickly suggests to a US reader that this book is likely British. It also refers to the ‘most startling protagonist’ in recent crime fiction. That doesn’t yet say female, but it does already draw the reader’s attention to the important oddness of the central character.

By the time you turn the book in your hand, or read the book description on Amazon, you’ll quickly find that the book is indeed British, and does have a compellingly strange female detective as its lead.

And of course, I have a problem. My elevator pitch refers to Fiona’s Cotard’s Syndrome – a genuine psychiatric condition in which patients think themselves to be dead. But I can’t put that fact anywhere on the cover of the book, because it’s the big plot reveal which only happens at the very end of the book. So I’ve got an elevator pitch I can’t directly talk about.

Which is fine. You can’t talk directly about the huge plot twist in the middle of Gone Girl either, but that book did OK. If you can’t slap the pitch down directly on the page, you have to allude to it – hint at it – give the reader a feel of the shape, like a vase hidden under velvet.

The book description introduces Fiona this way:

“Rookie Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths – a new recruit with a reputation for being deadly smart, more than ordinarily committed . . . and unsettlingly odd.” That does enough to suggest what I need without giving away any plot spoilers.

I’m lucky enough to have a ton of nice quotes to use about my book, and I don’t choose the ones that are kindest. I choose the ones that most communicate the basic marketing pitch: dark, literate, female protagonist, strange. Each quote wants to be repeating those basic thoughts, echoing the cover, echoing the blurb.

You won’t have all those quotes yet – though you may have some from readers. But whatever elements you do deploy, you need to make sure they are knock-knock-knocking at the one same door you want your reader to walk through.

So far, therefore, everything has lined up: title, cover art, cover quotes, book description or blurb, quotes.

And, if things go well, you’ll even find your reader reviews lining up nicely too. I have some nice 5-star reviews that I like very much. (Thank you, readers.) But I’ve got some 1-star quotes that I like too. This one for example:

“Anyone who touts this work of fiction as resembling real police procedure, has never stepped inside a police car in real life. The measures the main character took were bizarre, illegal and wholeheartedly unusable as evidence. The only thing they got correct was the stupid amounts of paperwork involved in a homicide case.”

That’s a terrific way of telling readers what my book is and isn’t. If you like your police procedurals to be, ahem, vaguely accurate, then my book is not for you. And yes, you want sales, but no, you should never seek to sell your book to the wrong readers. There are some technical reasons there, but they boil down to this: Amazon knows whether books are positively or negatively reviewed, and whether they are or are not read to the end (in the case of e-books.) You want Amazon to think that readers love your stuff and that means not selling your books to readers who just aren’t going to like it. So that one-star review is a brilliant way to warn the wrong readers away from reading my book. That’s good. That’s helpful. It’s actually part of a good, rounded marketing effort.

If I feel like it, next week, I might show you some snippets of how the book itself lines up behind its marketing promises – not just early on, but all the way through.

Right now, the kids are in the very last stages of building a model version of the old Victorian village school for a class project. They want cotton wool smoke to come out of the chimney, and the glue gun is needed.

Hey, ho, hey ho. A-gluin’ I go.

Til soon.

Harry