Self-Publish to Market: A Marketing Guide to Self-Publishing

By Michael John Grist

In 2016, author Chris Fox wrote the groundbreaking book 'Write to Market'. In it, he taught a generation of self-publishers to value what readers wanted, before they even started writing their book.

It's a great concept, and it inspired me to develop the Self-Publish to Market approach, which takes Fox's idea and applies it not only to the book text itself in new and powerful ways, but also to the marketing materials that surround it:

• the book's cover
• its title
• and its back cover marketing copy (blurb)

Put simply, it provides a proven set of techniques that will help you the author give the reader what they want, while also telling exactly the stories you want to tell.

How do you do this?

You simply choose the areas where what you want to write overlaps with what the readers want to read - then market accordingly.

You don't need to compromise your vision. You don't need to conform to a genre template or tick off elements from some list of tropes, motifs, settings and themes. You just need to build a beautiful storytelling bridge to your readers, and you do that by:

1. Listening - Listen to your readers. Listen to what experts are telling you. Listen to the market.

2. Adapting - Adapt your cover, title, blurb and book in line with what the market says. You can adapt a book both before and after you've published it.

3. Iterating - 'Iterating' is a fancy way of saying 'keep doing the first two principles on repeat'. You listen, you adapt, you listen again and adapt better, and so on, constantly homing in on a more perfect match.

Those adaptations could be something tiny, like changing the color of the font on your cover through several shades of blue. It could be one key word in your blurb that changes once, twice, three times to hit on perfection. It could also be something big, like working on new opening chapters that grab the reader better.

It's up to you how far you want to iterate - but even small changes can make a huge difference. It could transform your author career and propel you to 6- or 7-figure author status overnight.

That's what happened to me. It can happen for you too. In this book you will learn:

• How to squeeze gold dust from reviews without getting overawed
• How to package your book for sales - get optimal covers, titles and blurbs cheaply and efficiently
• How to use beta readers to start a virtuous feedback cycle spinning
• How to use movie classification systems to 'grade' your writing
• How to give readers what they want without selling out your vision, and 24 more techniques...

Take the first step to transforming your self-publishing career. Pick up SELF-PUBLISH TO MARKET now.

★★★★★ "A must-read for all authors regardless of where you are in your writing career ... helped me immensely!" - Brad Borkan, award-winning non-fiction author.
★★★★★ "An excellent book ... will make significant improvements to writers' book sales if they follow the principles within it. It's genius!" - Andrew Raymond, #1 bestselling thriller author.
★★★★★ "Excellent, excellent book! I'm always fiddling around with book covers and descriptions. But until now, I've never had a clear system or strategy for it. Now, I do!"- Holly Worton, podcaster and non-fiction author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael John Grist
• Release date: Feb 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215500774

Michael John Grist

Mike Grist writes the bestselling Christopher Wren and Girl Zero thriller series.He was born in the UK to a British father and American mother, and spent his childhood winging between the family farm in Kentucky and a terraced house in Manchester. At 18 he finished his last year of high school in Indiana, took Greyhounds across the US coast-to-coast then worked at a summer camp in Massachusetts.Fascinated by the extremes of human behavior, Mike got his undergraduate degree in Psychology then followed up with a Masters in motivation theory. After backpacking through India, he taught English in Tokyo, Japan for 11 years, also documenting the dark side of the country's gangs, cults and abandoned places. His photography and articles about urban exploration have been featured in the Guardian and the Daily Mail.Now based in London, UK, Mike enjoys working out, eating out, running his local writers' group, playing ultimate frisbee and spending time with his wife and two cats.

Book preview

PART I

GENRE

If listening is the first stage in building a bridge to your reader (and it is) - then the first and most important place where we'll do that is with our target Genre.

Do you know what your book's Genre is?

How about your Sub-genre?

Odds are that you think you know this well - odds also suggest (since most self-published authors sell less than 10 copies of their books - what a downer!) that you probably don't.

There's no shame in this. I was exactly the same. I thought I knew my target Genres, but I did not, and my books didn't sell as a result.

Let's start with a Genre overview.

Genre is just a label

There's some negative connotations to the word 'Genre', so let me dispel those now.

In the eyes of this book, every work of creative authorship belongs to a Genre, because Genre just means a particular content, style and form that provides a specific emotional or informational reader journey.

It could be Thriller, Romance, Science Fiction, Literary, Autobiography, How-To Guide or anything at all.

Subgenres of Thriller could be Terrorism, Assassination, Serial Killer, Political and more. Subgenres of Romance could be Cozy, Steamy, Bully, Reverse Harem and so on.

You may not know those subgenres, but your readers know exactly what they are and what they want, and they know exactly how to find that genre (and subgenre!) with laser-like precision.

They can spot the right cover from five miles out, the right title and blurb from three, and the right book itself from the most cursory glance at its opening chapters.

It's our job to give that to them - and thereby achieve two essential things with our books:

satisfy the readers by meeting a certain number of their genre expectations

delight the readers by exceeding their expectations with our creative vision

If we only satisfy our readers, by churning out hamster-wheel, cookie-cutter genre books (think templates and lists of tropes), then they'll get bored. If we only delight them with unique originality (a mish-mash of constantly changing directions and styles), they'll get exhausted.

We have to do both in moderation. That's not my rule. That's just the way most readers like their stories.

And this is not necessarily easy. For some authors, writing bang-on genre is as natural as breathing. For others, like myself, we cross and 'mash-up' genres without even realizing it.

But self-publishing to market requires us to realize it, and to control it, and that boils down to lining up three key factors in the reader journey:

Genre

Promise

Delivery

Genre

Readers know what genre they're looking for, because they've taken that literary journey many times before. They know exactly how to recognize their subgenre by its packaging Promise: the cover, title, blurb and opening few chapters.

Promise

A book's cover, title, blurb and first few chapters make a Promise to readers, saying 'this experience will be similar to that experience you had before, so you're going to enjoy it too.'

If you've written a book about young wizards going to school, it should look something like Harry Potter, so readers who love HP will want to read it.

Right? That's satisfaction.

But we also have to delight with something new and original - so your Promise absolutely should not be a carbon copy of Harry Potter. You just want to hit enough Voldemorty expectations to suck them in with the Promise of another great story.

Fail to get it right here, and we're selling sand to the Sahara. Nobody will want it. Succeed here, and we move onto Delivery - the actual body text of the book.

Delivery

Delivery means providing a book that largely lines up with your Genre and fulfils your Promise, both satisfying and delighting the reader at once.

If all three line up, then your book is the book they thought it was. If you promised Bully Romance (it is what it sounds like), and then gave them Bully Romance (with added delight) they'll love your book.

They got what they paid for.

Achieve this balance and your readers will come back for more of what they love. They'll leave you excellent reviews and spread the word to their pals - 'This book is fantastic!'

Fail here, though, and you won't be getting those return readers. You Promised them one thing, but you Delivered them another. You'll get 1-star reviews and readers warning each other away from your work.

Picture this.

I'm a reader out looking for a Regency Romance. I find one that looks incredible based on a sumptuous cover, delicious blurb and engrossing title. Then I find the body text to be 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' (a genuine genre mash-up book).

What the...?

I'm unlikely to be happy. I won't go on to read another book by this author (maybe 'Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter?'). I won't leave a great review. I'll tell all my book club friends to steer clear.

We want Genre, Promise and Delivery to line up neatly all the way through the reader experience - while avoiding too many off-Genre features.

In brief, this is what we want:

Everything is pretty well lined up, from our Genre to our Promise to our delivery, within the lane of one particular Subgenre. It doesn't ave to be a perfect straight line - remember we need to both delight with new tricks as well as satisfy with familiarity - but it's all pretty much in a line.

This is what we don't want:

Here our Genre, Promise and Delivery are all over the place. They don't match. We think we're targeting one Subgenre, maybe Terrorism Thrillers, but our cover says Serial Killer, our Title says Vigilante Justice, our blurb says Assassination and our actual body text is a mash-up of multiple Subgenres.

Readers will not like this. They want things to line up. There's only so many off-Genre features they'll tolerate before delight turns to frustration.

Off-Genre Features

So what are off-genre features?

Most generally, they're whatever the readers in that Genre say they are. An example of an off-Genre feature would be including Magical Realism elements in a Cozy Romance. Cozy Romance is a subgenre of Romance without much steam, often with some comic elements. Think 'Bridget Jones' Diary'.

Magical Realism is just not a part of that subgenre, so readers who came to this book looking for Cozy Romance would largely be disappointed to find the magical