How to win at writing

So, yesterday was the first of our super-brilliant autumn webinars. Last night’s discussion was about how to self-publish your work: the mindset, the basic model, and some extra tips for adding thrust to those efforts.

One thought I had afterwards is one I often have:

It’s a kind of regret that these conversations are restricted to writers-interested-in-self-pub. Because actually, the heart of what I spoke about yesterday is Author-Led Marketing – the kind of marketing that you can do very effectively, for very low cost, and totally irrespective of who your publisher is.

In other words, let’s say you are dead-set on trad publishing. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe you even have an agent or are progressing nicely down that happy road. Very good.

Let’s say you get your book deal. (Yay!) Your book starts heading for market. (Double yay!) And then it occurs to you that the fate of your book is wholly in someone else’s hands. Those other hands will be trying very hard to get your book bought by all the major supermarkets and other physical retailers, but what if they don’t succeed? And, given that all big publishers are hurling a lot of titles at a limited number of retail slots, they are quite likely not to succeed. So what then? What happens to your book then?

The scary truth is that the marketing budget for your book will rapidly shrink down to a little bit of nonsense on Twitter and the like, and the chances of your book selling well start shrinking down to a small, round zero. Those odds aren’t much affected by how good your book is. If your book doesn’t have a substantial retail platform, its chances of rescue by word of mouth are basically nil.

That’s where author-led marketing comes in – and it’s my personal view that every serious author these days needs to invest in their own marketing system. (Invest time, I mean. The actual costs are pretty small.)

That marketing system will elevate your sales no matter what your outcomes in the world of bricks-and-mortar print.  That marketing system will guard and protect you. It will insure your career. It will increase your income and give you more flexibility over what you can profitably write.

It’s a modern author-essential.

These discussions tend to be wrapped up in a self-publishing wrapper, simply because every single author-led marketing technique of the last decade has emerged from the world of indie authors. Some of those techniques work well only for self-publishers, but the big red engine at the heart of all indie success works for everyone. Trad, indie, hybrid, anyone. It can work for you.

In other words, if you have never thought about how to market your books, it’s high time you started. You can spend an hour learning the ropes on our Webinar Replay page right here:

https://jerichowriters.com/bf-self-publishing-webinar-replay/
[The formatting on that page is a bit weird at the moment, but the video plays normally if you click it, and we’ll sort out the formatting as soon as we can.]

Right. Bish, bosh. That’s done.

There was something else I wanted to pick up from yesterday, and it was sparked by questions like these:

BENEDICT: Is it possible to make money publishing Middle grade e-books, if you’re not already a popular writer?

CAROLINE: Hi Harry, one thing that concerns me is that it sounds like to make it work, you have to be churning out books very quickly! I am not a fast writer… Is self-publishing still going to work for me?

SARAH: Hi Harry, my series is planned out at 27 books (not all written yet!), but is also planned to be split into three sets of nine books with past, present and future time periods… Do you have any tips for setting out with something this ambitious?

DIANA: I have written my first novel. Edited and rewritten after Jericho editor report. It’s literary fiction. My next novels will be significantly different. Your model seems to suggest that a series is the most important aspect of self-publishing … Lit fiction is probably not the most lucrative market?

GAIL: I’ve written a memoir – a WW2 pilot. No series. How do I build an email list?

And, look, there are specific answers to all these questions. (Roughly: yes, middle grade can work. Yes, less prolific authors can succeed with self-pub. Yes, there is probably a good way to sequence some massive 27-book endeavour. Yes, lit fic is a hard sell in self-pub terms, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work at all. And yes: marketing a one-off memoir is hard, but there may be ways to cheat the system a little.)

But the big answer is broader and bigger. So is the underlying question. Because the underlying question is often something like this:

What does success look like? What would it be to be a successful author?

There’s just no one single right answer to that question. Or rather: the single right answer depends on you and no one else.

Yet I think there’s often a tendency to think that there’s only one model of successful author. Or maybe two: Lee Child (if you’re thinking of commercial fiction) and, I don’t know, Jonathan Franzen if you’re thinking of literary fiction.

Millions of copies sold. Or prizes won. Or both.

And if you don’t check one of those boxes, you haven’t succeeded, or not really.

But that’s horse dung, my friend. Fresh, bright, and steaming.

Here are some other ways to succeed:

• You write a memoir that people cherished by you read and love.
• You write a memoir that is read and valued by those in your professional community (Air Force pilots, for example.)
• You get published by a small publisher. You have a book on your shelves. It never sells very much, but you never wrote it for huge sales in the first place. That was never the expectation or the purpose.
• You write a literary novel that perfectly satisfies you, artistically.
• You write a commercial novel that satisfies you artistically and gathers a core of passionate, supportive readers
• You earn enough money from your writing that you can chip into the family coffers and allows you to describe yourself, truthfully, as a professional author
• You don’t ever get published, not the way you once wanted at any rate, but you have a skill and a passion and a community of friends who share your passion
• You read your draft manuscript and feel real, unfolding pleasure at the story you are telling.

These things are all successes. Every one. Especially the last, because it was to generate that sense of pleasure that we all came into this ridiculous game.

Of all the Jericho Writers clients who have gone on to commercial success (and several have hit a million copies in sales and counting), the two I take most pleasure in came from a couple of writers, both well into their retirement, who wrote memoirs. Their work sold well, as it happened, but their pleasure and pride came long before their work had even hit the shelves. It wasn’t the sales that mattered: it was the accomplishment. The perfectly told story.

And, full disclosure, my own authorial career flies on the same winds, swims on the same tides, walks the same well-grassed paths.

I could, I know, make more money from my writing. I could market harder, write more, push those boundaries.

But I don’t. And won’t. I like the books I write. I enjoy the act of writing and editing. I enjoy marketing up to a certain point, but when that marketing stops being fun, I stop doing it.

There’s a model of self-pub author which doesn’t look anything like me. It’s the four-books-a-year author, who still has time to run five email lists, and dozens (hundreds?) of ads on Facebook, Bookbub, and Amazon.

Those guys definitely make more money. Some of them also write good books. But they’re not me. I admire them, but I don’t want to be them. I’ve been approached – headhunted – by publishers wanting me to enter a partnership model that would turn me into something like those authors, and I’ve said no. Definitely, definitely not. It’s just not what I want.

So define your own success. Don’t be pushed around by the success of others. Choose what constitute success for you and know that that’s the only true success there is.

Go watch that webinar replay here. We’ll make slides available as well.

Next week: James Law on plotting, and everyone loves James Law.

Please walk in an autumn wood, while there are leaves still on the tree. Take a hat, though, because the winds are chill.

But what about you? What defines your success as a writer? Tell me what matters to you and let’s all have a Heated Debate.