Marketing
Getting people to read your books will probably prove to be a lot more difficult than writing them. The plot twists inherent in marketing are devious.
As of early March, 2008, about 1.4 billion people used the Internet. It's hard not to see this number as enough potential readers of whatever you've written to make your book a cosmic best-seller. If one percent of them could be persuaded to buy your stuff, you'd need to buy yourself a private country to store all your money in.
Sadly, this isn't going to happen any time soon. Quite a few of the users of the Internet genuinely aren't interested in what you've written — whatever it happens to be. More to the point, however, your voice on the net is going to have to compete with 1.4 billion other voices. The background noise is deafening.
Simply uploading your book to Kindle — and perhaps creating a web page to promote it — won't guarantee that you'll sell a significant number of copies of it. In fact, if that's all you do, it will probably guarantee that you won't.
You might want to regard this page as some "truth in advertising" — or, if you're mildly cynical, as us covering our backsides. Getting your books uploaded to Kindle will help you find readers for them, but especially if you're self-published or published by a small press with limited marketing resources, it's nowhere near the end of the story.
Promoting Your Book
It's probably helpful to appreciate that in undertaking to market your writing, you won't really be promoting your book — you'll be selling it, just as people sell cars and time-share condominiums and carpet cleaning machines. Books are somewhat more intellectual and lofty, but the principle is the same.
It's also probably helpful to appreciate that books are something which few people consider to be necessities. It's a lot easier to sell something to potential customers who regard it as fundamental to continuance of life, or likely to help them make a pile of cash. A product that merely promises to divert and entertain people won't have the same degree of immediacy.
Welcome to the new millennium.
If you write a book entitled Make a Million Dollars Next Week, and your book can actually do what its title promises, you'll have a reasonably easy time selling it. Your biggest challenge will be persuading people to believe your claim of its efficacy.
Most books aren't as easy to promote. You can better appreciate why this is if you think about how you respond to advertising, and how you choose the things you buy.
Consider the last time you saw an advertisement for something and felt compelled to leap from your chair and buy the product being promoted. If upon suitable reflection you discover that no such event has transpired within living memory, you'll be comforted to know that you're pretty much like everyone else in this respect.
Product promotion — advertising — rarely works this way, because it rarely has the opportunity to promote anything that's so singularly desirable as to provoke this sort of response in its potential customers.
What advertising actually tries to do is to make customers familiar with the products it promotes, in the hope that the next time they're shopping for a toaster or a pair of shoes or a book, they'll remember what they saw advertised, and give more attention to the items in question.
This is, as an aside, why using traditional media advertising such as television commercials or magazine display advertising is so grotesquely expensive. A single thirty-second television commercial won't sell much of anything. You'd need to buy a huge number of them, to run frequently enough to make whatever you're selling familiar to your potential customers. People rarely market books this way because it's rarely possible to make enough money selling books to pay for this sort of marketing campaign.
The same is true of magazines and newspapers — buying a single quarter-page advertisement in the back half of a publication to flog your book won't create enough buzz for your latest novel to attract the attention of a fruit fly.
You'll need to get creative — which, if you've written a worthwhile book, you probably already are, albeit in a slightly different realm.
The tricky bit in coming up with creative, effective solutions to the problem of marketing your books is that you can't pay someone else to do it for you. If you see a web page that looks like this one but promises to get your books flying from the shelves or downloading onto millions of book tablets, you can be pretty certain it's lying to you.
Clever marketing ideas come from within, and they're almost always peculiar to what you've written, and what ideas and peripheral skills you can bring to the problem.
Marketing on the Web
Web pages don't sell things, as a rule, but they can be a powerful adjunct to marketing whatever you're trying to sell. A well-designed web page will allow potential readers of your books to sample your writing, review synopsis of your books and consider what they want to buy, all without the prospect of a shop assistant descending upon them with sharpened talons and a malevolent stare, inquiring "can I help you find something?"
There are innumerable web page designers and hosting companies available to create pages for you. This includes us — please contact us if you'd like us to quote on designing a page for you. Note that we also offer e-commerce pages — if you plan to sell paper books, we can create a secure server page to allow your readers to order your books on-line.
Here's a bit more shameless self-promotion — we can also undertake to service orders for printed books, if you decide to do paper. We can warehouse them, take phone and Internet orders for them and ship them to your customers. We invite you to contact us about these services as well.
This web page doesn't include a specific discussion of the rates for these services because in the over two decades during which we've been providing them, we've yet to encounter two clients with anything like the same requirements.
One of the most obvious ways to promote your book on the web is to engage in web advertising — buying banners on other web pages to point to your page. This is the Internet's equivalent to traditional media advertising, and it suffers from the same drawbacks. Most users of the Internet have long since learned to tune out web banners — an increasing number of them use browser add-ons like AdBlock Plus to prevent their appearance.
You'd need to buy a great deal of web advertising to generate a meaningful amount of attention for your books.
Search engines represent a useful way to direct attention to your book's web page, and while they won't market your work, they'll improve the effectiveness of whatever marketing you do undertake by making it easier for people who are interested in what you're doing to find you. It's possible to improve your ranking in search engines, and as such make it easier for potential readers to get to your web page, by designing pages that search engines rank more favorably, and by submitting your web page to the popular search engines in a manner they approve of.
We can provide search engine management for our clients — please contact us for more information.
A Dark and Stormy Night
Great books are written — successful books are made. In a world shrieking with content to watch and listen to and play and attend… and occasionally, to read… making your book sufficiently visible will be a challenge.
It's a challenge that you'll ultimately need to address with your own resources, and your own imagination.
While we can provide you with an outlet for your books — by getting them into the distribution streams of the book tablet vendors — and assist you with some of the peripheral issues of marketing and fulfillment, the core of the problem will remain with you.
There are a lot of authors who have successfully addressed the issue of finding substantial readerships — you can do it as well. Be prepared for the task to be somewhat more daunting than writing your books was.