Category Archives: Marketing

3 things I’ve learned about book marketing

Business of writing, Marketing, Publishing, Uncategorized, , , ,

In the nearly six years since I created Elephant’s Bookshelf Press, one of the things I’ve had to work on the most has been my book marketing skills. Mind you, since part of what I’d reported on in my day job as a journalist was nonprofit marketing and fundraising, I thought I was starting my company with a solid knowledge base.

Perhaps I was, but it wasn’t enough.

When I was reporting on nonprofit marketing, Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist. The World Wide Web was still in its first decade. Email marketing was in its infancy. Direct mail was king.

Oh my, how the marketing and advertising world has changed!

These days, if you’ve launched an ebook and/or a paperback, you need to be able to boost the book’s visibility all the time. Building awareness requires a well-stocked toolkit. If you’re like me, with a spouse and young kids and a full-time job that keeps me away from them for several hours every day, that toolkit needs to have everything handy and charged up.

I want to share a few ideas about tools I’m using now that are either relatively new or new to me.

To be honest and open, I don’t have any affiliate relationships with these groups (well, I just created my Amazon affiliate relationship this week, but I don’t exactly know how to use that tool yet and I don’t think my mere mentioning of it will do anything that puts money into my account). But down the road, I might do that kind of thing. Again, building affiliate relationships is a potential tool, but I’ll discuss that sometime down the road when I have a better idea what I’m talking about.

Anyway, to the tools: One: Advertising. This may seem obvious, but a lot of authors don’t advertise, and at least as many don’t advertise enough. Honestly, I’m not advertising enough either.

But where to advertise? Sometimes the choice is made for you. For the latest EBP book, Lost Wings, we just launched a countdown campaign, and with it, an ad through Free Kindle Books and Tips. I’ve advertised through that side before, but part of the reason I chose it this time is because it allows books with few reviews to be advertised there. At the time I scheduled the ad, we only had two. I really appreciate that, since so many EBP books are anthologies, which often don’t receive many reviews. And while Lost Wings has nine reviews as I type this, and I have additional ads scheduled for later, I’m sure I’ll use FKBT again in the future.

Two: AMS ads. Yes, this is another type of ad, but it’s inherently different from a book blog ad. It targets different people (people searching for books, rather than readers who signed up for a list to get book ideas pushed to them). I’ve been playing around with these a lot in 2017 and have had some spectacular successes and some total failures. So far, most of the ads have been related to keywords. But I’m experimenting now with the product display ads. Again, I’ll talk more about those down the road once I have some experienced to speak from. But if your books are being sold on Amazon, AMS ads are a must in my opinion. Let’s face it, Amazon is the biggest online bookstore in the world. But if no one can find your book when they’re looking for something, then you owe it to your audience to bring it to their attention.

Three: KDP Rocket. I’ll probably sound like a paid shill, but I’m not. My approach to advertising changed as soon as I bought this product earlier this year. It has simplified my searching for keywords and enabled me to hone my selection process. I’ve learned how to improve the keywords I select for my books through Kindle — and the keywords I chose anywhere, for that matter — and I’ve started to rethink some of my book marketing overall. Once again, I’ll talk about that more down the road, but to give you a sense of why I’m so pleased with KDP Rocket, let me share this:

Our anthology Tales from the Bully Box was released in 2014, and it did ok when we launched, and then it quickly languished. I tried various things to bring it back to life, but they didn’t work.

One of the authors of a story there, Sarah Tregay (who also did the beautiful cover for Bully Box — and Lost Wings, too!) told me she’d been told good things about the book by a friend of hers who was using it in a school setting — which was what it was made for.

That made me smile, but I wasn’t quite sure how to take advantage of it. Then I learned about KDP Rocket, looked into it, and ended up buying it. The first book I tried it on was Bully Box. Within weeks, my AMS keyword ad campaign resulted in doubling the sales of the previous year in a single month.

I realize we weren’t talking about major sales of Bully Box in 2016, but I continued with the AMS ads and using KDP Rocket to craft the keyword selection further. And now Bully Box is the most successful paperback book in the relatively short history of EBP! We’re also paying more for advertising than we ever have, but when they result in success, they’re clearly worth it.

What are you using to boost sales of your books and finding success with? Please share!

Buzz vs Word-of-Mouth: What Hollywood Could Learn From Publishing

Business of writing, Guest posts, Marketing, , , ,

This post appeared originally on From the Write Angle in February, 2013. Gaining at least a basic understanding of marketing will help you identify and target work to your audience. In this post, R.S. Mellette offers a snapshot of his experience with buzz and word of mouth from the film industry. Shared with permission of the author, whose two novels, Billy Bobble Makes a Magic Wand (2014) and Billy Bobble and the Witch Hunt (2016) were published by Elephant’s Bookshelf Press.

Buzz vs Word-of-Mouth: What Hollywood Could Learn From Publishing
by R.S. Mellette

I moderated a conference of film industry professors a while back, and when one of them said that Hollywood relies heavily on word-of-mouth marketing, I laughed.

I couldn’t help myself. Here is an industry that considers a 20% or 30% drop in sales a success! That’s not word-of-mouth. Or if it is, good words are not being spoken.

Interestingly, the Hollywood insiders on the panel thought I was the crazy one for doing a spit-take with the Kool Aid they were serving. But of course, none of them had theatre or publishing experience.

In those disciplines, word-of-mouth marketing means sales INCREASE with time, not drop. A play that is worth the time, money, and effort of going to see will build an audience. A book worth the read will see an increase in sales.

In Hollywood, my filmmaking brothers and sisters have forgotten the difference between Buzz and Word-of-Mouth. So, let’s take a look at them side-by-side.

Buzz: “I want to see that movie,” says one friend to another before it premieres. “Yes,” says the friend, “I’ve heard it’s good.”

Word-Of-Mouth: “I saw the best movie this weekend, you should see it.”

In writing, we call that passive vs. active voice. In court, it’s called a firsthand account vs. hearsay.

Marketing generates buzz. The product itself creates word-of-mouth.

Why is that a distinction worth discussing? Because buzz owes only a passing fealty to the quality of the product. Producers in Hollywood will actually judge a script on “trailer beats,” meaning juicy stuff they can put in the preview to create buzz. A script that tells a good story but has no trailer beats will be passed over in favor of another script that is more easily marketable.

Compare this to the world of self-publishing today. Sure, sure, there is a sub-culture of writers trying to get good reviews—or spam their competition with bad ones—to increase buzz. There is nothing wrong with an honest pursuit of good buzz, but the runaway hits in the self-publishing world come almost exclusively from word-of-mouth marketing.

And word-of-mouth marketing is entirely dependent on the quality of the work. It is first-person, active, marketing. One friend telling another, “I enjoyed that, and I think you’ll like it, too.”

What does this product-oriented marketing technique look like on the sales charts, graphs, and tables? That’s easy. No drop off. Sales go up the longer the product is available. And when the same people create a new product, their sales start higher because they have become a trusted brand. As long as they keep up the quality, then their work will generate its own buzz.

The opposite is also true. How many of us have been fooled so many times by a great preview for a lousy film that we no longer trust the studios? Like so much of the rest of American Industry, studios have lost sight of long term success in favor of instant gratification. They have confused buzz with word-of-mouth.

So the work suffers. We, as consumers, suffer. And worst of all, we artists who must try to make a living in this environment suffer.

R.S. Mellette is an author and filmmaker. Prior to the Billy Bobble series of novels, Mellette had Sci-Fi short stories published by Elephant’s Bookshelf Press in the anthologies: The Fall: Tales from the Apocalypse, Spring Fevers and Summer’s Edge. Mellette is an Associate Director of Dances With Films (one of MovieMaker Magazine’s top 25 coolest film festivals in the world). He wrote and directed the multi-festival winner, Jacks or Better. He also wrote the first web-to-television intellectual property, “The Xena Scrolls,” for Universal Studio’s Xena: Warrior Princess. On Blue Crush and Nutty Professor II he served as script coordinator. He’s acted in Looney Tunes: Back In Action, Star Trek: Enterprise, Days of Our Lives, Too Young The Hero, and countless stage productions across the U.S.

A few minutes with Jean Oram, author of The Wedding Plan

Audience, Author interviews, Blogging, Marketing, , , , , , , , ,

One of the many wonderful writers I have met at AgentQuery Connect is Jean Oram, who is described as the “super moderator” of that writers’ community. In the fiction realm, she tends to write romance, and in the nonfiction area, she focuses on child’s play, with sites like It’s All Kid’s Play.

Jean’s latest new release, The Wedding Plan, is about a secret marriage between ex-lovers. But with their past and being stuck in a cabin out in the small, nosy little town of Blueberry Springs you can be sure their secrets will be difficult to keep! The Wedding Plan is from her new Veils and Vows series and can be found on all major online bookstores.

She also has been an important supporter of Elephant’s Bookshelf Press since its beginning and served as copy editor of our best-selling anthology, The Fall. For this interview, we talked about marketing and her approach to building her audience.

Do you have a mailing list and newsletter?

I sure do!

How often do you send anything to your mailing list?

It depends on a lot of different things, but typically I try to reach out to my subscribers every 4-6 weeks so they don’t forget who I am. 😉 It has to be meaningful though—I never want to annoy my subscribers.

Do you have a blog?

Yes.

How often do you post on your blog?

That, like my newsletter, depends on what’s going on. My blog is a place for my readers to find updated news, items of interest, giveaway entry forms, and the like. Sometimes there will be four posts in a week, sometimes nothing for 6-8 weeks.

What else do you do to market yourself as an author?

I try everything and an answer to this question could fill an entire book.

Basically, you never know what’s going to work for you, so you’ve got to experiment. Some things that haven’t worked for others work for me. Some things that work for others don’t work for me. Things that worked two years ago no longer have the same effect now. For example, doing a basic signed paperback giveaway used to create avid fans—like a 90 percent conversion rate. Now it’s more like 25 percent which makes it less financially feasible to use those kinds of giveaways in that manner. So, now I use few signed paperback giveaways and use them for different purposes. Why has it changed? Who knows, but if you’re going to keep selling your books, you have to stay hungry, stay smart ,and keep rolling with the punches.

Do you offer services like editing, query review, etc.?

I do not.

What do you consider success for your marketing efforts?

It really depends on what the purpose/goal on a particular marketing effort was. Recently, I wanted to increase the number of people in my reader group (on Facebook), and so I gave it a push from several different angles and met my numerical goal for new members. My next goal is to get them active, make friends with those members. After that will be to find rewarding ways for them to help me share the word about my books—that’s going to be a more difficult thing to measure. Because what are my goals? Visibility? Then having a few members share a post can help. If it’s getting sales directly from posts being shared…well, that’s more difficult to measure directly.

Thanks, Jean!

Jean Oram is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling romance author who loves making opposites attract in tear-jerking, laugh-out-loud romances set in small towns. She grew up in a town of 100 (cats and dogs not included) and owns one pair of high heels, which she has worn approximately three times in the past twenty years.

Her life contains an ongoing school theme, having grown up in an old school house, then becoming a ski instructor in the Canadian Rockies, then going on to marry a teacher and becoming a high school librarian. She now runs a fundraising committee for her daughter’s school.

Jean lives in Canada with her husband and two kids. She can often be found outdoors hiking up mountains, playing with kids on the soccer field, racing her dog on her bicycle–sometimes the dog lets her win–or inside writing her next novel.

Subscribe to Jean’s newsletter and get a taste of her small-town comedies that will have you laughing while falling in love. Get your FREE ebook by signing up here: www.JeanOram.com/FREEBOOK.

Rowing on the ocean

Audience, Marketing, Publishing, writing, , ,

I was talking with a writer friend recently who was feeling down in the dumps. She had seen her first book published, but the experience with her publisher had not been ideal. Inadequate communication, a lack of a cohesive launch and promotion plan, and ultimately a company that fell apart left her fighting to regain her rights.

A prolific writer, she ended up self-publishing a book that had been committed but not yet published. But that hasn’t been exactly what she hoped for either. She learned what many of us discover: It’s difficult to shift gears from writer to publisher. Frankly, there are different skill sets involved, and it takes a while to develop new skills. Moreover, it’s frustrating, especially when you feel like you’ve failed somehow even though you grabbed hold of the brass ring.

Or to use a different metaphor, imagine discovering that you’ve been set adrift on a raft without a motor. You have a couple oars and you know the basics of setting the raft in motion, but it’s a big ocean and you have no sign of land on the horizon. In my friend’s case, she has some advantages. She has an agent who is providing guidance. For sure, it’s better to have direction and a compass than to attempt to rediscover how our ancestors navigated by the stars, but guidance is not propulsion. Wherever you are on the journey, one thing is clear: Publishing takes energy. Continue reading Rowing on the ocean →