Where to find affordable and effective marketing for your book

I got an email recently which asked a perfectly sensible question: Does Jericho Writers keep a list of affordable but effective PR and marketing companies for books?

That question is one that gets asked by plenty of self-publishing authors who find – bizarrely – that just uploading a book to Amazon does not cause it to sell by the truckload.

It’s also asked by anyone with a micro-publisher that just doesn’t have the wellie to get the book at volume into bookstores.

It’s also asked, often enough, by authors whose traditional publishers don’t actually seem to do very much marketing at all. (A cover reveal? On Twitter? That’s your marketing?)

The answer, I’m afraid, is very simple:

There are no affordable yet effective PR & marketing companies for your books. Such companies don’t exist. And can’t.

Here’s why.

Let’s start with the way that traditional big publishers hope to market books. The effort starts, not in fact with marketing, but sales. The sales team will try and place your book with as many big, physical retailers as possible.

In the old days, you could come to Barnes & Noble or Waterstones in the UK waving a big chequebook. You’d buy space on the front tables, and you knew that your product would be highly visible to its core audience. These days, both firms (sisters now, with the same boss and the same owner) have done away with such practices. Local store managers choose what to display, which is great for readers, is better ethically – but was a real blow for publishers.

Instead, publishers today will focus heavily on the supermarkets (and, in the UK, WH Smith). Those retailers don’t stock a vast number of titles, but they love to sell at a discount and their footfall is huge. You could write a deeply mediocre book but, if it was selling at a good discount across all the supermarkets, it will sell well, for sure.

So let’s assume that your book has reasonable physical distribution nationwide. That’s the point at which publishers’ marketing and publicity teams will really get going. There’ll be campaigns on social media. Lots of work with bloggers. Lots of work with newspapers and magazines. Perhaps a bit of TV and radio if you’re lucky.

And what’s the point of all that press? You might think it’s this: ‘Inspire people to go out and buy that book.’ But it’s not. People aren’t inspired in that way, or not in anything like the volumes that matter. In fact, the purpose of that marketing is much more: ‘Plant a seed in someone’s mind so that, when they are in a bookshop or supermarket and happen to see your book, they think, Oh yes, I’ve heard about that …’

In other words, trad publishers’ marketing only works if the book already has decent distribution. That’s why you hear so many trad authors complaining that their publishers are doing no marketing at all. Those complaints are (mostly) perfectly justified. Publishers know that only a certain proportion of the books they buy will end up getting good physical distribution. Those lucky books will get all the marketing love. The others will be – politely, evasively – sidelined, because even the world’s biggest publishers can’t successfully promote a book which isn’t widely available for sale.

(And, by the way, self-publishers have a further disadvantage, namely that a lot of self-published books are crap. Newspapers and the like don’t want to promote a book that might be crap and they can’t be bothered to read your book to find out if it is or isn’t. So the easy call for them is to show interest in publicity calls from the big publishers but to ignore calls about anything self-published. That’s not really fair – you want a book to be judged on its merits – but that’s how it is.)

And, for a very long time, that was the only way that books could be marketed successfully. The rise of Amazon and the e-book has created two more:

1. You are signed up with a really good digital-first publisher

In that case, the publisher will have curated relationships with bloggers in your niche. They’ll have carefully tended mailing lists of readers in your niche. They’ll have extensive engagement with your target readers on social media. They’ll also have deep knowledge of such things as metadata, cover design, blurb writing, pricing strategies, and so on.

Those things will successfully win readers on Amazon, but the publisher isn’t going to start offering its resources to third-party books, because why would it? Those resources are needed for the publishers’ own authors. No marketing company can pay to create those resources, because they’d never generate enough income to repay the cost.

2. You are an effective self-publisher

Self-publishing is much the same as having a really good digital-first publisher – except you’re the publisher. And what you lose in scale (number of bloggers emailed, number of followers on Twitter), you can easily win back in laser-targeting and readers thrilled at direct connection to the author.

***

So those are the only three ways that books sell:

1. Traditional PR and marketing running hand-in-hand with extensive physical distribution
2. Digital marketing by firms with deep audiences in your niche
3. Digital marketing by you (probably centred on your mailing list and topped up with nimble advertising on at least one ad platform.)

Third party marketing firms do exist. Many of them are ethical. I’m sure a lot of them try hard and do good things. But they can’t succeed. Not really. They may boost sales, for sure, but they are highly unlikely to boost them by enough to repay you for the cost of doing so.

My advice to authors remains the same, always.

Whether you work traditionally or self-pub or as a hybrid, work to build your own mailing list. Make sure the people are on it for the right reasons. (They love your books, not because you give away biscuits.) Stay in touch. Write more books. Rinse and repeat.

If you do that, you won’t need third-party marketing. It won’t matter Whether or not LoPrice Supermarkets Inc stocks your book or not. You’ll have your own reliable marketing tool that will grow stronger the more you use it.

That’s it from me.

The news is full of some weird story from America. Old guy in Washington moves house. Jeepers. You’d think they’d find something bigger to focus on.