Robert Zwilling
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- Jun 9, 2018
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Thank you for the rundown, it gives me some good leads to followup.
The Written Fiction Market, Marketing and Promotion Issues
- Thread starter KatG
- Start date
kmtolan
KMTolan
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- Apr 14, 2008
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- 2,522
The funny part is that I had a minimal display for my books since I was pushing the crafting. No signs or props. Just a couple banners in back to give a backdrop to the table, but seriously low key. Even my table was smaller than the usual display I show at comic-cons. What was happening, however, was that I was very engaged with the customers as this craft show encouraged both an older audience and folks who had the time to spend as much as they had money. So I would sit there and chat up the books, showing my enthusiasm for the stories. I think that played a larger part in the sales. Also shows that, even with all the shows I've done, I still haven't figured out everything (grin).
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You had a convention effect -- as if you were on a convention panel talking about your fiction and writing. The banner and the dragons attracted their attention and then some of them were curious. It's probably not something that always happens, maybe sometimes the dragons sell more or neither books or dragons do, and it's not something you can plan that much for -- you certainly weren't expecting a woman to buy your whole line just because she overheard your conversation. But these are the things that can occur when people are made aware that your work exists, and in a way that isn't simply an ad that their eyes might skip over.
That's how the symbiosis becomes important -- people can become aware that your book or short stories exist because they are checking out another work of fiction or something else and run into your work or you and your work. That's what conventions are for mainly, and it is also why romance and SFFH have not given up cover art, even for e-books, and instead use it to catch people's attention in hopes that some will try it and then if enjoyed, spread word of mouth. You can also have symbiosis in that someone is attracted to the book cover of another author's work, which yours happens to be next to in display or shelf.
And it's an example of how a connection/community that is not fiction writing specifically can lead into finding readers. You were at a craft show, selling crafts, and the books came with you. Even if you hadn't had the books there, you could have had cards, fliers, free giveaway pencils etc. with the book info and your website on them and gotten their attention to check it out later that way. It's very hard for publishing to measure how much a lot of this works (especially as they have little money for market research per individual title or in general,) but we do know that these things can work, sometimes. Which is why you don't want to hide (unless doing so is a work requirement or otherwise inappropriate,) your writing from all the other networks and events in your life. You never have to be pushy, but letting people simply know that it exists can lead to sales and word of mouth.
If you don't have physical books and/or money and time to attempt things like conventions and book festivals and booth tables, you can still do things on-line. You can have a website/blog for free on sites like Wordpress or for not much a year. You can build up an e-mailing list of folks willing to be on it and send them a newsletter as was mentioned by some here. It may not do much, but some authors swear by it. You can talk on-line about your life and your interests and have people come to be aware also of your fiction. You can find places for free ads (which is why we eventually set up the Promotion Zone,) which might just be singing in the wind, but might also get one or two people -- and they may spread word of mouth.
There's a time investment in all that, obviously, so you have to figure out what you can manage. If you are working with a license publisher, you'll be coordinating with them, but usually they will like whatever you can manage. (They get a bit nervous about free-lance publicists some authors hire because that can muck up channels they are trying to use, but it's workable if you can swing that.)
Obviously, having money to pay folk and do stuff gives an advantage, but again, it's unpredictable and it can be done with less while the Web still has some free parts (as long as you can get access to the Net.) We can take a look at for instance the case of Amanda Hocking, who made media waves when after a very successful run in self-publishing the young author signed a large reprint and new books deal with St. Martin's Press/Macmillan for her YA fantasy novels. Hocking benefited from the early froth excitement of the expansion of the e-book market in the first couple of years after the Kindle launch when a lot of readers went hunting for e-books to fill their new e-readers and devices. Some of those readers, mainly teens who she was aiming at, found her books. (Teens are good at word of mouth.) Hocking also benefited in that time period from Amazon wanting to use self-published e-books as both a marketing campaign for the Kindle -- so they gave self-pub authors a fair amount of marketing services for free or cheap -- and a way to gather self-pub authors and their friends and families as new, loyal Amazon customers by encouraging them. She benefited from having a fair number of novels ready to be put out on a fairly quick regular basis and she wrote quickly, which some self-publishing authors regard as a key factor (but which may or may not be.) And when her sales started to climb, she benefited from Amazon's algorithm system for self-pub Kindle products at the time. So timing played a part. But not everybody self-publishing at the time saw Hocking's sales figures, which were primarily through word of mouth. But Hocking also we know did the following:
1) She set up multiple blogs/sites, one for her as an author as her main blog and then blogs for each of her series and regularly posted content on them (again, a time commitment, though blogs can be set up for free.)
2) She did giveaways and fun contests on her blogs and talked about stuff she liked -- it wasn't just shilling the books as an attractant.
3) She kept in regular touch with any readers who contacted her through email, etc., announcing new launches and so forth.
4) She regularly went on Twitter and Facebook and talked about stuff, not just her books, but her interests in geekdom, such as horror, John Hughes films and the Muppets. She followed people and interacted on those platforms. (Again, that's a time investment.)
5) She networked her interests and she went symbiotic with other authors, creators and fans -- and this may have been the key factor, though again, nobody knows absolutely. A big fan of horror, she did a Zombiepalooza on her main blog for the entire month of October about zombies, horror and all things Halloween. Essentially, she set up a mini online convention on her blog, inviting other authors, artists and bloggers to come and blog on her blog about zombies, etc., to do giveaways of copies of their books, to contribute stories and games and art and geek news. She in turn guest blogged on many of their blogs.
That meant that the fans of the other writers and creators and fan writers' blogs came on over to her site for the event and got to learn about her books, or learned about them when she was on their blogs. They may have had only a few hundred fans, but you only need some and e-books can be acquired very quickly. And after the Zombiepalooza in October 2010, her sales took a large leap upward. And a lot of self-published authors started using guest blog tours and other types of events to publicize from what she did. And that doesn't always work, but it is again a way of connecting different networks and interests in our lives to interacting with people, offering them things of interest and getting a few to check out the writing for sale.
But also by 2012, only about two years after she put up her first books for sale in hoping to make a few hundred to go to a Muppets exhibit in another city, Hocking was very burned out. She was having to spend a great deal of time fixing typo errors in her e-books, interacting with fans, and regularly providing content online and in blogs to keep promoting her work on various platforms, managing the accounting and business aspects of being her own publisher, facing subsidiary rights sales interest, etc.. She wasn't looking to stop doing all of that, but she wanted to get distribution without having to constantly search for it so that she could concentrate on her writing and also get a break. So that led to her getting an agent and getting the reprint deal with Macmillan. She slowed down her output, took some time outs and let Macmillan help her go more global in distribution. She still does online stuff, but she deals with the fanbase a little differently now.
So that's part of the things you have to look at, if self-publishing or license publishing -- what can you do, how much time and energy and money is going to work for you, can you afford it if a particular effort does not produce much results, what are your interests and how you interact with the world, what are going to be your limits, etc. Having a license publisher can help in that they do a lot of the business stuff, marketing and some promotion, and can advise you as well, but it's still going to be your personal decisions and every author is dealing with different circumstances.
That's how the symbiosis becomes important -- people can become aware that your book or short stories exist because they are checking out another work of fiction or something else and run into your work or you and your work. That's what conventions are for mainly, and it is also why romance and SFFH have not given up cover art, even for e-books, and instead use it to catch people's attention in hopes that some will try it and then if enjoyed, spread word of mouth. You can also have symbiosis in that someone is attracted to the book cover of another author's work, which yours happens to be next to in display or shelf.
And it's an example of how a connection/community that is not fiction writing specifically can lead into finding readers. You were at a craft show, selling crafts, and the books came with you. Even if you hadn't had the books there, you could have had cards, fliers, free giveaway pencils etc. with the book info and your website on them and gotten their attention to check it out later that way. It's very hard for publishing to measure how much a lot of this works (especially as they have little money for market research per individual title or in general,) but we do know that these things can work, sometimes. Which is why you don't want to hide (unless doing so is a work requirement or otherwise inappropriate,) your writing from all the other networks and events in your life. You never have to be pushy, but letting people simply know that it exists can lead to sales and word of mouth.
If you don't have physical books and/or money and time to attempt things like conventions and book festivals and booth tables, you can still do things on-line. You can have a website/blog for free on sites like Wordpress or for not much a year. You can build up an e-mailing list of folks willing to be on it and send them a newsletter as was mentioned by some here. It may not do much, but some authors swear by it. You can talk on-line about your life and your interests and have people come to be aware also of your fiction. You can find places for free ads (which is why we eventually set up the Promotion Zone,) which might just be singing in the wind, but might also get one or two people -- and they may spread word of mouth.
There's a time investment in all that, obviously, so you have to figure out what you can manage. If you are working with a license publisher, you'll be coordinating with them, but usually they will like whatever you can manage. (They get a bit nervous about free-lance publicists some authors hire because that can muck up channels they are trying to use, but it's workable if you can swing that.)
Obviously, having money to pay folk and do stuff gives an advantage, but again, it's unpredictable and it can be done with less while the Web still has some free parts (as long as you can get access to the Net.) We can take a look at for instance the case of Amanda Hocking, who made media waves when after a very successful run in self-publishing the young author signed a large reprint and new books deal with St. Martin's Press/Macmillan for her YA fantasy novels. Hocking benefited from the early froth excitement of the expansion of the e-book market in the first couple of years after the Kindle launch when a lot of readers went hunting for e-books to fill their new e-readers and devices. Some of those readers, mainly teens who she was aiming at, found her books. (Teens are good at word of mouth.) Hocking also benefited in that time period from Amazon wanting to use self-published e-books as both a marketing campaign for the Kindle -- so they gave self-pub authors a fair amount of marketing services for free or cheap -- and a way to gather self-pub authors and their friends and families as new, loyal Amazon customers by encouraging them. She benefited from having a fair number of novels ready to be put out on a fairly quick regular basis and she wrote quickly, which some self-publishing authors regard as a key factor (but which may or may not be.) And when her sales started to climb, she benefited from Amazon's algorithm system for self-pub Kindle products at the time. So timing played a part. But not everybody self-publishing at the time saw Hocking's sales figures, which were primarily through word of mouth. But Hocking also we know did the following:
1) She set up multiple blogs/sites, one for her as an author as her main blog and then blogs for each of her series and regularly posted content on them (again, a time commitment, though blogs can be set up for free.)
2) She did giveaways and fun contests on her blogs and talked about stuff she liked -- it wasn't just shilling the books as an attractant.
3) She kept in regular touch with any readers who contacted her through email, etc., announcing new launches and so forth.
4) She regularly went on Twitter and Facebook and talked about stuff, not just her books, but her interests in geekdom, such as horror, John Hughes films and the Muppets. She followed people and interacted on those platforms. (Again, that's a time investment.)
5) She networked her interests and she went symbiotic with other authors, creators and fans -- and this may have been the key factor, though again, nobody knows absolutely. A big fan of horror, she did a Zombiepalooza on her main blog for the entire month of October about zombies, horror and all things Halloween. Essentially, she set up a mini online convention on her blog, inviting other authors, artists and bloggers to come and blog on her blog about zombies, etc., to do giveaways of copies of their books, to contribute stories and games and art and geek news. She in turn guest blogged on many of their blogs.
That meant that the fans of the other writers and creators and fan writers' blogs came on over to her site for the event and got to learn about her books, or learned about them when she was on their blogs. They may have had only a few hundred fans, but you only need some and e-books can be acquired very quickly. And after the Zombiepalooza in October 2010, her sales took a large leap upward. And a lot of self-published authors started using guest blog tours and other types of events to publicize from what she did. And that doesn't always work, but it is again a way of connecting different networks and interests in our lives to interacting with people, offering them things of interest and getting a few to check out the writing for sale.
But also by 2012, only about two years after she put up her first books for sale in hoping to make a few hundred to go to a Muppets exhibit in another city, Hocking was very burned out. She was having to spend a great deal of time fixing typo errors in her e-books, interacting with fans, and regularly providing content online and in blogs to keep promoting her work on various platforms, managing the accounting and business aspects of being her own publisher, facing subsidiary rights sales interest, etc.. She wasn't looking to stop doing all of that, but she wanted to get distribution without having to constantly search for it so that she could concentrate on her writing and also get a break. So that led to her getting an agent and getting the reprint deal with Macmillan. She slowed down her output, took some time outs and let Macmillan help her go more global in distribution. She still does online stuff, but she deals with the fanbase a little differently now.
So that's part of the things you have to look at, if self-publishing or license publishing -- what can you do, how much time and energy and money is going to work for you, can you afford it if a particular effort does not produce much results, what are your interests and how you interact with the world, what are going to be your limits, etc. Having a license publisher can help in that they do a lot of the business stuff, marketing and some promotion, and can advise you as well, but it's still going to be your personal decisions and every author is dealing with different circumstances.
JamesMaxstadt
Registered User
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2018
- Messages
- 186
I have to say...that just sounds exhausting!
I'm trying different things to see what works and what doesn't. Recently, I've tried the book fair/comic con route, with no real results yet, but I believe that was more in my choice of what ones to attend than anything. One was good sized, but had the feel of a book fair making their money from selling tables to vendors. Most other authors I talked to hadn't done this one before, and wouldn't do it again. Not a good sign.
The comic con was different. The guy who put it on was obviously trying to get it going, but there was no traffic. Seriously, if there were fifty different people who came through all day, I'd be shocked. Hard to sell when no one attends.
So, this next year I'm going to try a couple more, ones that cost a bit more to get a table at, but also have more traffic. We'll see how it goes. Congrats to KM!
I'm trying different things to see what works and what doesn't. Recently, I've tried the book fair/comic con route, with no real results yet, but I believe that was more in my choice of what ones to attend than anything. One was good sized, but had the feel of a book fair making their money from selling tables to vendors. Most other authors I talked to hadn't done this one before, and wouldn't do it again. Not a good sign.
The comic con was different. The guy who put it on was obviously trying to get it going, but there was no traffic. Seriously, if there were fifty different people who came through all day, I'd be shocked. Hard to sell when no one attends.
So, this next year I'm going to try a couple more, ones that cost a bit more to get a table at, but also have more traffic. We'll see how it goes. Congrats to KM!
Robert Zwilling
Registered User
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2018
- Messages
- 121
The horror and vintage toy shows have changed drastically over the years. Its not the same buying audience they used to be. If there is an autograph section, people seem be more likely to dump their money at those tables. There are definitely shows where the vendors are not getting the same attention they used to get and the price of admission isn't getting any cheaper. Trendy toys do well, collectible stuff not what it used to be. You have to personally sell each book, they don't fly off the table at these shows. Libraries have indie author days where you can set up for free to sell your book.
JamesMaxstadt
Registered User
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2018
- Messages
- 186
Not sure if this is the best thread to post this on, but it seems to fit in.
I thought I'd share recent experiences with ads and how they've worked for me. I dabbled in Amazon ads a while back and saw very little return, but also little exposure. After doing a little homework, I realized that I was doing them wrong, shelled out a few bucks for a program that helped me with it, and tried again. For awhile, about two months or so, I was going great. I was selling at least a book a day, (for me, that was great), and had lots of page reads on KU.
Then, about two weeks ago, they dried up. No sales, no page reads. Everything dropped down to almost nothing. After doing a little more research, I learned that this is common with Amazon ads. Most people kill them for a couple of months, then re-do them and they begin to work again.
I turned them off, and tried a few Facebook ads instead. Those were a complete bust. I didn't see one single sale from them, so that's out.
For now, I'll leave the Amazon ads off, then start them up again. I might give it a shot a week or two before Christmas and run a price promotion, because who knows who might be looking for last minute gift ideas for the nerd in their life? In the meantime, I'll try to not obsess over the sales, keep on working on my WIP, and enjoy the holidays.
Love to hear from others who have tried using ads with varying degrees of success. What worked, what didn't?
I thought I'd share recent experiences with ads and how they've worked for me. I dabbled in Amazon ads a while back and saw very little return, but also little exposure. After doing a little homework, I realized that I was doing them wrong, shelled out a few bucks for a program that helped me with it, and tried again. For awhile, about two months or so, I was going great. I was selling at least a book a day, (for me, that was great), and had lots of page reads on KU.
Then, about two weeks ago, they dried up. No sales, no page reads. Everything dropped down to almost nothing. After doing a little more research, I learned that this is common with Amazon ads. Most people kill them for a couple of months, then re-do them and they begin to work again.
I turned them off, and tried a few Facebook ads instead. Those were a complete bust. I didn't see one single sale from them, so that's out.
For now, I'll leave the Amazon ads off, then start them up again. I might give it a shot a week or two before Christmas and run a price promotion, because who knows who might be looking for last minute gift ideas for the nerd in their life? In the meantime, I'll try to not obsess over the sales, keep on working on my WIP, and enjoy the holidays.
Love to hear from others who have tried using ads with varying degrees of success. What worked, what didn't?
Robert Zwilling
Registered User
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2018
- Messages
- 121
Over time, watched 8 hour mini series, the ending was very predictable. The bad good guys died, the bad bad guys survived and the good good guys survived. Can I edit out the first 7 hours, then radically change the ending where bad good guys win instead of bad bad guys winning and publish it as a short story? The bad good guys were playing catch up the whole time based on their past experiences, and the only reason why they lost was because it was time to end the story, so they made a series of really stupid blunders which did not fit their performance in the first 8 hours. How much of it can be the same? Can the same battle scene be used but at each point where the heroes stumbled they instead make the type of successful moves they had been making all along? This changes the entire ending of the story as there are new survivors and new losers.
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2003
- Messages
- 14,995
I copied and moved this to another thread, RZ, as it seems to be a writing structure question rather than a marketing/promo issue.
https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/writing-structure-question.56472/
https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/writing-structure-question.56472/
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