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We've spent seven weeks thinking about how to sell books. In my last seven emails to you, we have reviewed: 

1. The split in the books market between ebook and print 
2. How print books are sold by publishers
3. How you can maximise your chances of success when working with a trad publisher
4. How to sell via Amazon
5. How to use book promo sites to sell your ebooks
6. How to use Facebook
7. How to build your mailing list. 

If you are confident you want to self-publish, you can probably afford to (mostly) ignore emails 2 and 3 from the list above.

If you are confident you want to be traditionally published (and are also confident that you’ll get the chance to do that) then emails 5 and 6 are less relevant to you – though email 7 is very relevant, and you’d be nuts not to properly absorb the lessons of email 4.

But I want to end with some thoughts on mindset. All that follows, but two things first. 

One, please can EVERYONE take a look at Feedback Friday this week. I'd love as much involvement as possible. 

And two: 

NOVEMBER ALERT!

It's November. This month, you can become a member for 30% off our normal prices. Members get: 

• An entire suite of video courses. On How to Write, on taking your novel From Good to Great, on Getting Published, on Self-Publishing – and more. You could easily spend well over £1,000 on individual courses and not get as much useful information as you do from these. 
• A huge collection of masterclasses. We have hundreds of hours of masterclasses: on craft, on finding agents, on working with publishers, on marketing your work – and much more. If you’ve got a concern about writing or getting published, we almost certainly have an expert to answer it. 
• A vast range of live events. From “Ask Us Anything” to themed months on Build Your Book and Getting Published, and now including an online Writers Retreat, we have a ton of events to keep you educated and motivated – and in community with other writers. 
• AgentMatch – a proprietary database of 1400+ agents, complete with detailed profiles and easy search / filter tools. 
• Feedback Friday and query letter reviews - plus discounts on our other services. And more! 

Most of all, you get to be in a community of expertise and passion. I was in an internal meeting the other day with three of my Jericho colleagues. And – I noticed that all of us, all four, were published authors. We’re in this business because we care about it – and know a heck of a lot about it. With Premium Membership, we aim to make that knowhow available to you. 

You can sign up today at 30% off our normal prices. Info here. I really hope you do. We love serious writers and that includes you. 

BACK TO MINDSET...

Right: mindset. 

Writing books is not easy. Many of you will therefore set the endpoint of your dreams to getting published: getting an agent, getting a book deal. After that, presumably, the whole show is in the hands of grown-ups who know what they’re doing, right? And you can kick back, and write more books, and let the adults do their thing.

Except –

That’s not reality. Writing books is hard. Selling them? Also hard.

There are (estimated to be) well over 12,000,000 ebooks on Amazon. There are probably over 50,000,000 books of all varieties and formats on Amazon.

How many of those actually get sold? A minority. It’s probable that at least half of ebooks have made no sales at all. Not one. And if you set even a very low bar for acceptable sales – a few dozen, say – then well under 10% of books will ever reach even that hurdle.

Having a big publisher is certainly some sort of protection against these frosts. If you have a Big 5 publisher, you will sell some books, for sure, and not just in the low dozens.

But…

Print publishing is still a matter of 12 portly gentlemen running for the same door. On ground that’s slippery with rain, and in a high wind.

My first Fiona Griffiths book was published by one of the best editors, at one of the best imprints, at maybe the best publisher in New York. The book was a Crime Book of the Year in a couple of major US newspapers. It was positively reviewed in the NY Times. It got starred reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. It had a halo around it: it was destined to do well, no?

But it failed. The hardback didn’t do great, but the paperback was so shunned by retailers that it sold fewer than 1,000 copies across the entire United States. It was that failure which led me to buy the book back from the publishers and to self-publish instead. Buying the book back cost me $10,000 but within a short space of time, as a self-publisher, I had vastly expanded my readership and was making over 4 times the money I’d earned by way of advance from my trad publishing.

The moral of this story?

Not that self-pub is good and trad publishing is bad: they both have strengths and weaknesses, and the right choice for you depends very much on your book and your situation.

No. Rather, the moral is that you will always need to stay in control of your own sales destiny – or as much control as you can possibly retain. With that in mind, here is some final advice before I end this chain of emails and turn back to the happy busyness of the Writer’s Craft.

Mindset

Writers – myself included – tend to want to skip the boring bits.

Writing – that’s fun. Editing – well, I hope that’s fun, because it’s desperately important. Getting an agent and a publisher? Well, that’s fun and it’s glamorous and you get paid, so that’s a particularly good bit. And being published? Seeing your book on a shelf somewhere? Dropping the book in your mum’s kitchen waiting for her to go all pink and shiny with pride? Also good bits.

But to turn that book contract into sales success relies on lots more.

And yes, among other things it relies on luck. But focus on the parts you can control.

Ask yourself:

• Is your book cover good? Not just good in itself, but good in comparison with its immediate competitors? This issue is so important, I’ll revert to it in a moment.
• Is your blurb strong?
• Is the pricing of your ebook realistic?
• Does your Amazon book page look OK?
• Have you been sent a proof of your ebook? And is that ebook laid out in a way that will boost your mailing list and encourage sales of further books by you?
• If physical bookstores don’t take your book in any quantity, does your publisher have a meaningful Plan B – which would need to place Amazon and your ebook at the centre?
• Does everything – the cover, the blurb, the other marketing materials – line up with the pitch that you’ve spent so long thinking about and honing?
• Is there anything you can do to foster your relationships with booksellers, with retail buyers, with book bloggers, with reviewers, with festival organisers and so on?

One of the most professional authors I know used to visit bookstores in every town she went to. She introduced herself. She offered to sign books. She bought a coffee. She made nice.

She also never let her publisher send out proof copies without including a handwritten note from her.

She also wrote – always – to thank festival organisers and the like for events she’d attended. She made sure to know the names of book bloggers, and to find out about them, and to ask them about their children / dogs / pet iguanas the next time she saw them.

Her mindset was right. Every detail mattered. No detail would even add 1% to sales, but if you take care of enough details, these things start to add up.

You can have the right mindset and things can still go badly wrong – but your chances improve, and improve drastically. Don’t sit back. Don’t let the grown-ups take care of things, unsupervised. These are your books. You care more than they do.

Lean in.

Mailing list

I spoke in the last email about how to build your email list, but I didn’t say this:

Your mailing list is your strongest insurance against disaster.

If you have a robust mailing list, you kind of know that you can sell books and make money. (Not if the books are terrible. Not if you publish them unprofessionally. But if you do those things right.)

And that means, even if you are traditionally published and want to go on being traditionally published, you still need that list because of the protection it confers. It will be helpful if you (slightly) change genres. It will be invaluable if you switch publishers.

Build that list. Cherish it.

The book cover

It’s odd, but no one – including me – ever talks enough about book covers.

However, those covers are INSANELY important.

They matter in print publishing, because retail buyers are picking from a flipping catalogue. They are looking at one page of yadda about your book to see if they want to order it. The brightest, most attractive thing on that page is your book cover. They have essentially no text of yours to look at. The book cover (and your elevator pitch) matters hugely.

And in a bookstore: readers are hesitating over which book to pick up. They can’t yet see the back of your book. What else do they have to go on, aside from its cover?

On an Amazon selection page, the issue is even more devastating in a way. Users can’t even see a full cover, they can see a squashed-down icon of a cover. They see that, and book title, and price, and a summary of review ratings.

The cover is vastly influential at that first moment of choice – and a bad cover can easily crush your sales conversions here severalfold. A good cover (and title) can increase conversions severalfold.

And it’s not just that first moment of choice. It’s everything else, too. Your other visual marketing material will be (or should be) keying off that cover. You can’t, for example, create a good Facebook ad unless you have a strong cover. I mean, literally, you cannot do it. Because if you place the book cover on the ad, it looks weak, because the cover is weak, and you won’t get clicks. And if you don’t place the cover on the ad and use something more visually attractive instead, then you will get the clicks, but you won’t get the conversions when people land on your unattractive Amazon page.

So, your book cover matters.

If you’re an indie author, you sort of know that already and will have put proper time in to getting the cover right.

If you’re trad published, it’s very easy to be seduced by the grownups-know-best thing and to accept the cover you’re given. (And everyone will try to massage you into accepting that cover; publishers do not love having to redo something that’s been settled internally, even if they secretly know that the settled-internally option is not yet good enough.) So trad-published authors need to be on their guard. If that cover seems off to you, it is off. Fight for a better one.

Take your time 

When you’re writing and editing a novel, it’s almost a matter of pride amongst authors to boast about how many drafts they’ve done. How many times a paragraph gets re-written.

But with marketing, it’s often the other way around. We like to get a job done so we can move on to the next thing that’s calling – maybe, some damn paragraph that wants another rewrite.

Do not be like that.

I’ve found when I mock up (say) Facebook ads on Canva, that I do something, and I like it. Yes: I like it after trying this element here or there, and this colour or that one, and this font for another.

But I’m quick to like something.

If I come back to the same task again the next day, I’ll do something better.

And if I come back the next day, I’ll do better again. By this point, my first attempts don’t look amateurish exactly… just not quite good enough.

And, realistically, for a lot of tasks – and definitely Facebook ad creation – you don’t need one utterly professional looking ad, you need loads. One of those ads will outperform the rest, but you can’t tell which one it’ll be until you try ‘em out.

So take your time. Do multiple versions. Pick the best.

And – good luck. Writing is hard. Selling is hard. And I hope these emails have helped.

*

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

An odd one, this week, but a good one to do.

What matters to do you in writing? What do you want to get out of this? What do you think the biggest obstacles are? What would help? Let me know. I think it’ll be an amazing conversation.

See you there.

Til soon,

Harry

Last week, we dealt with the cheap and unglamorous world of book promo sites.

This week, we go to Madison Avenue, or at least to Silicon Valley. We’re talking digital advertising and, specifically, advertising on Facebook.

Now, before we go any further, I need to tell you that this is a complicated subject and small errors can quickly become costly. One email is not enough to fully explain the ins and outs.

Also, while I’m a more than competent Facebook advertiser, I’m not a seasoned expert. For both of those reasons, you should use this email as an introduction only – a first step. I’ve put some further reading in the PSes.

Please use it; it’ll be expensive if you don’t.

What is a Facebook ad?

A Facebook ad looks something like this:

The various components of the ad are as follows:

• Sponsor identifier: You’re the sponsor of the ad so it’ll be your name (or writer-pseudonym) in the top left.
• Primary text: That’s the bit of text that sits above the image. “6,000 5-star reviews…” The position of the text will vary depending exactly where in FB’s ecosystem the ad is shown.
• The image: That’s the picture, obviously. (Andjust so you know, the sale ISN’T running, so don’t bomb over to Amazon to find it.)
• Destination URL: The ad won’t send people to Amazon’s home page, it’ll send them to my book series page. But you want to show a tidied up version of the URL, just to keep the ad looking pretty.
• The headline. This is the text right at the bottom. (“Save over 50% …”) I always think it’s weird that the headline sits at the very bottom, but I don’t make the rules.
• The Call-To-Action (CTA): That’s the “Shop Now” button, in this example.

This email is going to offer a very swift overview of how to use these various elements – but, again, please think of this as a quick orientation only.

What you’re aiming to create

A good ad is sexy, spare, focused – and repellent.

It’s sexy, in that it should attract the eye, and arouse reader-lust in the right group of readers.

It needs to be spare, because you don’t have a lot of text to play with and you need to make sure that you give the essential messages fast and unmistakably.

It has to be focused, because your ad needs to tell people what it’s advertising. In the example I’ve given, it should be clear that I’m offering (a) a crime series, (b) it’s on sale [except, it’s not – this is just an example], and (c) what I’m offering is ebooks on Amazon.

This is also why the ad also has to be repellent. I actively don’t want ad-clicks from people who want to watch TV crime, or only buy print, or only use Apple as their bookstore. Those clicks will cost money and destroy returns. To those people, the ad has to say, very clearly, “this ad is not for you.”

How to build a persuasive creative

In terms of primary text, the basic rule is that you need your tagline followed by an explicit statement of what you want the user to do next. In my example, the tagline spends two lines pitching Fiona’s unique quality and reader reactions, followed by half a line which tells the user what to do next. (And you’ll note, I’m explicit about “download on Amazon”: I don’t want clicks from non-Kindle users.)

Don’t use more than 125 characters for all this, or your text will be cut off. It’s best to come up with several (three?) variants for primary text. One variant might emphasise a price discount, another might emphasise social proof (“X number of 5-star reviews!”), a third might pick out some key property of the book. Facebook will be able to test which variant works best for you, so give it some options.

Your ad image matters immensely. The basic rule here is that you use the cover art (without text) as a background and overlay a book cover on that art. You might think that sticking a book cover on top of the artwork is not exactly a way to make the artwork look its best, and it’s not. But again, your ad has to say: “I am selling books, nothing else.” You can get cheaper clicks if you don’t include a book cover… but your conversions are likely to suffer.

It’s also tempting to overcrowd your image. You’ve got some great reader quotes! You’ve got how many 5-star reviews? And wouldn’t it be nice to cram a bit of your blurb on there as well?

But radical minimalism tends to work best. A few words to convey whatever it is you want a reader to hear and retain. And a price alert. That’s it.

The colours you choose to do all this should, almost always, be either black text on yellow (like wasps) or white text on red (like danger signs). Using other combinations steps away from the tools used by generations of marketers. That’s probably not a good idea.

One positive in all this: you don’t need a designer or any fancy software to create these images for you. I made this image on the free version of Canva in well under an hour. The image above is 1080x1080 pixels. A letterbox format is also possible but tends to work less well. You can try both, but make sure you’re working to the standard FB formats.

Your headline is the only other element that truly matters. You have 45 characters to play with here, but shorter is often better. Pick the thing you want to emphasise (“Sale, now 50% off”, for example) and keep it short.

Your call-to-action button won’t make a huge difference, but on the whole you want to tell users what you’re expecting: so “Shop now” rather than “Learn more”.

No, but really: how to build a persuasive creative

What I’ve just told you is not the law; it’s a set of guidelines that works for most ads and most authors most times.

But you need to test. Testing is the only route to excellence. You need to generate multiple bits of text. You need to generate multiple images. You need to refine those, by eye, the very best you can. Then you feed them to FB and let it test what works. And that, in the end, is how you perfect the ads. You build several great variants, then test. Then you do it again. And then again.

Where do you want to show your ads?

Facebook will offer you a million different placement options, across its whole sprawl of websites. Many of those placements will offer much lower cost clicks than the Facebook Feed placement, but they tend to come with lower conversion rates too. So you need to test. Try (a) letting Facebook do its stuff, and (b) restricting placement to the FB Feed only. Remember, you’re not looking to see which option delivers a better cost per click. You’re only concerned about sales. There are good indie authors who favour approach (a) and others who favour (b). All that matters to you is what works for your readers.

Who do you want to show your ads to?

A big question, this.

A few years back, I’d have been encouraging you to go and ferret out your audience by targeting the readerships of comparable authors, and TV shows that chime with your work, and figuring out the demographic niche that works best for you.

These days, Facebook’s AI can essentially figure this all out by itself. On the whole, I think you need to tell FB:

• What country to target
• That you want people who read books on Kindle
• That’s it.

There are highly successful marketers who don’t even restrict by Kindle usage, which somewhat puzzles me, but again: you can test with and without that restriction. And remember, Facebook’s AI is very effective, but it needs data. You can’t spend $20 and hope to have found your optimal targeting. It doesn’t work like that!

What results are you looking for?

When you’re setting up your ad, Facebook will ask you what you want to achieve. Do you want engagement (clicks and likes and so on)? Or website traffic? Or sales?

Now, of course you want sales – but you have a problem, because the sales are being made on Amazon, a website you probably don’t own. Since Amazon won’t tell Facebook which user has or has not bought your book, that route is simply closed.

You therefore have to ask Facebook to optimise for “website traffic”, and Facebook will duly oblige. It will report its success or failure in terms of CPC, or cost-per-click. And yes, this metric is important. But in practice what matters most is cost-per-sale, and Facebook can’t tell you, because it doesn’t know.

You can solve this problem in one of two ways, and they’re both fine.

One is: you just average out your baseline sales before you start advertising. Then you advertise and see how much above baseline you achieve.

The second (and my preferred) approach is to use the Amazon Ads attribution tool to figure out precisely what sales come from what campaigns. I’ve put a link in the PSes to some useful resources.

But whichever way you approach this, the arithmetic is little muddy. What counts as success?

The obvious way to think about things is:

1. How much have I spent in terms of ad-spend?
2. How much money have I earned in royalties as a direct result?

Except –

Directly boosting the sales of Title #1 by advertising will also increase its sales indirectly by lifting its visibility on Amazon and thereby attracting more organic sales.

And that visibility lift will have some afterlife – if you engage in an intense promo, you may feel the effects of it some 30 days after a promo ends.

And if you’re writing a series (as you kind of need to be for this kind of approach to work), then you should in principle be happy to pay, say, $0.10 to get a reader into #1 of your series, if you have a high degree of confidence that a sufficient proportion of readers will go on to buy #2, #3, #4 and so on.

So the benefit of a sale is very likely worth more than that one sale… you just don’t know how much.

As a result, it’s hard to say what an adequate cost-per-sale is. It genuinely does depend on your objectives and what you have to sell. You need to figure this out for yourself, based on the data you have in front of you.

How much do you want to spend?

I’ve told you to generate multiple versions of your text, and multiple images, and to test them all. I’ve said to test placements and audiences. I’ve said that estimation of actual success is somewhat muddy. Furthermore, Facebook’s ability to snuffle out the right traffic for you has become impressive – but it needs data to work with, and those early clicks cost money.

Unfortunately, all that says that you can’t really engage intelligently in a Facebook campaign without being willing to plonk down a significant sum of money, which you are very likely to lose. I’d say that you probably need to commit $150-200 just to get your feet wet: that is, to get your testing to a point at which you might start making (or at least stop losing) money. And that would actually be a good result. You’ll only achieve that if your images, your text, your campaign set up, and your Amazon books page itself are all excellent.

When and if you think you have a successful campaign, you’ll probably want to run that at no less than $10 a day, and perhaps more like $20/day. Just go carefully – and watch that data!

When and how to use Facebook ads

The book promo sites, which we looked at last week, can certainly add a chunk of low-cost, fair-quality traffic on demand – but you can’t scale up, or not beyond a point.

Amazon ads have a huge potential audience, but – even for really proficient advertisers – it’s hard to get scale and it’s essentially impossible to support a surge-marketing campaign.

Facebook, on the other hand? If you want to surge market via FB, it’ll be more than happy to take your cash – and deliver your ads in potentially huge volumes. That quality of scalability is vital to most seasoned book marketers. It’s going to be an element of any large-scale, professional digital marketing campaign for books.

That said, it is NOT likely that you can earn money by marketing a single book: you probably want to have a decently performing series of three books first. (Decently performing? That means good evidence that a good proportion of Book #1 readers will end up buying Books #2 and #3.) As I say, Facebook is not a newbie-type technique.

In short…

Facebook ads are powerful – potentially career-altering – but also dangerous. It’s easy to overspend and lose money. People who lose are more common than those who win.

And again: please don’t forget the qualifiers that have studded this series of emails. You can’t sensibly market bad books. You can’t sensibly market books whose packaging (covers, blurb, and the rest) are subpar. You are competing – literally, not metaphorically – against the best authors and book-marketers in the world. So match those standards.

Next week

Next week, we’re going to talk about mailing lists – and a ship that can sail faster than the wind.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Query Letters

It’s been a while since we’ve looked at Query Letters on Feedback Friday, so let’s go for it today. 

Your task: simply this – present your draft query letter. Post yours here when you're ready to share it.

Simple, right? 

Till soon 

Harry 

Last week, I explained that the trick of selling on Amazon is to achieve steadily growing traffic and sales over 4-7 days. In effect, you’re priming Amazon’s own algorithms to take over the task of marketing your book for you … and Amazon turns out to be rather good at doing just that.

But how do you get your traffic in the first place? We’re going to look in turn at promo sites, Facebook ads, and mailing lists. Today, we’ll look at the simplest and easiest tool of all – namely, the promo site.

These sites aren’t just useful to newbies – they’re nigh on essential. They bring the readership that you don’t yet have. Plus, they’re cheap. Plus (with one exception) access is easy.

The Beast

The biggest, best-known book promo site is Bookbub. It promises readers that it will help them get ‘Amazing deals on bestselling ebooks’, and that’s just what it does. (And, to be clear, the site is all about ebooks. Now, of course, you can happily sell print books on Amazon… you’ll just find yourself selling 10 or 20 times as many ebooks, so that’s what this email will focus on.)

In effect, Bookbub runs a massive mailing list – the biggest in this sector, by far. That mailing list is divided up into genres. So if you join Bookbub as a reader, it’ll ask you what books you’re interested in. In your specific case, you’ll tell it you like Literary Fiction, Crime Fiction, and Swamp Monster Steamy Romance. Bookbub will then send out regular emails which will notify you of selected books in those categories when they are on special offer. So, a book that might normally sell at $9.99 as an ebook could be available, for one day only, at $0.99.

Bookbub is offered a LOT of books. The books that are chosen for the emails are editorially selected and standards are high. Unsurpisingly, if you like your steamy swamp monster romances, and you find a classy and bestselling title sold at a fraction of its normal price – you’re likely to jump on it. Loads of your fellow readers will do the same.

For an author, this is bookselling gold… just relatively expensive gold. If you’re in a major category – like crime, for example – a Bookbub Featured Deal will cost you upwards of $1,000. You might think that’s pretty dear for a promotion of this sort… but on the three occasions I’ve had a Featured Deal with my books in North America, I’ve repaid the money by tea-time in the UK, which means barely midday in New York, and not-even-properly-woken-up time in California. The deal lasts all day, and the effects of the deal last even longer.

So: if you can get a Bookbub deal, then do. And really, a disciplined author should put in for a deal at least 5-6 times a year. There’s no harm in knocking.

In fact, the only real problem with Bookbub is that you have no guarantee at all of being accepted – and the odds are against you. (They used to say they take no more than 1 in 5 books offered. I think that ratio has gone down and is, in any event, increasingly biased towards authors with a well-established following.)

That means, it’s good to know how The Beast works. It’s good to apply for promos. But it’s also good to have a back-up. And that’s why we need to get to know…

The little sisters

There are literally dozens of book promo sites, many of which are simply useless. But there are still a good few sites with meaningful email lists and a meaningful capacity to drive sales for you.

The best sites do change from time to time, so I always check out the latest information from David Gaughran and Nicholas Erik. Both of those guys are in the market a lot, for their own books and for campaigns they manage on behalf of other authors. I basically trust them to know the good sites and make honest recommendations to others.

Be aware that the various sites do have their differences. Freebooksy, for example, will only handle books that are being promoted at $0.00. Bargainbooksy will handle promotions of $0.99 and similar. There are also sites that handle only specific genres. And so on. Prices are relatively affordable and should certainly be within your budget.

Crucially, these sites are essentially non-selective. That means, if you’re a newbie author without a huge pre-existing following, you can still use these services. Indeed: not just “can”, but “bloody well ought to”. It should be the very first layer of your promotional campaign.

Promo stacking

You’ll hear indie authors use the phase ‘Promo stacking’ – and it’s what I recommend. But the phrase is just a little misleading. A stack is a set of things piled vertically, right? A stack of books, a stack or ironing.

And that tends to suggest that if your overall book promotion campaign is going to run Monday to Friday, that you should ‘stack’ all your promo sites on (say) the Monday. And that’s not right.

Promo stacking means using multiple different promo sites, but spaced out so you can add traffic throughout your promotional period. BargainBooksy for Monday, RobinReads for Tuesday, Fussy Librarian for Wednesday, and so on.

For under $200 you can build a five-day promotional campaign that will get your book out in front of thousands and thousands of readers. You shouldn’t leave things there – we’ll talk about more powerful strategies in subsequent emails – but even pro marketers working on big campaigns for authors making seven figures a year will start with the basics: bookings on promo sites running through the term of the campaign.

It's easy. It’s low cost. And it works.

Don’t forget the basics

All that said, please don’t forget the basics.

By far the biggest marketing failure made by newbie authors is to hurtle through to the very end of the selling process – booking promo campaigns, designing Facebook ads – when the preceding plumbing is woefully leaking.

So:

• Is your book actually good, or is it just you and your mum who thinks so? If it’s just you and your mum, there is no amount of marketing that will make that turkey fly. You MUST get your book to the kind of standards required by high quality digital-first publishers. If that means investing in writing courses and professional editorial feedback, then spend that money. (Preferably with us! We’re very good.) If readers don’t like your book, Amazon will figure this out, you’ll get lousy reviews, and the more money you spend advertising the book, the more money you’ll lose. Write. A. Good. Book.
• Is your cover actually good, or is it just you and Dorky Phil who did the Photoshop work for you who think it is? Again: there’s no compromise here. Your book cover must look like something that could adorn a book put out by Penguin Random House or any of the other big boys. That also means that your pitch and your genre have to be visually assimilable – and quickly – from the thumbnail of cover and title. Here too, there can be no compromise.
• Is your blurb good? Do you have good reviews coming in? Is your pricing sane? Is your website up to scratch? Is your mailing list set up and do you have a proper welcome automation in place?

If you allow any of these things to be sub-par, you will struggle. You are up against the best writers and the best publishers on the planet, so don’t think some lowlier standard applies to you. It doesn’t.

Next week: a tool that’s more powerful and more scalable than anything else out there. It’s also a tool that will spend your money with glee and won’t in any way guarantee results. In short, we’re riding the bronco that is Facebook ads – and don’t tell me you’re not ad-curious. I know you are.

See you next week.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Single Sentence Summaries

Because we're now at the end of Build Your Book Month, we ought to look at what you've accomplished. So, I'd like: 

• A one sentence summary of your book, please. Just a quick explanation of what kind of book you're talking about.
• 250 words or so of plot outline - which will include giving away the ending. You're not blurbing the book; you're summarising. 

Ideally, I want to see a nice tidy sense of shape. I want to feel the point of the book and the forward thrust. It's really not easy summarising in this way, and you can write a good book and a lousy summary - but still. Let's give it a go. When you're ready, post yours here.

I have just noticed: I have many children. And they're still here. Oh yikes. They made pumpkin soup today, and I saw an actual footprint, in soup, on my kitchen floor. 

Till soon,

Harry

Over the last couple of weeks, we thought about how to sell books the traditional way - print books sold through physical bookstores. The short summary: you try to amass retail footprint (via your publisher’s sales team) then create a real density of awareness once you have it. The lethal catch: if you don’t capture that footprint in the first place, there’s essentially nothing that can be done to achieve sales thereafter. 

Today, we turn from a world of tweed, pipe tobacco and hardbacks… to bits, bytes and algorithms. 

This email (and the ones that follow) are of particular relevance to anyone self-publishing their books, but I think they’re ALL of relevance anyway. No ambitious author should be without a mailing list under their own control. And the other tools we’re talking about are so basic to modern digital selling that you can’t afford to ignore them. And, to be blunt, plenty of trad publishing companies who ought to know better are still poor at digital selling. You won’t be able to understand or modify those failures unless you understand the territory. So: listen up. 

The big question today is: 

How, in theory, do you achieve huge sales via Amazon? 

Yes, I know that other online bookstores exist. But they’re so small in comparison with Amazon that they barely count. Kindle Unlimited alone is about equal in size to all other non-Amazon e-stores combined. So, I’m going to focus on Amazon. That’s where the sales are. 

And… the answer to our big question is easy. It’s: 

1. Achieve strong, steady traffic to your book’s Amazon page; and
2. Ensure you have strong conversions once readers get there. 

I’m not going to talk about Part 2 of that very much. In a nutshell, you need a blisteringly good book cover. You need a strong blurb. You need to accumulate some reviews. You need a sensible price (which means a low one. My Fiona series is self-published in the US. The first book in the series normally sells at $0.99. The other books sell at $4.99.) And – have I ever mentioned this? – everything of course needs to be perfectly in line with your insanely strong elevator pitch. You all know what a strong Amazon page looks like, because you’re familiar with it as readers. Create that. 

So let’s turn instead to Part 1 of the question: an altogether harder and more thought-provoking question. How do you drive traffic to your Amazon page? 

The biggest source of traffic 

Before we start to answer it, I want to call your attention to the phrase “strong, steady traffic”. What does that mean exactly? Also: who cares? If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right? 

But no: that’s not right. That arithmetic is totally wrong. 

Because the biggest source of traffic to your Amazon page will be… tiny drumroll… Amazon. 

Amazon’s websites have more book-buying traffic than anyone else, by far. Amazon knows exactly who amongst their horde of buyers is likely to buy your book. Further, Amazon has any number of ways to advance or drop the visibility of different pages. For example, a really popular book page might feature on: 

• An overall bestseller list.
• A sub- or sub-sub-bestseller list. (You can sit at the top of multiple lists.) 
• A “customers also bought” selection attached to books by other writers in your genre.
• The home page for certain users. (So, if you’ve bought a lot of romantic comedies from Amazon recently, you may find that your Amazon home screen fills with various other rom-coms for you to consider.) 
• A hot new releases list.
• Emails to selected users (i.e., readers in the same genre.) 
• Search pages, where the search term is in some way relevant to your book. This could even be for another author’s name. So if I enter “Gillian Flynn” as a search term, Amazon will first display some books by GF and then start to suggest books that it thinks GF-type readers are likely to enjoy. 
• And so on... 

So, the best way to get traffic to your book’s Amazon page is to get Amazon itself to boost your page’s visibility. Essentially, you want to make sure that Amazon’s algorithms and robots to decide that what they most want to do is feed traffic to your book page. 

But how?

Strong and steady 

To answer that question, you need to know two things. 

The first is that Amazon’s bestseller lists are extremely sensitive to short-term movements. A classic bestseller list – the NY Times list, for example – reflects the total volume of weekly sales, and is updated once each week. Amazon’s list, by contrast, updates every hour. What’s more, the sales you’ve made in the last 24 hours account 50% of your total ranking. The sales you make in the preceding 24 hours account for the next 25%. The prior day for 12.5%, and so on. 

That means Amazon is electrically sensitive to quite small movements, in a way that the NYT list is not. 

That said, Amazon’s little robots know that a one-off spike doesn’t mean too much – it could be an email blast that gets a flurry of sales and nothing more before or after. 

So, the Indie Author Hive Mind (which is exceptionally smart, by the way) says: 

• Work to secure sales over 4 days, not 1. 
• A little longer than 4 days is probably better – say 5-7 – but that does depend on how much marketing oomph you can bring. 
• Ideally, you’d have a gently sloping increase in sales over the period – so aim for something like 100 / 110 / 120 / 130 in terms of sales progression. (I mean these as indicative units, not specific book sales. A brand-new indie author would be doing very well indeed to shift 400+ books over four days.) 
• If your sales tools are still in their infancy (i.e., no mailing list, smallish ad budget), then do what you can. I’d suggest that getting some sales on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4 would be a reasonable aim, with anything splashy you can manage coming on Day 4. 

You’ll note that this advice will NOT maximise your peak bestseller rank. If you wanted to do that, you wouldn’t just try to get your sales compacted into a single day. You’d ideally try to have them squashed into a single hour. And yes, you’d have the pleasure and satisfaction of a salesrank you can boast about to your dental hygienist. But you won’t get as many sales overall as if you follow the plan here. And sales matter more. 

What happens next? 

So let’s say you follow the plan, and achieve that gently sloping uptick in sales over 4-7 days. What then? You’ll have exhausted your mailing list. Your ad budget will be empty. What next? 

Well, what next is – Amazon. 

If you do this right, at about the four-day point, you’ll see a sudden surge in sales as Amazon takes over the marketing. Its tiny little underpaid, non-union bots are essentially saying, “OK, author-human, we’re convinced that this book of yours is worth marketing, so we’re going to start marketing it ourselves. We’re going to sift through the MILLIONS of readers who come daily to our website, and we’re going to show your book to the ones most likely to buy it.” 

That sounds exhilarating – and it is. But the exhilaration (and the sales) won’t last forever. New books come onto the market, new sales surges are manufactured, those underpaid little bots are fickle – FICKLE, you hear me? – and they will start flashing their glossy metallic ankles at other books and other authors instead. 

So, over a period of about 30 days, you’ll see sales tail off to a base level… then probably dwindle further as time goes by. 

You’ll do better in that 30-day period (and maybe extend it a little) if your Amazon page is all seven shades of fantastic: Amazon will prefer to send readers to a page that ends up in sales. You’ll also do better if readers read and enjoy and finish your book. (How does Amazon know if you finish your book? Because it collects data from a gazillion Kindles.) But nothing lasts forever. Your sales surge won’t. 

The arithmetic of sales 

Earlier in this email, I said: 

“If you had, say, 10,000 visitors to your book page, why would you especially care if they all came at half-past two on Saturday, or trickled out over a week, or trickled out over two months? If, let’s say, one in ten of those visitors ends up buying a book, that’s 1,000 book sales whichever way you count it, right?” 

You can now understand why that logic is flawed. 

If you trickled those sales out over two months, your popularity on Amazon would almost certainly never rise to a point where you tickled Amazon’s bots enough to get them involved. So your expected sales would indeed be 1,000 books, or something similar. 

If you took the one-off surge approach, I think that Amazon would respond, just not in a very powerful or sustained way. But still. Books sold? More than 1,000 anyway. 

And if you took the slow and steady over 4-7 days approach? You’d easily generate enough sales to get a really good blast of love from Amazon and you’d see lovely, organic sales for week, after week, after week. That’s where you’ll really make the money. That’s also why smart indie authors are perfectly happy if their Week 1 ad campaign makes exactly zero profit. It doesn’t have to make a profit in week 1. It has to make a profit in the somewhat longer term. The approach outlined in this email tells you how to go about doing that. 

“Now look, you blithering idiot, you gibbering phytoplankton, you lumpen mass of curdled whey – why won’t you answer the ONE QUESTION that I really want you to answer?” 

I expect that most of you will be thinking along these lines – or a politer version anyway. Because of course, it’s all very well setting out the theory of how to apportion your traffic to Amazon, but how do you secure that traffic in the first place? 

I’ll answer that question in some detail next week, with deep dives into a couple of further areas after that, but suffice to say that there are lots of things that don’t work: 

• Twitter / X
• Instagram 
• Blogging 
• Blog tours 
• Organic Facebook traffic (probably) 
• Boosted Facebook posts 
• Amazon ads 
• Traditional publicity, of the sort that Big Publishing uses. 

Some items on this list might be surprising: how could Amazon ads not increase sales on Amazon, for example? The answer is that Amazon ads may increase sales in a low-level, evergreen-type way. They are not well adapted to the kind of surge marketing I’m talking about here. I also think that Amazon ads tend to work better as a phase two option: that is, once you have already generated some good book sales through other sources. 

Or again: how could trad publicity not work, since it works perfectly well for trad publishers? And yes, of course it does: but they have a huge physical retail footprint. Trad publicity is pretty much hopeless for generating digital sales on demand. The two worlds – physical bookstores and all things Amazonian – are largely separate in terms of sales approach. 

So I’m only going to focus on three tools, but they’re all important: 

• Promo sites 
• Facebook ads 
• Author mailing lists. 

That’s it. That’s what lies ahead. 

If you’re trad published, then knowing about promo sites is valuable, in that publishers should – these days – think of them when it comes to boosting your ebook. Author mailing lists are critical for everybody. And Facebook ads? Well, it will be essentially impossible to profit from them if you’re trad published. But indie authors will rely on them heavily – and I do think that trad authors just need to know what their publishers could be doing, and in many cases ought to be doing. You can’t even have the conversations, if you don’t understand the territory.

*

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Selling Strategies

An unusual task this week. Simply: 

• Do you have experience of a selling strategy that really didn't work for you? 
• Do you have experience of one that really did? 

You might be talking about something that your publishers conceived and executed for you. You might be talking about something that you did yourself. Either way, let's hear about it. When you're ready, post yours here.

And? 

Yes: writing books is hard. Selling them is harder. But let's also not forget that loads and loads of books do get written and sold, and authors make money and find readers. Just this week, for instance, our very own Becca Day has published her latest thriller, The Woman In The Cabin, to rapturous reviews. 

So, this is a hard task, but not an impossible one. Avanti! 

Til soon,

Harry

Last week, I talked about how print-led publishing is essentially dominated by the battle to secure retail space. 

If your book gets a really good level of retail space, it stands an excellent chance of selling well. If not, your book is mostly likely to sell badly, irrespective of its basic quality. 

I ended that Depressing, Pointless and Nihilistic email by promising you that this week I would offer you some Very Sound Advice. 

And yes: I will. But be warned. That advice is akin to finding running shoes for the portly gentleman at the start of his race. It’s akin to massaging his quads and calling his attention to a trip hazard en route. His odds will improve, for sure… but the race is still a crapshoot. The basic shape of the game remains unaltered. All you can do is boost your odds. 

So that’s coming up, but first: 

I got a LOT of replies from you guys last week, and quite a lot of you seemed to think I was saying that trad publishing is basically broken and that self-publishing is a better option. 

To be clear, I am not saying that. Trad publishing has its challenges. Self-publishing does, too – they're just different challenges. And, either way, a ton of books get sold all the time. Authors are taken on by agents, their books are bought by publishers, they’re sold to retailers, who sell on to readers. Despite the huge torrent of new media, books remain absolutely central to culture. And of course, you can earn a lot of money even if your book doesn’t sell: that’s what advances are for. 

So, trad publishing is great and full of opportunity. But it’s also difficult and full of challenges. 

Here’s what you need to do. 

Write a good book 

The quality of your book ought to matter, and it does matter. 

Ideally, the major retail buyers would read all the books offered to them by publishers, and pick the ones that were the very, very best. That doesn’t happen. Too many books, too few buyers. 

But quality still matters. Your publishers are sophisticated readers and will know the difference between a book that feels genuinely special and one that feels just fine. They’ll put more work into the first one than the second. That will affect every conversation between your publishers and the wider world. It can generate some startling, immediate, significant wins. 

For example: when my Fiona Griffiths series was launched in the UK, hardback sales weren’t great. They weren’t awful, but certainly mediocre. 

In the normal course of things, hardback sales are the best predictor of paperback ones… except that my publisher (Orion, part of Hachette) had an in-house book group. A reading group, in other words: a bunch of friends getting together to talk about a shared reading experience. That group read my book and loved it. That enthusiasm spilled over to UK’s biggest bookseller who ended up putting the paperback into their biggest monthly promotion, thereby sharply changing the book’s (and series’) sales trajectory. 

So: write a good book. That’s the only part you have real control over, so do it right. 

If you need or want help, then of course we offer a ton of ways to provide that. Two easy options are: 

1. Our Good To Great course, which is specifically there to help competent writers become dazzling writers – the sort that agents have to take on. The course is free to Premium Members, but everyone gets to have a free first lesson. 

2. Manuscript assessment. This is still the gold standard way to improve a novel, and our editors are very, very good. If I’d recommend any one thing, it would be this. 

Make nice 

Back in the day, I was published by HarperCollins and my editorial team also handled a major bestselling author, whom we’ll just call Jack. (The author in question? Rich. Litigious.) HarperCollins knew this author would earn them money, but he was horrible. Just a nasty human. So yes, they put together a pitch for this chap’s next book. Yes, they tried to win it. But – they were also kind of happy when they failed. 

Publishers will work harder for people they like. So make nice – and, really, that’s just a way of saying BE nice. It makes a difference. 

Be professional 

For the same reason, it helps to be professional. Delivering on time, working well with edits, responding fast to emails – all of that. Those things help your editor do his or her job, so being professional is basically just a way of making nice, in a way that is directly helpful. It all makes a difference. 

Be strategic 

If you’re lucky, you’ll get the chance to meet bloggers, and retail buyers, and booksellers, and other industry types. 

Those meetings really matter. 

Yes, there are often other authors floating around at those events and authors are generally more delightful souls than, erm, almost anyone, and so it’s tempting to curl up in a knot of drunken writers and ignore everyone else – but don’t. 

Be strategic. Booksellers and bloggers and other influencers matter, so seek them out, and be interesting and make nice. And retail buyers really, really matter so seek them out and make super-nice. 

And if that sounds too calculated – well, hell, I should probably add that you should be authentic too. Don’t just lie and flatter. Be yourself, just a polished up version of yourself. Make nice with the people who matter, then get hammered with your cronies. 

(Oh yes, and crime writers are WAY the most interesting authors, so you should probably write crime, not something smelly like lit fic or YA. And even when crime writers aren’t the most interesting, they have way the highest capacity for booze.) 

Care about your cover 

Your book cover matters – intensely. 

It’s something I’ve often not got right in my career. I don’t mean that I’ve chosen a poor cover, because I’ve never exactly got to choose. I’ve got to comment. (And, by the way, a publisher may be contractually obliged to consult with you about your cover, which sounds nice. Just be aware that their legal obligation would be entirely satisfied by the following exchange: Publisher: “What do you think of your new book cover?” You: “I hate it in every possible way.” Publisher: “Thank you for your opinion.”) 

But – even without having a contractual right of veto, it’s a rare editor who doesn’t basically want to make his or her author roughly happy. 

So: 

1. Before you see your draft cover, have a damn good idea of what the other books in this space look like. Yours can’t look worse. You want it to look better. 

2. When you do see your cover, be as honest as possible with yourself about your feelings. That’s harder to do than it sounds! 

3. Discard completely all feelings that have to do with the way the book, or the cover looks in your head. It doesn’t matter if the cover seems to refer to an incident or feature that’s not in the book. The key questions are: Does it convey genre? Does it convey mood? Is it arresting and just generally brilliant? That’s what matters. 

4. Tell your editor what you think. If you want changes, say so. If you want a total rethink, say so – and in those terms. Be direct. Do not be too people-pleasey.  

5. Beware: if you think the cover’s wrong, your publishers is likely to “nice” you into submission. If your editor says, “Oh, I’m sure once you see the cover with the raised lettering and the foil effects, you’ll be absolutely blown away,” what they mean is, “Give us a chance to let a few more weeks pass, and then it’ll be too late to make changes anyway.” 

6. For that reason, make sure you get a reasonably early sight of your cover. If it arrives with you too late, you may be stuck with it. 

A bad cover will kill your book. A great cover could propel it into the stratosphere. Do not accept compromise – and throw your toys out of the pram if you have to. This is almost the only area where toy-throwing makes sense.  

And when you are considering cover – or blurb – or marketing in general, then always remember: 

The pitch, the pitch, the pitch! 

Publishing is a machine. It makes its profits by employing good people, working them too hard, and paying them too little. It can seem like a privilege to work for a good, big publisher, but by heck they’ll take their pound of flesh (or 454g, for our EU readers.) 

The result is that books don’t always get the level of thought and attention they deserve. And in particular, your cover designer hasn’t read your book, didn’t commission your book, and has little more than a page or two of notes from your editor in terms of design brief. 

The result can easily be a lazily “me-too” cover, or one that simply doesn’t evoke the mood and tone of your book. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You are most likely to get stellar sales if: 

1. You have a brilliant concept – an elevator pitch; and 

2. Everything lines up perfectly behind that concept: the text, the title, the blurb, the cover, and every line of marketing yadda. 

Your job, as author, is to be the scent-following, rat-shaking terrier that ensures the fidelity of everything to your pitch. If your title and blurb promise one kind of experience, and the book cover promises another, that book will not persuade readers to walk it over to the till. 

You need a great concept. 

And everything – everything – needs to line up behind it. 

Honestly? Nowadays, I’d be blunt about it. I’d offer my own cover design brief to an editor. I’d suggest my own blurb. I’d say what I thought our pitch was and what tone we needed to strike. 

If you do that right, you won’t even come across as an asshole. Offer your material humbly and accept advice when it’s wise. Most of the time, an editor will actually be grateful: you’re making their life easier. That’s a positive blessing. But if they say you’re wrong about something, you also need to accept that you don’t know everything.  

FEEDBACK FRIDAY:  

Well, I’ve yammered away about the pitch – again – in this email, so let’s have another pitching challenge. 

If you haven’t watched the free first lesson of Good To Great, then do please do just that. And, in any event, please: 

• Give me the pitch for your novel in a maximum of 20 words, and preferably fewer. If you’re stuck, try the “Premise + Conflict” recipe to see if that unsticks you like slippery egg on Teflon. 

• Also, present your pitch as an extremely short list of ingredients “Teen romance + werewolf”, “Orphan + wizard school”. You have 3-8 words for this. 

For extra pepperoni on your pizza, then please also show me how everything is going to line up behind that concept: 

• What’s your title? And how does that line up with your pitch? 

• What kind of cover would work? You need to advertise genre and you need to advertise pitch. Don’t get too specific: just offer a sketch of a possible cover brief. 

What we’re trying to do here is make sure that your pitch flows right through to the places where your book is first going to touch the reader: on a bookstore table or on an Amazon search page. 

When you're ready, post yours here.

NEXT WEEK 

We turn to the beast that is Amazon and all things digital. 

Til soon 

Harry 

Last week, I talked about how selling print books is a very different proposition from selling ebooks. Print books can’t change their covers, can’t radically lower their price, can’t link to the internet, and are sold (by publishers) to huge corporations not direct to consumers.

So how do publishers sell books?

Well, there are two ways to look at it. There’s the way that publishers will talk about (at length) if you ask them at a festival or elsewhere. Then there’s the way that actually illuminates what happens.

How publishers sell books (publisher version)

Let’s honour publishers first by talking about bookselling the way that they do. Selling a print book, these days, is more complicated – more multi-channelled – than it has ever been. So publishers will think about:

• Social media activity, including relatively novel channels like BookTok.
• Some digital advertising (maybe).
• Book reviews via notable bloggers in whatever your genre space is
• Book reviews via mainstream media
• Other media opportunities, from local radio to national press or even (rarely) TV
• Requesting puffs and review quotes from authors and other influencers
• Sending out proof copies to all and sundry
• Festival appearances
• Industry get-togethers that give you a chance to meet bloggers, reviewers, etc
• Industry get-togethers that give you a chance to meet retail buyers
• Industry get-togethers that give you a chance to meet booksellers
• Book signings (less frequent now than they used to be, thank the Lord. Turnouts at these things seldom helped an author’s ego.)
• Book giveaways, however handled
• Price promotions, especially with supermarkets
• Purchasing “book of the week” type slots with chain booksellers
• Inclusion in the publisher’s seasonal catalogue

That’s not even a comprehensive list – and it includes categories (eg: ‘social media activity’) which in itself comprises a whole bewildering and inventive range of initiatives.

That said, what publishers actually do for any particular book tends to be a very small subset of what they could potentially do.

Let’s say that you have a really capable agent from a heavy-hitting literary agency in London or New York. Let’s also say your Really Capable Agent has sold to a highly credible imprint at a major publisher. The publisher concerned has a fancy office building at some glamorous address. They have a billion dollars plus in global revenues and make a very healthy profit on those sales. Let’s also say that your book deal wasn’t even marginal. It wasn’t one of those $10,000 / £5,000 advances that basically say, “Look, we’re not that excited by this, but we’ll give it a shot …”

So, you’re all set, right? You just need to stand back and let this mighty machine do its perfectly polished work?

What actually happens

Well – maybe.

Sometimes, yes, an author will find it pans out, all as they’ve dreamed it. It’s as though they’ve gone to sleep in some frozen landscape, then woken up on a geyser, tossed higher than seemed possible. “Hey, sorry, Oprah, I’m on Jimmy Fallon that night, could we maybe reschedule?”

But mostly – it’s not like that.

Mostly, you have these weird conversations with whichever Glossy Marketing Person your publisher allocates you.

YOU: “Cover reveal on Twitter, OK.”

GMP: “Yeah, it’s called X now.”

“And, uh, the book’s in a catalogue?”

“Yes, we’ve really revamped the way we address indie bookshops, so there are going to be a LOT of eyes on this.”

“And proof copies? When you took me on, you were going to print up some book proofs with a fancy cover …?”

“Well, yes. I mean, we’ve gone the PDF route, in fact, because so many people find PDFs easier to handle.”

“And Festival appearances? We spoke about that too …”

“Yes, we’re really getting your name out there.”

“But nothing booked?”

“Well, we haven’t yet heard back from the Little Piddle Lit Fest team. They were very  enthusiastic at one point.”

“Book reviews?”

“We can send out another email, but it can be positively unhelpful to chase too much.”

“Adverts? I mean, are you taking any positive steps to get this book in front of readers?”

[Glossy Marketing Person does the nervous laughter compulsory when an author mentions a strategy that costs actual money.]

“We really feel that organic reach works better on digital.”

It’s perfectly possible – no, likely – that your marketing conversation goes something like that. And you watch on as this huge machine, this reliable creator of bestselling books and authors, appears to do virtually nothing to support your book.

Sure enough, what looked likely to happen, does happen.

Not many retailers buy your book, and those that do don’t buy it at huge scale. Sure enough, you make some sales, because it would be weird if literally no one bought it, but the sales seem very low.

Nobody from your publisher ever calls you up and says, “Hey, you do know that your career is completely ****ed, don’t you?”, but by the time you get to the latter stages of your two-book deal, the mood music has altered so unmistakeably, you get the message anyway. You always quite fancied pig-farming / floristry / exotic dance as a way to make a living, so you start retraining as one of those good things instead.

You are about to be a former author, except that – like American presidents – you always get to call yourself an author, even if it’s been years since you ran a country / wrote a book.

How publishers sell books (the reality)

What publishers say about selling books is all, 100%, completely true.

But they mostly don’t add a crucial little rider, and everything that truly matters is in that rider.

Your book will get a huge and impressive density of marketing effort if retailers agree to stock your book in significant volumes. If retailers don’t agree stock your book in bulk, we will offer you the absolute minimum of support – and yes, we are well aware that this lack of support will be terminal.

They are extremely unlikely to tell you this directly. They are not likely to volunteer what level of orders they are looking for. They are not likely to tell you if you have / have not met this level.

Publishers are, in the end, profit-seeking companies. Their basic sales model (for print) is as follows:

1. Buy 12 books from debut authors.
2. Do a reasonable (if cost-conscious) job of book production – covers, editing, all that.
3. Present those 12 books to retailers. (That’s why “Inclusion in the publisher’s seasonal catalogue” is the most important element in the list I gave you earlier, even though it seems like the most boring and least impactful element there.)
4. Retailers are getting bombarded by loads of catalogues from loads of imprints from loads of publishers. Even the biggest stores don’t have shelf space for everything. Most stores are small not big. And supermarkets – which sell huge volumes of books – sell very few individual titles. The result is that most debut novels don’t get many orders. That’s just how it is.
5. Publishers then triage, ruthlessly.
6. If a book gets a heavy level of advance orders from a good number of retailers, the marketing artillery will come out in force. The advance orders from supermarkets are most likely to come if the publisher offers significant price discounts, but supermarkets know that they can and will secure those discounts if they back them up with orders. All this is potentially geyser territory; where you wake up on a glorious fountain of sales: your book, in a lot of stores, backed by hefty price promotions.
7. If a book does not get a heavy level of advance orders (and it probably won’t), publishers will, in their smilingly deceptive way, let your book (and your career) die.
8. The publisher then moves onto the next batch of 12 debut authors. You move on to pig-farming / floristry / exotic dance.

All this is perfectly logical.

Retailers can’t possibly stock all the books they’re offered. If a publisher runs an expensive marketing campaign aimed at generating sales in bookstores, that campaign is bound to fail – badly – if your book is invisible in the places where people buy books.

The result is that, if your book doesn’t get ordered in significant volumes, your publisher will simply throttle any marketing effort. They’ll do just enough to stop you being shouty and screamy, but they know perfectly well that the little they do won’t meaningfully shift books.

In effect, modern publisher bookselling is akin to twelve fat men running for the same revolving door. It’s not really an athletic competition. It’s more of a random scramble. But in the end, only one fat man can pop first through that door – and the bliss of Selling Heaven – and eleven portly gentlemen will be sitting all a-tumble on the skiddy granite outside, wondering what happened.

What happened, my friend, is that you just got published.

Pipes and tweed

Now, I should say that all this is very much the pipe and tweed version of things – what happens with a very print-led publishing process. There are, for sure, imprints at big publishers that are either digitally-led or reasonably adept at pivoting between the two. But since the pipe-n-tweed imprints are always the most prestigious, and the ones most likely to create the kind of bestsellers you’ve always dreamed of writing, this model is still profoundly influential.

If you’re startled by my cynicism, I should say that I’m hardly alone. I had a conversation a year or two back with someone who used to run one of the most prestigious imprints in British publishing. I gave him my 12-fat-men analogy, and he essentially agreed. He said that one of the reasons he left publishing was precisely because he felt it had become too much of a lottery, with books elevated by happenstance more than quality.

(And all this, by the way, explains lot about your experience as a reader. Let’s say you read about the new bestseller by Q. It has fancy reviews from X and Y and Z, and it’s selling a LOT of books. So you buy the book and read it, hoping to learn something about how to write … and you think, huh? I mean, books don’t get to be super-big bestsellers unless they genuinely have something special. And you don’t even get to be an ordinary-level bestseller unless you bring a basic competence. But dazzle? Bestselling debut fiction should be dazzling, and it often isn’t. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. This email explains the reason why.)

So what to do?

This email would be Depressing, Pointless and Nihilistic unless it ended with some words of advice on how to win that 12-fat-men-and-a-revolving-door race. And …?

Well, I don’t know.

And this email is too long.

And these emails are ALWAYS too long.

But, that being said, I do nevertheless have some Very Sound Advice to offer.

But you’ll have to wait till next week to get it.

Tell me what you think

As we go further with this series of emails, I’d love to know what you think. What’s useful? What isn’t? What do you want to know more about? Just hit reply, and let me know.

I got a lot of replies last time, so do keep your thoughts coming. I read everything and reply to nearly everything.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Build Your Book Month - Plotting

It’s Build Your Book Month and we’re plotting away.

Sophie’s workshop last week - “Start your book with a bang” was free to all and and generated a LOT of interest. So the assignment this week is:

1. Watch Sophie being amazing here (that link will take you to the Masterclass area of Premium Membership. Not a member? We've made the replay free to watch here too.)
2. Upload your opening page (max 300 words)
3. Give us some comments (after your opening) about how you decided on what you wrote.

Post yours here. 

(I’m asking for comments because personally I don’t really start my books with a bang. My most tedious ever opening paragraph? That’s easy. It was the one word: “Rain.” Although, more broadly, that opening was probably beaten out by my very next book which opened with two characters, including my protagonist, discussing a new pair of jeans:

I say, ‘Great. Really nice.’ I’m not sure what to say.

‘My jeans. They’re new.’

‘Oh.’

Any time, Becca Day and her team want a BYB workshop on “How to craft a tedious opening”, I’m their man.)

I’m off to open things in a boring way – books, beer bottles, supermarkets. I’ll see you next week.

Til soon

Harry

This is the first in a season of emails on how to sell a book. Today’s email will cover the shape of the industry as it is today. Further emails will cover things like traditional sales techniques, Amazon’s algorithm, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, mailing lists, non-fiction, and other topics.

What’s the point, mate – I mean, honestly?

There’ll be a large group of you for whom this kind of information may seem redundant. Those folk may be inclined to think, roughly:

“Look here, you Cheerless Charlie, I haven’t even finished my book, and I don’t know if it’s any good, and certainly don’t know if any literary agent will be keen to take me on. And all that mailing list and Amazon ad stuff? Isn’t that something that publishers are meant to take care of? I have zero interest in self-publishing a book and a couple of emails won’t change that.”

Well, yes, I hear you.

And yes: selling a book may seem a distant dream, and the information that follows may feel theoretical. But that’s not the right way to look at it. You are, all of you, seeking to create and sell a product to an industry – or, for indie authors, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that you’re looking to create a product that you’ll sell direct to consumers via some well-established industry structures.

And to do that, yes, you need to write a good book. You’ll know me well enough by now to know that I’m a craft-first kind of guy. I’m all about hard-writing and easy-marketing, not the other way round.

But understanding the industry always helps. Always.

Sometimes, it helps in very direct ways. If you sell your book to a publisher, and you’re at some industry event supported by that publisher, you’ll know who performs what role – and who you ought to be out charming. Good knowledge about the industry will change the way you think about Twitter/X. It’ll change the way you think about your book cover. It’ll change the way you present yourself as an author.

But more than that, I think you grow up in less definable ways. All fiction projects start out in a kind of dream. A story pops into your head and you think, wouldn’t it be fun to write this down? That’s perfectly fine – it’s how I started, too – but your aim has to be to become a truly professional author. Yes, you will always need to satisfy your own creative spirit (what a waste it would be if we didn’t do that), but you’d be plain dumb to think that your creative spirit doesn’t need to work hand-in-hand with an industry.

What’s more, for all the mwah-mwah-darling nature of the (very pleasant) publishing industry, it is at its heart as ruthless about income and profits as any other.

So:

You need to remain creative, but you also need to build a product for a shamelessly profit-seeking industry. These emails will tell you how books get sold and that in turn will tell you a lot about how agents, editors, publicists and everyone else thinks. Get to grips with these emails and your odds of success go up. Got that? Good. Allons-y!

The doom loop that wasn’t

For a few years, it seemed credible to argue that the traditional books industry could simply collapse. Bricks-and-mortar booksellers were near-bankrupt. E-books were booming. Print-runs were getting shorter. It seemed possible that shorter print runs would drive up print prices, which would force the collapse of Barnes and Noble (US) and Waterstones (UK), and that in turn would create a doom loop for the rest of the regular bookselling industry.

That didn’t happen. A couple of big book chains went bust (bye-bye, Borders), but the flagship chains recovered their spirits, their profitability, and their charm.

Meantime, e-books (and audio book) did in fact turn out to be the Next Big Thing – a vast new way of reading and marketing and selling books – but that new thing has added to, not replaced, what was there before.

The invisible publisher

The publishing industry, as it exists today, divides into two (messily defined) chunks.

One chunk is ‘traditional’ publishing. The company names are essentially the same as they always were. The imprints are often the same, too. The firms they sell to are largely the same. The products they sell have shifted – but only a bit.

Thus, a modern trad publisher might sell roughly 70% of its books in print form, roughly 20% as ebooks, and roughly 10% as audiobooks. If you look at value, not volume, then ebooks drop back to more like 10% and that chunk gets added onto print instead.

So, for most modern publishers, ebooks are and have long been secondary. It’s true that ebooks play a bigger role in adult genre fiction, but that means they play a correspondingly smaller role in kids’ books and adult non-fiction.

This summary – 70 print / 20 ebook / 10 audio – is often presented as though it were true of the books market as a whole, but it’s not.

Talk to indie authors, and you’ll find they barely think about print at all. My own self-published books sell at least 95% of their copies in digital form – ebook and audio. I really only sell in print because it’s easy to do so, and because it’s nice for readers who prefer lovely, lovely paper.

Virtually all self-published authors are like me: we sell digital products. Our print sales are little more than decorative. Yet because mainstream media has long, deep connections with trad publishers and essentially no connection at all with indies, the self-published part of the industry is essentially invisible – perpetually forgotten, perpetually surprising to those from trad publishers.

But, collectively, these indies are hardly negligible. The self-pub industry is at least as large as Penguin Random House and probably larger. If you add in the digital-first publishers – who are quasi-traditional in that they are selective, but still very ebook dominated – then the ebook-dominant publishers are collectively way bigger than PRH.

And yet – still invisible.

Selling in print and selling in bytes

Now all this matters to you because selling print books is radically different from selling ebooks.

Take ebooks first:

1. If early sales data says that your cover isn’t working quite right, you can change the cover instantly. Or the blurb. Or both. Aside from the new design itself, it’s not even costly to make the switch.
2. If you want to tweak the price, you can. Want to drop a book from $9.99 to $0.99 or even $0.00? You can do so, easily and instantly.
3. Supposing you want a reader to visit a website, with an ebook you just offer an ordinary, regular link and say, “Tap here.” Done.
4. One more thing: ebooks are sold (almost exclusively) via Amazon and Apple, two of the world’s largest companies. Those companies don’t hand-curate their bookstores. They just sell everything, no matter how good or bad. So that means you, the author, aren’t really selling your book to Amazon for them to on-sell. You are selling via Amazon direct to the consumer.

So that’s ebooks: instantly flexible, price-adjustable, online-linked, direct to consumer.

None of that stuff is true of print books.

1. Yes, in theory a publisher can change a cover – and often does from hardcover to softcover, or for an anniversary or TV-special edition. But for that process to operate cleanly, the old stock has to be recovered and pulped before the new stock is issued. Consequently, the process is slow, rare and considered.
2. Price tweaking doesn’t really work with print. Because there’s a hard cost (in materials, printing, warehousing, shipping) to get a book to a bookstore, a publisher can’t just chop the price and expect the same margin. So price cutting happens less radically (“3-for-2”, say, not $9.99 to $0.99) and less frequently.
3. Visiting a website direct from a print book? Good luck with that.
4. And, finally, print books aren’t sold to consumers. Not really. Print books are sold to retailers – often huge companies (such as supermarkets) for whom books are all but irrelevant.

Why this matters

This matters to you because print sales techniques are utterly different from digital sales techniques. You need to know how the whole print selling process works, because you may end up working with a big publisher and you need to know what you can influence and what really matters.

But you also need to understand, in depth, how the ebook selling process works, because if you have a trad publisher, they may well cock it up. (Though they’re less hopeless than they used to be.) And if you don’t end up with a trad publisher, your alternative will be selling digitally in one form or another, so you need to know all that side of things, too.

As we go further with this series of emails, I’d love to know what you think. What’s useful? What isn’t? What do you want to know more about? Comment below to let me know.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Publishing and selling Q&A

Simple one this week. Just tell me what your publishing / selling plans are, and what questions you have.

Premium Members only, please. If you’re not a PM, then this could be the time to Do The Right Thing…

I’ll give as many responses as I sanely can.

Post your plans and questions here.