What Sells Books

By Randy Stapilus

Book marketing ideas are so numerous as to populate a city, overrunning books, booklets, articles, offers, bargains, come-ons, even a few scams. But which will sell your book? Every book needs its own sales strategy.  There is no universal silver bullet for bestsellerdom. But excellent sales tools and resources, some obscure and others well known (but often misused), are available. You'll find them, and how and when to use them, and learn about what approaches actually have helped to sell books, in "What Sells Books" (115,000 words). 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ridenbaugh Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781533732972

Randy Stapilus

I'm a journalist - editor and publisher, in my meaning of the words, which have changed in connotation a lot over the years. I worked for 15 years as a reporter and editor for daily newspapers, and since then have published monthly periodicals on Northwest politics and public affairs, and on the subject of water rights.

Book preview

Also by Randy Stapilus (partial)

Paradox Politics

It Happened in Idaho (Rowman & Littlefield)

Outlaw Tales of Idaho (Rowman & Littlefield)

Camping Idaho (Rowman & Littlefield)

50 Meds

The Water Gates

Idaho 100 (with Martin Peterson)

New Editions (with Steve Bagwell)

Governing Idaho (with James Weatherby) (Caxton)

100 Influential Idahoans 2015

The Stuck Pendulum*

Speaking Ill of the Dead (Rowman & Littlefield)

Crossing the Snake

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*e-book only

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What Sells Books

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Which Strategy Works for Your Book?

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Randy Stapilus

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Ridenbaugh Press

Carlton, Oregon

2016

What Sells Books: Which Strategy Works for Your Book?

Copyright © 2016 Ridenbaugh Press

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, without prior permission of the publisher.

Composition and editing by Ridenbaugh Press, Carlton, Oregon.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Stapilus, Randy

What sells books.

Includes bibliographical references

ISBN 978-0-945648-36-9

1. Bookselling. 2. Marketing 3. Book industry I. Title.

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Printed in the United States of America.

September 2016

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Why

Stars

About consultants

Marketing analysis paralysis

Where we are

Times a-changin’

Community and discovery

Community  You  Pen names  Seen when it counts  Actual numbers  Reasons for buying

In planning (pre-writing)

Book description  Who benefits  How many books  Reaching your niche  How many formats  Social Media (1st pass) [Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Quro, Google+, specialty, listservs]  Crowdsource research  Your budget  Crowdfund (front and back) [Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, GoFundMe]  Crowdfund industry hybrid  Author bio  Author website 

Early on (writing, planning)

Marketing research  Key influencers  Reviews for others  Lines of contact  BookWorks  Business side  Taking their money  Landing page

Revisions and editing

Title  Cover (front)  Cover (back and spine)  Wattpad (and more writing sites)  Order page  Pull quotes  Business cards  Elevator pitch  Reviews (early, major) [Booklist, CHOICE, C-Span, Library Journal]  Story Cartel  Reviews (blogs)  Hungry Author (review blast)  Short-advance reviewers  Amazon reviews  Blurbs  Keywords  Author website upgrade  Major site author pages  e-mail signature  Audio and video  Freebie funnel book  Costs and pricing  Blurb (service)  QR code   Amazon keywords  Amazon categories  Amazon also-boughts  Categories, non-Amazonian  Amazon series pages

Nearing the starting line

The funnel  Social media (2nd pass) [Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Quora, Google+, LibraryThing, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Tribrr]  Specialty social media  Cover reveal  Book trailer  Contact key influencers  ISBN  Library outreach  Contact organizations  Author newsletter  e-mail contact list  Auto-responders  Commercial mail blasts  Book clubs  Pre-orders  Pre-release reviews  Amazon Kindle  Smashwords  Draft2Digital  Scribd  Pronoun  Specialty e-book sellers  More late indie book listers  Ingram catalogs  Help a Reporter Out (HARO)  Microcerpt  Permafree  Free and discount e-book lists  Giveaways  Serializing (online)  Newsletter release  Flyers and bookmarks  E-mail  Pre-release checklist

Release!

E-book then print  Social media (3rd pass) [Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, listservs]  Low price launch (e-book)  In the trunk  Release party, readings  Tweet the release  Amazon advertising  Press release/pitch  Serial podcasts  Book stores generally (print)  Independent book stores (print)  Barnes & Noble (print)  More store chains (print)  Barnes & Noble (e-books)  E-book stores  Wholesalers  Amazon  Amazon reviews  Goodreads reviews  BookLikes  Big box retail  Specialty retail  YouTube reviews  More online setup  Casual mention  Bookmarks, business cards  Op-ed  Radio interviews  Podcast interviews  Giveaways and raffles  Online events  Wikipedia page  The traveling book  Advertising  Nook Press Print  Performances

At a month and more

Foster reader community  Foster author community  Kindle book discovery  Corporate sales  Sharing success  Tour (physical)  Tour (blog)  Audio books  Readers Legacy   Awards  Re-review Amazon categories

Long tail: A year and beyond

Backlist release  Free book deals  Translation  Bundle book  Cover revision

Connecting the dots

The list

Bibliography

Why

. . . yet

another book marketing book, that is. Since, out in the marketplace, there are hundreds of them, maybe thousands.

They are there because a lot of people who undertake to write and publish books find that, once printed or digitally formatted, they have no idea how to get them sold. Or, worse, a head full of mistaken ideas.

I know this.

For close to 30 years I’ve been publishing books written by myself and by other people. And at a predictable point when editing on the book is just about complete, I encounter the inevitable question: So, uh, how do we go about selling this book? This question coming almost always from writers who themselves have bought no small number of other people’s books over the years. And only a short time before the selling will begin.

As the publisher, I have some responsibility to answer it.

This book was written principally and initially for me and for my clients and authors as a guide to getting those books sold – there being few ways to get to know a topic better than to research it to the point of writing a substantial book about it. In this case it meant tackling a subject which, I knew, was enormously complex.

I saw that too when I started writing, in the fall of 2013, for the website of BookWorks, an association (linked to the book industry’s trade magazine, Publishers Weekly) aimed at helping self-publishers. Since then I have been writing every other week on book publishing, and much of what I and the other writers at BookWorks have posted has concerned the fast-changing and faster-growing field of book marketing.

Putting this story together is something like crafting a murder mystery in which the puzzler is not the absence of prospective killers but rather an enormous crowd of them. (And in which both clues and red herrings keep multiplying.) If you want information on book marketing, you can Google the subject, or jump into Amazon.com, dive in and come up for air months or years later. Over the course of research I began to wonder if there was any way to make sense of the enormous volume of information out there.

I believe there is. But there is no single silver bullet, no one-size-fits-all list of to-do items. There is only a collection of options, some more and some less effective for your particular book – which this book aims to put into context and make usable for you.

My background is in newspaper journalism, and I approached this from the point of view of a reporter, pausing occasionally to offload some analysis (or, now and again, opinion). Sifting through masses of data to find coherent threads was something I had done before.

The idea was to collect relevant information about the subject of book marketing as it is in 2016, to provide an overview of what people are doing and outline what options are out there. That would be supplemented with comments from participants (frequently and wherever possible, actual author-publishers) on what worked and what didn’t. These were found practically everywhere, from print publications to blogs to forum comments to author websites and elsewhere. I was looking for whatever might provide insight about what works, and how to make it work.

The plan was to organize the material in a way that tracks with the process of conceiving, researching, organizing, writing, editing and releasing a book, so that the information can be of some practical use.

I didn’t find a whole lot of seriously-proposed options which simply didn’t work at all, for anyone. (Those mostly don’t last long.) I did find options useful for many author-publishers, in some cases for almost all, and plenty of others which may make sense for various subsets.  I unearthed at least a few useful thoughts almost everywhere I went, from the pages of expensive industry studies to the humblest e-pamphlet come-on from a consultant hunting clients.

But it shouldn’t tell you to give up hope, because good ideas that can help really are out there.

Lots of good thinking is available, but many of us have been having trouble getting our heads around it in a way that’s practical. That’s what I try to do here.

The process of collecting and reorganizing has done wonders for the way I now approach book marketing. I hope it will help you too.

Stars*****

You will see these stars, numbered from one to five, associated with various tactics, practices or activities through this book.

Do not translate them (as you would in a travel guide) as meaning best to worst. They are meant to suggest a combination of how widely around the book marketing ecosystem this particular thing is advised, and the likelihood it will be useful in your case.

Of course, I don’t know what your case is, which is why I do include plenty of items with fewer stars.

Consider those options which may not work for most people but, if the conditions are right, might work for you. You might also think of them as red lights – make sure you have a good reason before you invest time or money into this.

About consultants

If

you prowl around the web in the area of book marketing you’ll rapidly run into the business segment of book marketing consultants.

They do many things. Some will offer to help with one specific and narrow activity. Others may take care of all your book marketing needs, or beyond. Others fall in between. Some of them are one-person shops; others are (or have been) divisions of some of the Big Five publishing houses, or are closely linked to major industry players like Amazon.com.

Other than hiring out technical work, I have never used any, owing in part to limited funds and in part to a bias toward doing things myself. If it isn’t clear from other parts of this book,let me say this up front: I’m not a book marketing consultant and I sell no services in that area. (I do provide some writing, editing and other publishing-related services, and feel free to contact me about those if you’re inclined.)

Some prominent book consultants are quoted at various points in this book because they have useful ideas or suggestions, and some of these can fairly be considered leaders in the field and industry.

Not having worked directly with any of the various types of consultants, I’m not either endorsing nor warning off any specifically, if only because some of them might work well on some projects and not so well on others.

I would guess that, like nearly every other grouping of people I’ve ever encountered, a few of them are really good at it, many others are pretty good at it, and others are skilled primarily at promoting themselves. Some may work more effectively with some authors than with others. There’s a good argument to be made for developing a comprehensive team when you’re publishing a book, and my best advice if you want to bring in one or more consultants would be: Do your due diligence, not only to research their background but also to determine whether you and this person or group would make a good and healthy combination.

The information in this book should, if you do sign with someone, give you some overall perspective and questions to ask.

Also:

There is a weekly podcast on book marketing, a couple of years old at this writing, called the Sell More Books Show. It is hosted by two knowledgeable book guys, Bryan Cohen and Jim Kukral, both authors with marketing expertise, and noteworthy guests often show up. They even have a lab segment in which marketing ideas are tried and results discussed. If you’re into book marketing, it can make for bracing listening; they’re not afraid to take positions and sometimes buck the trends or conventional opinions. I listen regularly, not to take their word as gospel (though much of what they say is well-informed and thought-out) but as good grist for thought.

I can recommend it among the various book marketing podcasts – and there are quite a few[1] – that I’ve heard out there; it’s entertaining and informative. You can find the cast at sellmorebooksshow.com. 

I mention this here to preface an insight they provided on one show (episode 66), that the only really effective business model for book publishing they had ever heard of was this:

Keep writing better books and keep writing more books.

Not a bad place to start . . .

Marketing analysis paralysis

One

of publishing’s great thumb rules: Put as much effort, if not more, into getting your book in front of people as you did in writing it.

The writing side takes, or should take, careful thought and planning. So does the work of getting your book into the hands of people who will buy and read it. Unless you’re writing as therapy or purely for pleasure – both legitimate reasons for writing – or unless you have no intention of disseminating your writing beyond a small audience of friends and family, then your object is to communicate with the rest of society, that is, with people you do not know. Real communication involves not just sending a message out, but ensuring it can be and is received.

In the interest of simplicity, we’ll call this second part of the process, the sending-out, book marketing, but the term needs clarification.

It includes a presumption that the book – the message – is one worth sending, and one that can be easily absorbed by a reader: Meaning, in finer point, that you have a good book. What constitutes a good book is really a separate subject, though, probably worth another book-length discussion unto itself.[2]

This discussion on book marketing generally is intended to cover what happens apart from the writing and editing, designing and printing, work of developing a book. It does overlap a bit.

Bestselling e-book[3] author Courtney Milan noted that, A lot of times authors use the word ‘marketing’ to refer to promotion. This is because, for a very long time, promotion was the only part of marketing (outside of the content of the book itself) that authors could control. But that’s only one part of what goes into marketing. Marketing typically consists of the following: product, placement, promotion, and price.[4]

Author Derek Murphy wrote a book titled Marketing is Dead – but evidently he meant marketing to include only a small piece of what’s described here. It turns out that marketing a book is not only as much (or more) work as writing one, but is also – I’m sad to report of so many it’s really simple book marketing e-books – as complex a subject as the material inside – say – a definitive history of the Roman empire.

It is complicated in part because unlike many book topics, marketing technique is a rapidly moving target. Pick up a volume on book marketing from a decade ago (at this writing, 2006), and you’ll find it wildly out of date. I first started marketing books in 1988; it might as well have been 1888, so great have been the changes since.

Among the many book marketing problems and issues I have confronted – and you may have too – the least of them has been a lack of marketing ideas. Quite the opposite, in fact. Marketing plans by the container ship-load are out there awaiting your attention.[5]

A more precise way to put it is that there are many more books on book marketing than there are book marketing ideas. A lot of marketing books are distributed – some free, some as low-cost e-books, some as print books – with lists in their titles: [This many] Ways to Market Your Bestseller. The variations are almost endless. I’ve turned up and in many cases own publications titled with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 30, 33, 50, 52, 55, 71, 75, 79, 89, 98, 99, 101 (not to be confused with Book Marketing 101), 103, 182 (quotes about book marketing), 200, 500, and 1001 (John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, though his iconic and long-running series of books actually includes many more ideas than that) tips on book marketing – and that’s an abridged list.[6] Many of these numbers have been used by several authors for entirely different lists and books. I’ve written a few articles along these lines myself. Many of these books contain useful ideas, too, though bear in mind that many of the marketing ideas across these various lists duplicate each other, or at least sit on each other’s periphery. Or use different words to convey similar concepts.

The need for effective book marketing, clearly, has been recognized.

And such lists are appealing: The implication is that if you just execute this collection of however many to-do items, you’ll turn your book into a bestseller.

Most of us know it’s still not that simple.

The various items on a list seldom have equal weight; some are more or less important. And less important than checking off any number of boxes is how the ideas are executed. Use Twitter! many proclaim. Okay . . . but how exactly should you use Twitter?

At least as important: Approaches that work well for one book might work poorly for another. The point’s been made, and will be remade here, that every book is its own unique business, each to some extent unlike any other. Marketing plans for books ought to reflect that: Every one ought to be individually hand-crafted.

Sibel Hodge, a best-selling e-book author, advised: For me, it’s a matter of trying different things and seeing what works. It’s trial and error a lot of the time, and most advertising methods, like Bookbub (which gives amazing results) will only give you a short-term boost in sales. One thing that’s important is to have a backlist. Having more books on your virtual shelf means the readers who enjoy your work will hit that One Click Buy button if they see you’ve got other work out there.[7]

But with all these masses of ideas out there, what’s a self-publisher, or a small publisher, to do?

Time, money and other resources are limited. You’re not going to undertake 1,000 marketing ideas, or even the somewhat smaller but still large number of ideas in this book.

It’s enough to give you a good case of marketing analysis paralysis.

It’s happened to me. And I’ve missed book sales as a result.

What’s more, there seems not to be an established independent science or discipline for book marketing that works in today’s environment.

Quick, off-the-cuff surveys often are undertaken, whole corporate organizations have been set up for the purpose, but no comprehensive established discipline appears to exist in the field (nothing quite comparable to that for, say, grocery stores), if simply because the field is changing so rapidly. Ideas and efforts considered conventional wisdom or even ahead of the curve in 2010 may be all but useless now.

This book was conceived out of these thoughts, and the need for a serious plan of action. (My little publishing company needed a more coherent marketing plan of action, that need being the seed of much of what you see here.) Information, a lot of it, is out there, but not much organized in a way I as a publisher or author easily could use, and not filtered to separate the pointless from the profitable.

This book is intended to be read by people with various ranges of understanding about the book sales environment and book marketing, and in various stages of the process toward publishing. Some of the descriptions and instructions may be more basic than some people need, but it may be essential for others. Take from it what’s useful for you.

And prepare to step into a whole new world you may never have realized exists.

Where we are

When

I published my first book in 1988, the world of book selling was almost static, at that time changing only modestly in the course of generations. It is a model of book marketing many people still carry around in their heads.

I’m reminded of that world by a title on my bookshelf, given to me by a book seller back when. My copy of A Manual of Bookselling: How to Open and Run a Bookstore, was in its fourth edition published in 1987 by the American Booksellers Association. Its 500-plus pages covered the waterfront of running a book store, and it was inspirational too. It quoted a Milwaukee, Wisconsin bookseller as saying, Bookselling was and is for me a cultural and political expression, an expression of progressive change, of challenge to oppressive authority, of a search for a community of values that can act as an underpinning of a better world.

A couple of chapters in that book were contributed by the owner and manager of The Book Shop in Boise, Idaho, a highly active ABA member and for a while its vice president, named Jean Wilson. She personally lived up to the ideals of that statement from Milwaukee, and that she did was a godsend for me. When in 1988 I published and marketed my first book, I would have flailed badly but for advice from several other self-publishers in the area and especially the deep book industry experience of Jean Wilson.

Her store was the dominant (by no means only) book seller in town, and more than a quarter of the copies of my regional-oriented book were sold there. As other publishers large and small routinely did, I had printed several thousand copies of my book and then started efforts to sell them. I sought out reviews and news coverage; the fact that I then wrote for the largest newspaper in the state helped. I held signing events, not least at Jean’s store. I traveled around the area to persuade other retailers to carry the book as well; many agreed to buy a few copies and sell them. The retailers were almost all locally-owned; Barnes & Noble wouldn’t show up in the area for years to come. I worked a bit with wholesalers, national guys such as Baker & Taylor as well as some focused on the region (Pacific Pipeline in the Seattle area was a great resource for me), which made the books directly available to other retailers and buyers, such as libraries. I sold occasional books directly too, when I encountered someone who wanted to buy. I bought a few small ads, and made a few cheap bookmarks which were scattered here and there.

What you read in that last paragraph constituted the essence of marketing my first book. Reciting the details wouldn’t make for even a very fat chapter. Mostly, it involved working with local bookstores and getting publicity through local newspapers and (less often) broadcasters. It was not an unusual approach for self-publishers of the day.

Computers were only beginning to make their appearance, and for most of us those computers weren’t connected with each other. I wrote my first book on an early home PC (pre-Windows and pre-Web), but design and other work had to be done elsewhere. In that 1987 Manual of Bookselling, Jean Wilson described herself as scoffing at a customer who argued that she needed a computer to track sales and stock.

The Book Shop is, sadly, gone now, and so is much of that world.

I describe it here because many people have a picture of something like it in mind when they think about writing or publishing a book, at least on the small-scale level.

But I assure you that world is no more.

Things today are a lot different, in some ways improved, in other ways not so much.

Times a-changin’

In 1988, you could publish a book in hardback or softcover – those were the options. Today we add a whole variety of e-books to the list, and even expanded e-books with audio and video built in, with more possibilities (animated book covers, anyone?) to come.

In 1988, brick and mortar book stores were the likely outlet for selling most of your books – and in those years, most of mine were sold that way. Today, the percentage is much smaller. Amazon.com[8] alone is likely to account for more of your sales than all of those physical stores put together, and that’s not even factoring in the many other online retail options. Generally, the authors I work with sell many more books away from bookstores of any sort than they do within them.

Getting the word out to people in 1988 meant, mainly, working through mass media, especially newspapers and to some extent magazines.

Now newspapers and magazines themselves are struggling, diminishing in size and (apart from the web component) reach, with smaller staffs and fewer column inches. Today, you may reach more people through the various arms of social media which barely existed a decade, or even just a few years, ago.

Then, if you wanted to publish something that looked like a professional or commercial book product, you contacted one of the larger offset presses, probably one in the industry center in Michigan, and ordered a print run (the industry term for the number of items printed) no smaller than 1,000, and preferably much larger. Because setup costs were so high, the cost of producing just 100 or so copies of a book was prohibitively expensive on a per-book basis; books selling in the hundreds rather than the thousands almost never worked as a commercial proposition. Your front-end investment would be large, and you had to guess correctly about how many books you would need. If you couldn’t sell at least 1,500 or so books, the odds were very strong you’d lose money. You might also lose money if you sold 1,500 but printed 3,000.[9]

Today, you can order individual copies of books through print on demand, not quite as inexpensively per-copy as in large mass runs, but close enough to make sense commercially, and greatly reduce your financial risk.

That alongside the ease technology has made for the production side has created what’s known as a low barrier to entry – a combination of low cost and simplicity allowing many people, people by the millions, to try their hand at book writing and selling. Recent surveys have reported that as many as 70% of Americans want to write a book (of some kind, any kind), if they haven’t already.

In 1988, around 40,000 books were published annually, and the number of titles in print – new copies of current and older books available somewhere for sale – was estimated at 700,000. Today, the number of new book titles printed each year has increased by around 20 times, and probably no one (not even Amazon) knows how many are in print, but the number of titles must be in the tens of millions.[10]

In January 2013, Forbes contributor Nick Morgan wrote in an e-article, Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hillary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t. So self-publishing is an exercise in futility and obscurity.[11]

He conceded, Of course, there are the stories of the writers who self-publish and magic happens and they sell millions of books, but those are the rare exceptions. How rare? Well, on the order of 1 or 2 per million.

His take seems a little too pessimistic. But let it marinate for a moment; it should give you a feel for your real marketing challenge.

Back in 1988, through my professional and personal contacts, I knew a few people, only a few, who had written books. Today, I know a lot of people who have. Bump into them everywhere. Probably you do too.

And while people still are buying books of one kind or another, not all that many more people are buying significantly larger numbers of them. The pie still does seem to be growing, a bit, but not as rapidly as the number of slices being cut into it.[12]

There’s some reason for thinking the rush into publishing is slowing, somewhat. A demand was pent up for many years and then abruptly released by the advent of new technology and far lower costs, so some of the flood tide may have passed. Even so, the numbers of new books published likely will remain enormous, by 1988 standards, for years to come.

In 1988, publishing a book meant tossing it into a relatively small pond, in which it was readily visible and where it easily could create ripples. In the mid-2010s, publishing a book is more like tossing it into the Pacific Ocean.

Of the various marketing challenges a new book author and publisher faces today, that’s by far the largest.

Independent publishing – what is still but less often called self-publishing – even now doesn’t have some of what traditional publishing has, such as cachet, financial and infrastructural resources, or as many big authorial names. It hasn’t fully arrived. But it is well into the journey.

Mark Coker, the founder of e-book resource and distributor Smashwords, reflected on that in his blog post of predictions for 2016.[13] One of his key points was this:

Compared to traditionally published e-book authors, the competitive landscape for e-books is tilted to the indie author’s advantage. Indies enjoy full and often superior distribution to retail and library sales; faster time to market; greater creative control; marketing and promotion flexibility; 4-5 times higher e-book royalties; and the ability to price dramatically lower. Most indies are pricing [e-books] between $2.99 and $3.99, whereas most traditional publishers are still pricing their front list books above $10.00. Based on our Smashwords Survey, the average $3.99 e-book will get three to five times more buyers than a book priced over $10.00. Large publishers are over-pricing, and in the process they're harming their authors' ability to build readership.

A great deal evolves from that. Retailers are becoming more accepting of indies (gradually). Indies are getting more sophisticated in their marketing, support systems and infrastructures are growing (you will read about many aspects of this in the pages to come), and major traditional authors have been moving into independent publishing in more than just experimental ways.

As long as indie authors compete in a marketplace where they can easily undersell the competition, they have a good chance of continuing to increase their share of the market.

They will need to, because a new survey from The Author’s Guild of its members[14] shows writers are earning less than they did six years ago – at the dawn of the e-book era – and are spending more time on marketing. Bear in mind that Authors Guild membership consists mainly of traditionally-published professional writers, so they aren’t representative of the self-published community (though their survey indicates that a third of their authors have self-published). Still, the survey results are worth bearing in mind for self-publishers.

Among Guild members, the report said, author income has dropped by 30% for full-time authors and 38% for part-timers. It cites book industry consolidation, online book piracy and the rise of self-publishing as contributing to that decline in income for so many authors.

Writers are spending much more time on marketing now than in 2009 (about 59% more), and many publishing contracts now require authors to maintain a web and social media presence. Many authors, both traditionally and self-published, have proven adept at using new technologies to connect with readers.

The Guild report finds a bright side: The opportunities for author-reader engagement are unsurpassed in the history of book publishing – even if this engagement competes with an author’s writing time.

That’s clearly true, and it’s a lesson many self-publishers already have learned for themselves in the past few years.

The global book economy does, in total, have a lot of money sloshing around. Its value is estimated at $100 billion. There is some money to be made, and there are readers for many – albeit not all – of the books.

The marketing ideas you’ll see here came from all over, from books, articles, forums, conversations, interviews, author websites, e-mails, podcasts and sundry other sources. A small handful came from out of my own mind, though in some cases that could mean I just forgot where I first heard it. (Apologies to anyone who should have been been credited but, because of mental lapse, wasn’t.) Overwhelmingly, they’re collected from the web and other communications mechanisms. Many are specifically attributed. Most of those which aren’t, have shown up in many places.

A second point: Marketing is not this one tactic or that one piece, but (as many before me have said) an ongoing effort, starting long before book release and continuing long after, that will include multiple strategies to produce maximum results.

A third: Do what makes sense in the context of you and your book. As one bookselling survey in Smashwords said,[15] Don't let data-driven decision-making cause you to make stupid decisions. If the data shows (and it does) that shorter book titles might give you a slight sales advantage, don't change your title to two words if the absolute best and necessary title is seven words. If the data shows that books over 100,000 words sell the best (and it does), but you think your story works better at 70,000 words, don't bloat your story. Use common sense and do what's right for your book, and do what's right for your reader, and what's right for your personal ambitions as an author.

Now let’s start looking at your options.

Community and discovery

Why

are you writing your book? Which is to say, this particular book – or at least, for our immediate purposes, a book about this subject?[16]

Stop here, drop to the word processor and give me 200 words on that. Explain to me in one or two good paragraphs not only why the world just cannot do without this particular book – but also and more specifically, why certain individual people will perceive a passionate need for it.

Not everyone in the world. Not even most people. Not necessarily a large number.

Just certain people.

You’re going to want to focus in on those particular people who have a strong interest in what you’re putting into your book.

This group – this community,