Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

A “humanistic” approach to social media marketing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This past week­end, I attended MileHiCon 43. I had a really good time–I hadn’t attended in sev­eral years due to attend­ing World Fantasy instead.  It’s a very small sci­ence fic­tion con­ven­tion by com­par­i­son to World Fantasy, but full of fun, ded­i­cated fans.

I was on two pan­els, both of which I think went rel­a­tively well.  The first was on New Marketing for Writers–specifically regard­ing social net­work­ing.  I’ll talk more about that in a minute.  The sec­ond panel was on “Urban, Suburban, and Rural Fantasy.”  I had no idea what the hell we were talk­ing about (as typ­i­cally used, the term ‘urban fan­tasy’ has lit­tle to do with urban set­tings) and mostly just cracked wise about vam­pires and were­wolves “doin’ it.”  Also, I mocked Kansas a bunch, because that’s pretty much what I do when I’m at a loss for any­thing else to say.  I’m told it went over fairly well, though.  Mario Acevedo is one funny guy.

During the mar­ket­ing panel, I real­ized that for a while now, I’ve been striv­ing to develop my own notions of “eth­i­cal” inter­net mar­ket­ing for writ­ers, although I’m not cer­tain I’ve ever tried to say as such.  This hit men when one of the other pan­elists talked about using a Twitter bot to iden­tify and auto­mat­i­cally fol­low poten­tial fans, which then de-​​followed any­one who didn’t fol­low back in three days.  I was repulsed by this idea, although I don’t think I artic­u­lated clearly why I think that it’s wrong.

I think my entire approach to social media mar­ket­ing can be summed up in two bul­let points.  They are:

  • be a real human being, not a mar­ket­bot spew­ing out demands to buy your stuff
  • don’t be a jerk (unless you’re a funny jerk).

Social net­work­ing in par­tic­u­lar, and the whole inter­net to a lesser extent, is about con­nect­ing with other human beings.  It is not your low cost broad­cast medium for adver­tis­ing your book.   I do advo­cate that authors and cre­atives share their pas­sion for their work via the medium, but not to the exclu­sion of every­thing else.  Engage with other human beings.  Social net­work­ing is not a broad­cast medium.  Twitter actu­ally has a sur­pris­ing num­ber of exam­ples of mar­ket­ing peo­ple who get this, and engage with their clients/​customers/​readers as human beings, rather than as walk­ing bags of money to be hit with the twitstick.

The rea­son I can’t sup­port the idea of using a bot to do your fol­low­ing and unfol­low­ing is it’s tak­ing a cold, method­i­cal  approach to the very human work of ini­ti­at­ing social inter­ac­tions.  It’s like try­ing to make friends with a junk mailer sent around town.  It’s treat­ing those you fol­low as poten­tial money bags, not as peo­ple with thoughts and feel­ings and inter­est­ing opin­ions.  They are tar­gets. Potential “sub­scribers,” not con­ver­sa­tional partners.

I don’t think there is strong evi­dence that this tac­tic of being a car­ni­val barker on social media even works.  Anecdotally, I think peo­ple spot these broad­cast­ers early on and drop them unless they _​really_​ like their prod­ucts in the first place.

The fun­da­men­tal mar­ket­ing strate­gies are: be loud, or be clever.  And online, I find that clever wins out–especially with read­ers.  Novelty accounts like ShitMyDadSays and DrunkHulk demon­strate this with their huge fol­low­ings.  The local car­pet com­pany post­ing noth­ing but sales notices doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot of fol­low­ers and prob­a­bly won’t.

My approach may not squeeze every last poten­tial dime out of the mar­ket­place, but I think there are some things more impor­tant than mak­ing money– being a decent per­son, for one.  And I don’t care if it means I never get rich, because I’d rather be seen as decent than a wealthy jerk will­ing to do any­thing to make a buck.  Hopefully there are authors who are more inclined to hire a web designer who advo­cates this mod­er­ate approach to online shilling. If you’re look­ing for some­one who thinks there is no mar­ket­ing tech­nique too low, no method too inhu­mane in the pur­suit of gain­ing read­ers, then I’m prob­a­bly not your guy. I can live with that.

Stop Worrying About Subgenre

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s been an awful lot of chat­ter around the web lately about sub­gen­res and steam­punk in par­tic­u­lar.  We’ve seen attacks on steam­punk, defenses of steam­punk, and a thou­sand shades of opin­ion in-​​between.  As some­one who likes steam/​clockpunk enough to name his busi­ness after it, I have a dog in the fight.

But I’m not drawn to these discussions.

Genre in gen­eral, as far as I am con­cerned, is mostly a con­struct of mar­ket­ing. Booksellers care about them, and the read­ers do too, but I ques­tion how much it helps an author to con­sciously choose a genre or sub­genre.  Right now, I feel bad for any­one writ­ing a steam­punk novel, because steam­punk is clearly, at least to my eyes, reach­ing a sat­u­ra­tion point rivaled only by zom­bies.  To be on that bus, you needed to write and sell your steam­punk novel 2–3 years ago.  I’m sure we’re going to con­tinue to see nov­els from estab­lished authors in this vein, but it wouldn’t sur­prise me if edi­tors and agents are already mov­ing on in their search for the next big thing.

My advice to you, and to myself, is to ignore the sub­genre when you write.  You can ignore that advice and still be suc­cess­ful (of course). I know, for exam­ple, that John Scalzi set out delib­er­ately to write mil­i­tary SF because it seemed to be sell­ing well, but I won­der what we would have got­ten from him if he had set out to write his own sub­genre.  Scalzian fic­tion, we would call it, prob­a­bly.  What would it look like? Who knows.  It’d prob­a­bly have fart jokes though! (and I mean that in a pos­i­tive way)

That’s not to say that if your pas­sion is steam­punk, I think you shouldn’t write a steam­punk novel. By all means, punk away.  This post once again boils down to “don’t lis­ten to oth­ers and write what you love.”

But I think this advice espe­cially holds true when it comes to labels.  Labels are for mar­ket­ing and that comes later.  Right now, when you’re still string­ing words together and shap­ing a book just seems like the wrong time to get caught up in such thoughts.  It’s not the sub­gen­res that exist today that get me excited.  I’m exited to won­der just what weird, wild, and expres­sive forms and gen­res writ­ers are work­ing on right now, as we speak, that we’ve never seen before.  I can’t wait to see what they turn out to be.  Regardless of where they are shelved in the bookstore.

5 More Ways for Writers to Market Themselves

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There are two schools of thought on mar­ket­ing and writ­ing.  Some think that mar­ket­ing can lead to great suc­cess, or that mar­ket­ing alone is respon­si­ble for the suc­cess.   Dan Brown is some­one I hear this accu­sa­tion levied at from time to time.  Others will argue that no amount of mar­ket­ing will make a bad story good.  Bad in this case gen­er­ally being bland and bor­ing. I waf­fle back and forth between these opin­ions depend­ing on the writer and how jeal­ous I feel, but ulti­mately, I ascribe to a syn­the­sis of the two.

Talent and genius are not all that is required to suc­ceed in writ­ing.  Sure, they’ll take you places a lot of the time.  But there’s a prob­lem that doesn’t have any­thing to do with how good you are.

There are a lot of other tal­ented peo­ple out there doing work just as good, if not bet­ter.  And they’re all vying for the atten­tion of the same peo­ple you are.  Sure, you can seg­ment the mar­ket a bit, and nar­row your niche, but ulti­mately, we’re all look­ing for read­ers, and there are only so many (and appar­ently grow­ing fewer by the year).  Forget the national deficit, we’re run­ning one hell of an atten­tion deficit these days.   Luckily, there’s no short­age of appetite for good sto­ries.  Human being are vora­cious con­sumers of the stuff.  But each per­son is pre­sented with a ver­i­ta­ble buf­fet of choices, and until they try a dish, they have no idea if it will be any good.  It’s  such a big buf­fet that they might not even know your dish is down there, next to the green bean casse­role and the can­died yams.  They may fill up on bread.

Okay, I’ve stretched that metaphor as far as it will go.

Writers don’t want to be sales­peo­ple.  If we wanted to be sales­peo­ple, we wouldn’t be writ­ing. There are no short­age of jobs for sales­peo­ple.  Maybe you’ll win the pub­lisher jack­pot and get a great mar­ket­ing deal with your three book con­tract.  Or maybe your publisher’s inter­nal process will hic­cup and the book sell­ers won’t really know what your book is about, and will have a hard time push­ing it to the chains and you’re dead on arrival.   Or, maybe you’ll pub­lish in high qual­ity, but some­what obscure mar­kets that not nearly as many peo­ple read as you might wish.

A lot of the time, the work falls to the writer to mar­ket them­selves and their work.  You’ll have help along the way, from the edi­tors and pub­lish­ers who buy your work, but not always.  Then you need to step in, and mar­ket yourself.

It’s a bad word though, isn’t it?  I feel slimy just for even say­ing it.  I’ve had to come to terms with the notion that what I do isn’t really infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy any more so much as it is a form of mar­ket­ing.  I have the neg­a­tive stigma attached the idea as well.   But I’ve come to know some excel­lent and effort­less self-​​marketers in the writ­ing world, and it’s con­vinced me of the over­all value.   They had the tal­ent first, but even tal­ent can use some help.

I’ve talked at length about how to use your website/​blog to mar­ket your­self.  I’d like to dis­cuss some alter­na­tive meth­ods, or at least tan­gen­tial ones.  So with­out fur­ther wind-​​up, here are a few more off-​​the-​​wall mar­ket­ing ideas for writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers.  Use at your own risk.

  1. Get Em Young

    Volunteer as a speaker for your local school sys­tem.  This will prob­a­bly go over best when you’ve got some cred­its to your name that you can show to teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tion.  Offer your ser­vices, explain that you would love to talk to kids about writ­ing.  Bring along age-​​appropriate free sam­ples (ARCs, mag­a­zine issues, and so on), and give it away to the kids.    Hey, if you’re a genre writer, you’re not only doing your­self a bit of a favor, and help­ing kids, you’re also increas­ing the expo­sure of the genre as a whole.   So it’s good mar­ket­ing and it’s just good karma too.

  2. Twitter Away

    You already know about Twitter, right?  I’ve blath­ered on about it enough.  Here’s the thing… Twitter is infected with self-​​marketeers, mar­ket­ing gurus, and all man­ner of social snake-​​oil sales­folk.  The Twitterati can smell a mar­keter from a mil­lion miles away.  I can tell from a glance at someone’s stream whether or not they’ve basi­cally cre­ated a Twitter account to blare about their work, or prod­uct, or what­ever.  They’re not sub­tle.  You need to be sub­tle, and you do this by not being an ass­hole. Twitter’s for social­iz­ing.  This means you talk to other peo­ple, you lis­ten, you par­tic­i­pate.  You don’t use it as a broad­cast medium.   It’s cool if you plug things now and then, really.  But retweet stuff too.  Answer replies.  Tell peo­ple how cool they are.  Be a gen­uine human being. And stay the hell away from any­one telling you that they have the sure-​​fire method of gain­ing you 16,000 fol­low­ers in 24 hours.  That stuff has to be bogus.

  3. Become an Expert (or share your exist­ing expertise)

    This goes back to some­thing I wrote about yes­ter­day, which is that I believe writ­ers should have pas­sions out­side of writ­ing itself.  Few of us make a liv­ing at this, and I hope some of us have day jobs that we kind of like.  So, make your­self an expert on your pas­sion, and share it with oth­ers through online media.  An audi­ence mem­ber is an audi­ence mem­ber, and no, I don’t have any hard fig­ures to sup­port the notion that a blog reader turns into a book buyer, but a blog reader is one less per­son who has never heard of you.

    Call it becom­ing an expert, or estab­lish­ing author­ity.  Either way,  you do so by offer­ing some­thing of use­ful­ness to other peo­ple.  Like I have been so des­per­ately attempt­ing to do with this blog for the past sev­eral weeks.  You can do this by a blog, but you can also do this via find-​​an-​​expert sites.  Join a com­mu­nity around the sub­ject and be help­ful to oth­ers.  Project good energy out and it comes back to you, I have found.

  4. Manufacture a Controversy

    Tension sells in fic­tion and it sells in real life too.   And I’ll be damned if this doesn’t actu­ally work some­times.  Now, whether or not you do this depends on whether or not you think any pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity.  Manufacturing a con­tro­versy, even if your out­rage is true and heart­felt, can back­fire.  Controversies inher­ently bring emo­tions to the table, and dis­cus­sions can turn into flame wars in a sec­ond when emo­tions are at the table.    I’ll be hon­est.  I wrote some of the things I wrote in yesterday’s post because I knew some peo­ple would take excep­tion to them, to the degree that they would be com­pelled to write a reac­tion.  That’s not to say I lied, because I believed what I wrote at the time.  But I knew that the “hook” of what I was writ­ing was that some peo­ple would dis­agree with me.

    In the end, I feel bad about it though, and I won’t be using it as a blog­ging tech­nique again unless I’ve put a lot of thought into my posi­tion.  Nick took me down yes­ter­day in about fif­teen min­utes, and gave me trou­ble, right­fully so, for not research­ing before I wrote.    So if you want to man­u­fac­ture a con­tro­versy, keep that in mind.  Do your research and make sure you feel strongly about your subject.

  5. Forget Everything I Just Said

    Sometimes, the best mar­ket­ing a writer can hope for is to be a nice, help­ful, gen­uinely inter­est­ing per­son.  Someone who gives as much as they receive, and who loves meet­ing and talk­ing things over with new peo­ple.  Those peo­ple do well because they earn it.

    I’m try­ing to be that kind of per­son, but I’m also twit­ter­ing, shar­ing my exper­tise (what lit­tle there is), and some­times, not nec­es­sar­ily by acci­dent, man­u­fac­tur­ing a con­tro­versy or two.  To the point where I don’t get nearly enough writ­ing done out­side of the blog.

    I hon­estly write these posts out of a desire to be help­ful, and to feel like I am engag­ing in the com­mu­nity around me.  If I’m try­ing to mar­ket any­thing, it’s my ser­vices as a free­lancer.  I don’t have a book and my short sto­ries are rare lately.  Maybe the best pol­icy for a writer regard­ing mar­ket­ing is hon­esty and authenticity.

So what do you think?

Five reasons this book trailer rocks

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I for­get where I got this, but I think that it’s the level of qual­ity I’d like to see in more book trail­ers online:

Having Tim Curry as a nar­ra­tor is prob­a­bly out­side of the range of what we can afford as SF/​F writ­ers, but still.  Let’s go over what makes this awesome:

  1. Tight pac­ing. 2 min­utes long, and packed with infor­ma­tion.  If there’s a neg­a­tive here, some of it is too fast.  But that is prefer­able to too slow.
  2. Rapid-​​moving, well designed motion graph­ics. The move­ment is var­ied. It’s not a bunch of slow zooms or pans on a graphic like many book trail­ers I see. Stuff comes in and leaves the view at an angle.  There’s per­spec­tive.  It has a coher­ent visual style also.
  3. Illustrations! This is much eas­ier when your book has illus­tra­tions already, but maybe an invest­ment in an illus­tra­tor would increase the “stick­i­ness” of a book trailer.  It’s a visual medium, and you need some imagery to catch the eye.  Simple stock pho­tos prob­a­bly aren’t good enough. And you can only use your cover so many times.
  4. Professional nar­ra­tion, with the high­est qual­ity sound. So many book trail­ers I have seen end up sound­ing like they were recorded in a bath­tub.  PC micro­phones are a trav­esty.   Studio-​​quality audio is not cheap.  Alas.
  5. Prominently dis­played URL at the end. This isn’t a crit­i­cism of other book trail­ers as I usu­ally don’t make it to the end in other ones I have watched.  But I liked how it left you with a call to action (go to the web­site!)  I don’t know how much pro­mo­tion Lemony Snicket really needs for these books, but if I didn’t know about them already, this would have sent me run­ning to the site.

My After Effects and Premiere skills are pretty rusty, but I think I’m going to try and add them back into my skillset.  I have a voice actor stu­dio I’ve done work with in Denver at the old day job, and so I think I could prob­a­bly offer a decently afford­able, high qual­ity book trailer ser­vice.  Youtube is the third most vis­ited web­site on the web.  It’s power to bring your book before a new audi­ence is unpar­al­leled.  I’d really like to offer a ser­vice to tap into that power.

Today’s Market Health Question: How Many Readers Are There?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

How many indi­vid­u­als, all told in the English speak­ing world, do you think cur­rently read SF/​F short fic­tion, by which I mean read at least one story pub­lished in the past year? Do you think that num­ber is grow­ing or shrink­ing? Explain your num­ber, if you can. My thoughts after the jump.I don’t think the num­ber could be more than 35,000 peo­ple. This is a totally soft num­ber, and I’m guess­ing based on dou­bling the sub­scrip­tion fig­ure of the largest print mag­a­zine, which is as good of a method as I can think of. I sus­pect that we can’t just total up all the sub­scrip­tion num­bers because there’s a huge over­lap between the groups.

If that num­ber is even close to being right, it sure does make genre short fic­tion seem like the most niche of activities…

Now China and it’s SF mag­a­zine… that’s around half a mil­lion? I keep com­ing back to that. There’s some­thing in that num­ber, in that size that I can learn from, that is telling of the sit­u­a­tion, but I can­not fig­ure it out.

Honestly, after being in London, I am sur­prised short fic­tion isn’t more pop­u­lar than it is. Everyone on the tubes appeared to be read­ing some­thing. I saw a lot of books, but mostly the free papers. Has any­one ever tried to do a free paper con­sist­ing of fic­tion? I need to read up on the eco­nom­ics of those free papers. You could get one at every sin­gle tube sta­tion, from one of sev­eral people.