marketing-- like it or not

by Rain Trueax

Here's the thing for anyone selling anything. You have to satisfy the buyer. You have to convince them of their need...  for what you are providing. To do that, your product must be visible to them. The greatest artist in the world will not sell their paintings if they don't get them out of their studio or buyers into it.

While creating a book, painting, beautiful furniture, etc. is a mix of craft and art, marketing is a business. It is what will convince someone to trade their labor for the creator's labor. While art might be pure, once the creator wants to trade the result for money, short of finding a human benefactor, it is a business. Business is something many artists find distasteful-- hence they better find that benefactor.

This is true when selling our skills or selves for a job. I always think about movie stars where it comes to marketing. There are many women as lovely as Marilyn Monroe, what made it her while the others went back to Kansas? Heck, some even sell themselves for sex to get ahead and don't get anything but bad experiences. 

So, why is it that some succeed in the business end, while others must put their wonderful work in closets? Persistence? Talent? Beauty? Luck? Whatever it is, marketing, which is a skill, is behind it all. 

Ranch Boss has a saying and even an image for it of a dead possum on the highway with a yellow stripe painted over its body. 

Timing is everything.

Regarding timing, I tried in the 90s to market a contemporary romance that had a monster in it and how the heroine finally had to overcome it. Sky Daughter got read, but the publishing house didn't know where to put it. One comment I got back was it wasn't believable enough to be marketed... A few years later Harry Potter changed mainstream books for what was believable.

Where it comes to marketing, because I know the most about it involving books, what follows is my experience and what I think I've learned. There are many possibilities to why today my contemporaries don't do as well as the historicals. It may well go back to the beginning. 

In 2011, when I first decided to bring my books out, I knew absolutely nothing about what readers expected from covers. I thought doing them myself was a good idea (since I was a painter). They would be different (different isn't always better in that world but I didn't know that then). It took me a year to get them all ready as I had read it's a good idea to bring out a lot of them-- and by golly, I had a lot. The cover for that first one is alongside here.

Although my preparation involved updating the stories, improving the craft end, it did not involve a way to launch them. I had no idea how to do that, but because it was in Amazon (the years before KU changed it all), I had the option of offering free days. With no advertising, I expected the book to get no takers. In shock, I saw the numbers go up until over a thousand had been taken.

That was encouraging... Except, it didn't end up with reviews. Only one reader wrote a review. I wondered did the other takers even read the book. One person even told me in a comment that she now had a Rain Trueax book on her device. As best I know, she never read it. I soldiered on with the other contemporaries and had them all out by June 2012. 

Back then, I had no idea about promotion but did find one place I thought might help. Amazon had had a forum for readers and writers but by the time I got into it, that had split into separate forums-- one for readers and the other writers. I goofed and went to the reader one first, When I mentioned something that indicated I was a writer (not even a mention of my book), I was told my being there was a bad mistake and could lead to being blackballed. Properly chastised, I headed to the writer one where I found a forum there for western romances. Although my first contemporary was not a cowboy story, it was set in the west, and I joined in to try to learn. I made some friends there who are still beneficial to me today. For me, the forums didn't sell books. I think years later Amazon ended them all. One thing about this world of marketing-- change is the name of the game.

What did a poor launch mean for my books? Well, Amazon ranks books based on one of their algorithms, which can alter at any time. Ranking a book shows readers how well it is selling-- supposedly. That's not totally true. They rank sales higher for new releases than books that have been out a long time. Today, I might get say seven sales on a book that still shows up 1,000,037 while a new book with those same sales could be below 100,000. There is no way around the penalty for an older book, which was poorly launched, except maybe blockbuster status. Unlikely to happen if readers look at rankings to determine their next book.

So, even today, years after they came out, my contemporaries might not sell because of my ignorance in launching them. Even today, I don't know do as much for launches as it is claimed I should. There are tutorials out there to tell the budding writer what to do to be a bestseller. Someone else will have to test their success as I won't be the one. It's like being on a treadmill that never stops to do all they claim you should. Maybe worth it to some, and I do recommend reading the books just to see if it'd be for you.

Another thing to get your product seen in Amazon or any sale site is finding the right target words on the blurbs (which, of course, are very well written). Some people search for their next read by key words-- like rabbit romance. Now, if you have one of those, but it's been out there a long, long time, it will take a lengthy search before someone will come to it-- based on those algorithms. Ideally you get your tags into places where there are going to be searches but not so many in there that you will be buried.

That I know of, there is only one way to beat those algorithms-- advertising. It is why my historicals sell today. Without it, there'd be no sales. Also maybe historicals are easier to put into boxes than contemporaries which can go from Hallmark to erotica.

Social media can be a friend of the indi author. Get onto some of the platforms like Facebook or the new one MeWe, and put out stuff about your books but also yourself. Facebook is apparently changing how it will let you show up there with a lot of new criteria. Authors are trying to figure out what the heck that means. It'll begin July 31st and has led me to decide to create a public group at FB and probably MeWe for creative work. This could be extremely time consuming and where does that leave writing new books?

What about blogs like this one? I began this blog years before I had any intention of bringing out the books I was writing. When the time came that I did bring them out, I was hesitant to mention them here as I knew most of the readers were not into romances. Maybe for authors who had a lot of readers from their genre, a blog could be a marketing tool. It wasn't for me and though I've had a few come here and try a book because of the blog, I think it's been very very few. I do the blog because I like doing it and any marketing it might accomplish is a happy surprise. 

Social media may or may not work out to help with sales; but here's the thing I've found at my age-- challenges are kind of cool. Whether they work or not, they get the juices stirring as it forces me to think new ways. I could be sitting around watching TV or trying something new that could fail. It's a choice.

I do have a Twitter account but don't think it sells anything for me. I do it because I can and it doesn't take much time. Other than that, some say Instagram is helpful. I've never figured out how to use it. I have listed the places I'm on social media alongside here somewhere. They may work better for some than others but they are mostly free to try and options.

Marketing though, if you want your work to even pay for itself, is not. If you are bringing out a book you hope will find readers, you need to learn about advertising. At this point, Ranch Boss does the ads and grumbles about it but also I think likes the challenge.

So, those are my ideas about what I think might help if you are launching a book today. The big one and currently free, is get out into social media and find the ones that work for you. The new guidelines suggested for FB say get a group page but even there, don't post sales stuff more than 20% of the time. Make it personal and interesting. Maybe give some things away but in general have people get to know you and they might just look for what you have online to sell... Maybe. But if that doesn't work, maybe you will make some friends. That's a win/win for stepping up to the challenge and meeting new people. 

In the end, maybe marketing, for all the skills involved, is also a mystery like life, but it can be done by anybody willing to learn and take some risks.