2. Sales and marketing. Sales is defined as “the act of selling a product in return for money or other compensation.” Marketing is the strategy that the business uses to get to the sales part.
Sales and marketing is generally considered the second of the two line functions in business, because it generates income directly. The Sales part is pretty obvious: you give someone something – a proposal, a manuscript, a book or e-book – and they give you money. The Marketing part is all the various research, techniques, and strategies that you use to get the sales.
Sales, for writers, splits into two categories: licensing and direct, or selling-to-editors vs. selling-to-readers. Early on, in the traditional publishing industry, it’s all about licensing. The writer sells (licenses) his/her work to a publisher/editor, who handles the actual production of the physical book, as well as a lot of the things that come under Quality Control. Selling to an editor involves the grunt work of sending the manuscript out over and over until you get an offer, followed by the contract negotiations over exactly what rights and subrights the author is licensing to the publisher. Eventually, most of us get an agent to handle this part, but that doesn’t mean it goes away entirely. The author still has to OK the deal, and then review and sign the contract, and there’s often a lot of networking on the author’s part that goes into getting the offer in the first place.
If you’re self-publishing, the whole licensing area drops out (except possibly for subrights); instead, you have expanded the Operations area and vastly expanded the Marketing and Publicity areas, in order to do all the things a traditional publisher would do.
Either way, direct sales-to-readers don’t come into the picture until there’s an actual physical book available to sell. For the traditional publishing industry, the publisher handles the vast majority of selling-to-readers, too, but there are at least some genre writers who generate direct sales themselves, at personal appearances or by setting up their own sales tables at conventions and book fairs. Usually, this kind of direct marketing-to-readers works best if one is in a genre such as SF (which has lots of conventions) or children’s/YA (school and library book fairs). For the self-published, there’s all of that plus the getting-the-book-into-bookstores part, which takes considerable time, effort, and persuasive ability.
Direct sales are also something that one has to watch closely. While it can be very satisfying to talk to readers and watch them buy your books, you have to sell at least one hardcover or two to three paperbacks per hour just in order to make minimum wage for the time you’re spending at the table. Add the same numbers for every hour you spend getting to the convention, hauling books in and out, setting up and tearing down, collecting and paying sales tax, and for most writers, it’s just not cost-effective. (I’m assuming here that the writer bought the books wholesale from the publisher at the standard author discount rates.)
For ebook publication, there’s nowhere near as much time and effort involved in distribution and direct sales; you sign up with the big e-retailers, put a link on your web site/blog, and you’re pretty much set. On the sales and distribution part, anyway.
Which brings me to the marketing half of Sales and Marketing.
There are two basic types of marketing: push marketing, in which one tries to get the book prominently displayed in as many places as possible, so as to encourage potential readers who pass by to pick up the book and buy it, and pull marketing, in which one tries to get a lot of potential readers to go to bookstores and ask for the book, “pulling” it into the store. Most of the marketing publishers do has traditionally been push marketing to bookstores and wholesalers. Authors do both: push marketing to editors and pull marketing to readers.
Like Sales, Marketing splits into two parts: marketing a manuscript to editors/publishers/agents, and marketing the book to readers. For writers who don’t yet have an agent, marketing a manuscript basically means doing a bunch of research to find out which publishers/editors/agents are most likely to be interested in their particular book, and then polishing their query letter/proposal. Those of us who have agents are not exempt from this; there are always questions of strategy that only the writer can decide. Would a collectors edition be feasible, or is it too early in the writer’s career for anyone to be interested? Is it better to do a free podcast now, as a promotion, or try to sell audiobook rights later? Will that high-profile work-for-hire generate enough visibility to be worth the lost time working on one’s own original series?
This part of marketing can also include choosing new products, which for writers means picking what to write next. Depending on your overall strategy for your writing career (see upcoming post on the Executive area), that might mean working out what’s “hot” in the current market, drumming up a work-for-hire contract, or settling down to whatever one is most longing to work on next. Whichever route you’ve chosen, it will require some thought.
The second part of Marketing – promoting books directly to readers – is where most writers focus their efforts once a book comes out, and it will eat your life (and every bit of cash you make on the books) if you let it. There are horror stories about writers who wrote their first book, and then had their careers collapse because they spent three to five years after it came out doing nothing but promotions and answering fan mail.
Direct promotion covers everything from autographings to “author loot” (like bookmarks) to special web site promotions to conventions to book launch parties. Most of the time, the author foots the bill for this themselves, and it can be quite high, especially for those determined to “do everything possible to make the book a success.” They’d usually be better off thinking for a few minutes about how much bang they’re getting for their bucks, and then choosing only those promotional events/items that make for the largest explosions. Figuring out what’s best to do is as important as actually doing it.
Promoting a book directly to readers is absolutely vital for the self-published, but it’s more and more necessary even for those of us who are published by traditional publishers. In-house publicity departments are run ragged, and publishers expect their authors to step up and fill in the gap. The catch is that doing the wrong thing can blow you right out of the water…and it’s not always obvious what “the wrong thing” is. Even experienced professional publicists mess up now and again.
Marketing a manuscript to editors means doing the research to find out if the book you have written fits their line. There is no point in sending a fluffy romantic comedy to a publisher that only does gritty action-adventure-thrillers, or a science fiction thriller to an academic press that only prints textbooks. Editor marketing also means not cornering the editor at her cousin’s wedding, his sister’s bat mitzvah, or their son’s college graduation party and handing them a copy of the ms. along with a demand that they look at it. (I am not making these examples up, only changing names and relationships to protect the innocent.) This is not networking; it’s obnoxious, highly unprofessional, and pretty much guaranteed not to work anyway.
Marketing a book to readers is a lot harder, because the market for fiction is so huge and diverse. Again, market research – but this time, look at what other writers are doing to promote their books, what other publishers are doing, and what’s being done for completely different entertainment products. Talk to readers and bookstore clerks about what they like/don’t like to see happen. Talk to your fellow pros and find out what they’re doing and not doing, and what they think has worked and what hasn’t. Then consider your own time, energy, and abilities, and do some brainstorming.
The most difficult part of marketing a book to readers is getting attention in more than your local community. An ad in the church bulletin usually isn’t costly, but it also doesn’t reach a lot of people. Bookmarks passed out to local bookstores may raise awareness in your city or town, but they don’t do much for the rest of your state, let alone the rest of the country. The Internet and social media have made it possible to reach people all over the world, of course, but doing so effectively takes a lot of time. If you’re self-e-publishing, you’re pretty much committed to it, though.
Next: Quality Control
I wish I was five years farther along in my self-publishing career so I could speak with more authority about self-publishing (two months and six days doesn’t give a lot to build on) but I think some of this post falls into the common wisdom trap of marketing books. The fact is–and this is based on ten years as an acquisitions editor for a small non-fiction imprint at a Big 6 publisher–marketing success with no budget and no name author boils down to luck. It comes quickly when a big-name person loves the book and promotes it, or slowly when many readers gradually find the book and recommend it to friends, but either way authors can’t control it. No bookmark, no video, no appearance at a conference, no incredible number of tweets can create the right word-of-mouth to make a book take off. Only the right reader reactions can make that happen. And for self-published authors, our best bet is not to spend time on market research for marketing and promotion, but to spend our time writing more and better books. Amanda Hocking made some comment a few months back when she said that people always attributed her success to her social marketing skills, forgetting that everything was based on the fact that she wrote books that lots of people seemed to enjoy reading. For a self-published author, writing books that readers enjoy is going to matter enormously more to long-term success than any amount of time spent marketing.
Obviously, I wish I could be saying this five years from now having proved that my marketing (or non-marketing) theories are true, but I believe that more people are already realizing that the marketing advice being given to self-published authors (“promote yourself endlessly and at every opportunity”) is neither effective nor rewarding. JA Konrath’s blog had something on this recently, re reviews being useless, and Dean Wesley Smith has also written about it.
Of course self-published authors have to make it possible for readers to find our books, so some marketing is essential–writing a blurb, sharing the news within our own communities (one of my reader reviews comes from someone from my WOW guild and a couple others come from the positive-discipline parenting group I was part of when my son was younger), probably having a presence on Goodreads, Facebook and other such sites, although I haven’t even done much of that yet. I think my author FB page has four friends. No one can skip marketing entirely. (And personally, I’m sort of having fun playing with re-writing my blurb every month. Next month I’m going to do my first “traditional” blurb, ie not immediately obvious that I’m self-publishing, and see what happens. I almost hope the book does worse, so that I can justify continuing to entertain myself in my blurbs. My current blurb amuses me greatly.)
But anyway, letting people think that bookmarks will make a difference does them a disservice, in my opinion. There’s a site called Why Is My Book Not Selling? and many of the self-published authors there have been incredibly proactive about tweeting, submitting to blog review sites, doing blog hops, interviews, etc. even advertising and paying for marketing, and have still sold only a few dozen copies. Truly, the best bet for a self-published author, is to use their time wisely, by writing more and learning more about writing. Marketing time beyond the essentials is likely to be wasted.
Anyway, nice post, and I’m looking forward to reading what you have to say about the executive function. Deciding what to write is a really interesting aspect of thinking about writing as a business, to me.
While I knew some of this already, I learned SO. MUCH. from this post (literally too much for me to put in a comment, so I won’t try. I’ll just go reread the post.) Thank you!!
Wyndes – Frankly, I’m basically of your opinion about writing in general, but especially self-publishing. Still, ALL writers have to decide for themselves just how much time, money, and energy they’re going to put into self-promotion, and as they said in my marketing classes, “80% of all promotional dollars are wasted, but we don’t know which 80%, so we have to do it all.” My personal stand, like yours, is that if 80% of my time and energy will be wasted, I’ll keep promotional stuff chiefly to the things I actually enjoy doing, and minimize the rest. Some people, though, are natural publicists who can get a really amazing amount of return on their time/energy marketing and publicity expenditures. The hard part is actually being honest with oneself about where one’s strengths lie, and then playing to those strengths. Someone like me, who isn’t terribly good at the marketing or publicity end of things (and who frankly dislikes it, for the most part) is far better off minimizing time spent in this area, while a natural publicist might be well advised to put nearly as much time into marketing and publicity as they do into writing.
Self-publishing is a whole ‘nother post (or perhaps a set of them), though I don’t know the ins and outs as well as I ought (my one experience with a small press was brief, and mainly involved with the financial end). I’ve been mentioning it specifically because there are so very many people now who want to do it, and it’s so often neglected as a genuine option when people give writing advice. If anything, self-published authors need to consider all this stuff more carefully than those working within the traditional publishing system, because the self-published are taking on a lot more of the Operations, Sales and Marketing, Quality Control, and Publicity functions, so they have a lot more work and a lot more need to apportion their time wisely.
Tiana – Glad you’re finding it useful!
Self-published authors do need to consider the entire ecosystem of their business carefully, but I (again, from the limited perspective of less than three months) think it can and probably should be done with much, much less effort than people make it out to need. Well, I guess that depends on what an author is hoping to get out of it–maybe to strike it rich in self-publishing, you need to work JA Konrath’s 17-hours-in-front-of-a-computer days. But as long as you’re not aiming to strike it rich, I’m hoping (and, I guess, trying to prove in my own life) that it’s possible to be a lot more relaxed and still make a reasonable return on your investment of time.
In my case, I’ve put less effort into all of those business functions put together–with the exception of the writing–than many people put into finding an agent (based on boards I’ve read.) I finished my first draft on Halloween, and posted the book to Amazon on December 9th. So far I’ve sold about 500 copies, and I’ve made about $1200 in the time it might have taken me to start getting rejected by agents. So every time I read someone saying it’s a lot more work to self-publish, I think, well, if you want it to be, sure. But I’m really not convinced that it has to be.
In the old world of publishing, publishers wanted to be convinced that authors took the job seriously, that they wanted to be professionals, that they were “growing careers”. And none of that’s a bad thing, really. But in the new world of publishing, it feels to me like there’s room for people to have different kinds of careers. And there’s room for a model where yes, you have to pay your taxes and yes, you ought to make a pretty cover, but otherwise, write the best book you’re capable of, then have fun, do what you feel like doing, and let it go while you work on writing the next book. I’ll try to let you know in five years or so how it worked out!
projectwonderful.com is a cute little place that allows one to sign up and do free ads. Mind, they get bumped off as soon as someone bids higher, and you can only have a freebie last a max of 2 days, but it can get a few more views. Still, “free” sells a lot better than the paid. Ah, well.