This is another post after reading How to Market a Book https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08TZJQ1FB/ . I discovered lots of really common sense ideas in this book, not complex or World-changing, but blindingly obvious when you think about them in retrospect. The title of this post is the first of these.
When my first book was published, like many authors, I was eager to push it out to the World and use social media and my website to beg, plead and cajole people to buy my book. Some kind souls did, of course, but it’s hardly a sustainable strategy and reading this made me re-think that letting the readers that want to, find me, is a far better approach. Part of this is the categories the book is listed under on Amazon, and which keywords are used in the metadata, things I’d guessed at when I published, and being frank, hadn’t properly researched. There’s lots of great advice in the book, about the blurb, conversions to sales etc, but I realised I’d spent far too little time on these. I want to write, and love writing, and the marketing is a struggle and to me, a bit of a chore, until I realised I was looking at it wrongly. The parts of discovering what appeals to my readers, the phrases and words that people look for, it can actually be quite a fun game, with great satisfaction if you manage to see a change in hits or sales patterns because of what you’ve done. I also came to realise, looking back, that my blurbs were crap. A bit like the covers issue in my previous blog, I was trying to write clever, all-encompassing descriptions with plot points and hints, that accurately reflected the narrative. Basically I was doing them for me. By putting myself in the place of the potential reader/buyer, I could see that my descriptions probably wouldn’t even persuade me to invest my time and money in the book, so what were the key parts that should be there, which would make me want to read it?
In my day job, one of the things I train people to do is to think about the eventual audience and what they might want from the very beginning of a project, not just at the end, so you have a clearer sense of what might appeal. That way, tweets, blogs, comments can sow seeds of interest, and you’re not starting from a standstill when it comes to final publication.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t change my content to increase readerships, that’s an area of the Reedsy book which makes it stand out as a marketer’s tool rather than an authors. If you’re writing just to appeal to an audience, it becomes too mechanical for me, and the advice to write in a set genre and write in series might be great for marketing, but don’t appeal to me. One of the reasons I chose the indie route is so that I don’t have to fit into an existing niche, can write in different styles and on different subjects, and don’t have to alter what I write for an external publisher to be able to sell me better. It’s a drawback, but this is the real World and publishers have a business to run, and need to maximise sales first. I want to write my stories first, they are my priority, and while I may find it hard to build a genre following (the easiest way, this book suggests, to make it big) I can still use many of the tools and approaches mentioned for those markets.
I also have a big two or three book narrative planned for some point, which arose organically over the past couple of years, so it will be fascinating to see if the response and sales of those (when I eventually finish writing them), make any noticeable difference.
Anyway, I’ve updated my keywords, categories and blurbs, to try and make my books more discoverable and appealing, and I’ll let you know if it works!
Stay safe,
Kit