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I opened a can of worms in my own head when I wrote last week’s blog which I titled “Stars.” The post deals with the fact that there are no big names in entertainment any longer, except for legacy names, like Harrison Ford in movies and Stephen King in fiction. A source I quoted from The Hollywood Reporter believed that there were no new stars created in the movies since about 2008, which he blamed on the collapse of the DVD market.
Although he had his finger on part of the problem, I don’t think he saw all of it.
(And, if you can’t tell, you should go back and read that post before reading this one.)
What happened in movies in 2008? The same thing that happened to books at the turn of the century. Part of their distribution system collapsed.
The music industry started dealing with this in the 1990s as well, as the record stores vanished and iTunes took over. I don’t know if any of you have looked at iTunes recently, but trying to find the latest hit single by anyone let alone someone you like requires using the search function, rather than seeing what’s happening on the home page.
The collapse of the distribution system—or rather, the changes in distribution—have had an impact on us all. One of the things the change has done is level the playing field. Now anyone with the proper equipment can enter an artistic arena with more than a snowball’s chance in hell of not only having a success but having multiple successes.
The problem is as it always was—discoverability.
I’m going to move off of the entire entertainment industry now, and look at books. As I wrote last time, books were part of a curated system, in which tastemakers (editors, publishers, publishing houses) determined what choices readers had in the books that hit the shelves.
Those shelves were limited, both in time and space. As a local bookstore owner learned back when I lived in Oregon, if you keep books on the shelves until those books sold, your store went from a store that featured “new” books to a store that featured books from years gone by. The product (books) had to be refreshed constantly or readers had no reason to browse.
Twenty years ago, the publishing industry was a B2B industry. It sold books to bookstores—business to business—and hadn’t learned any other way to do so. Traditional publishing is still a B2B operation, even though most bookstores have gone online or gone away entirely.
Indie publishers are a B2C business—Business to Consumer. It’s a much better system. We need to market to readers, not to some bookstore chain or nameless distributor somewhere.
The problem is that the book promotion shorthand is based on B2B, not B2C.
What’s the difference (besides the obvious final letter)? The owners of other businesses do not have the time to read all of the product in their stores. Back in the day of the megabookstores like Barnes & Noble once strived to be, there were literally thousands of books on the shelves, with hundreds more clamoring to get in each month.
No one can read all of that.
The local bookstore I mentioned above, the one that got stuck in amber, probably had five hundred titles in the store, and even when those titles remained on the shelf for 18 months, the employees still did not have time to read everything.
The consumer, on the other hand—who shall, from henceforth, be called the reader because it is more accurate—has one of two attitudes toward a book that floats past their eyeballs.
The first attitude is hey! I haven’t read that yet! What is it?
The second attitude is oh, yeah! I like that series and/or the previous book by that author. I’ll take a look at this one.
Then there’s the third attitude, one that doesn’t happen with a book in front of the eyes. The third attitude happens when there is no book. That attitude is Hey! Does Suzette T. Writer have a new book out? I should check.
Or that third attitude might be framed this way: Hey! Is there a new book in the AngelCat Extraordinaire Series? I should check.
Nothing in B2B marketing does more than answer the second two questions, maybe. And probably the only question it might answer is the one about Suzette T. Writer…provided Suzette T. Writer is what traditional publishing called a big name.
Readers buy stories. They want stories that will appeal to them. In addition, they want more of the same but with a surprise or two packed inside.
Traditional publishing did do one thing right in its quest for shorthand. It created genre categories. Genre categories and the subgenres within made it possible in a B2B world for readers to find the type of stories that they liked without relying on big names.
Ironically, genres weren’t created with marketing in mind. Or maybe that’s not ironic, considering how averse traditional publishing was to actual marketing. I was about to launch, yet again, into the history of traditional publishing marketing which I’ve written maybe a dozen times. I plucked history out of a past post and put it up on my Patreon page for everyone to read. I suggest you go there, so you understand how the marketing for traditional publishing evolved.
Anyway, genre and subgenre categories were the only thing that made life easier for the reader. The rest of what traditional publishing did made life easier for the distributors and the bookstores, by freeing up shelf space. This is why book series would often stop in the middle with no hope of finishing the saga or why an author would completely vanish from the shelves.
In today’s market, a writer can publish as many books as they want in their series. Just this week, I published the seventeenth official book in my Diving series. (There are unofficial books, like Diving Pairs and Notebooks.) Unless I had been a super-dooper big name in traditional publishing, I could not have done that in the B2B system of the past.
I love doing that. It gives me a lot of freedom.
Here’s the thing, though, about marketing. Readers have been trained in this cramped, curated traditional publishing system to look for big names and to expect books to vanish from the shelves overnight. That created velocity—the habit of buying something when the reader saw it, not because the reader wanted it.
Slowly the buy-now, read-later part of the reader/consumer is fading, but they’re still primed to find books the old-fashioned way—at least, the older folks are. Younger people understand how to find books that appeal to them without using the old-fashioned traditional publishing shorthand.
What does that mean for indie writers who need to market their books? It means that we change our own thinking about the way we promote those books.
I was going to make this a short post hitting some highlights, but as I dug into things, I realized that this is a modern marketing series that I want to write.
However, because I promised some solutions from last week’s post, I’ll give them to you now.
The old-fashioned marketing tools are broken. As I mentioned last week, terms like New York Times Bestseller mean nothing in today’s market. I used a sales unit comparison to make my point. Nowadays, we indies sell books in a variety of markets, like Kickstarter and Storybundle and off our own websites, places that don’t count toward the “so-called” bestseller lists.
So…how do we replace the idea of the “bestseller” lists? Pretty simple. If your books are selling well—and by that I mean sales, not giveaways such as free—then declare it on the cover.
You can do it one of two ways: If you have a single book that has sold a million copies over the past decade, use that as part of your promotion. Because this is indie, you can update that promotion at any time.
Use something like this: Join the one million readers who have already enjoyed This Great Book.
But maybe you’re like most writers, and none of your books have sold that well, not even over decades. However, you might have sold a million copies of all of your books in the past five years.
Put a bug (a little design feature that looks like a star) on your cover that reads 1 million copies sold worldwide.
I have no idea what the best number is to start with, whether it’s 500,000 or even less. I suspect it depends on genre. But here’s a rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t be impressed with the number if it belonged to another writer, don’t use it as your own.
There’s a better way to do cover promotion in this indie world, though, and it will benefit you even more. Instead of adding New York Times Bestseller or Amazon bestseller (please don’t. Not ever) around your name, advertise another of your books.
For example, my Diving covers might have the phrase Author of the Retrieval Artist Series under my name.
You’ll note that we haven’t gotten there yet, because we’ve only just started discussing this change.
But the great thing about doing that is this: all readers want is something the same but different. The Retrieval Artist series is the same as the Diving series in that both are space opera with a touch of hard science fiction and both are written by me, so they will have my sensibilities.
Other than that, they’re not the same at all, and for many readers, that’s a surprise.
The cool thing about putting something like Author of This Other Series on your book cover is that when the reader finishes your book and likes it, they’ll know what to look for next without all of those back page shenanigans that many readers never even look at.
What else can indie writers do on their covers to promote their books?
Write good sales copy. Not plot-based sales copy, but concept-based sales copy. We actually offer a classic workshop on writing sales copy. If you haven’t taken it, you need to.
Finally, we all need to embrace niche marketing. One of my friends who has been publishing for decades told me that they had exhausted their existing fan base by promoting directly to them.
If that were true, then that person should have been selling hundreds of thousands of copies of each book. What they meant was that within traditional book marketing, they had exhausted the usual advertising sites.
This person had published a lot of tie-in books for a while, and rather than marketing to that fan base, they tried to hide from it. They wrote books that were similar to the tie-ins but never even tried approaching that base.
Nor did they cross-pollinate. They had a nonfiction base as well, and they never informed that base of their fiction writing.
These niches are unique to all of us and to all of our writing. Some of it we might not even think of as relevant to our writing, so versed are we in traditional B2B marketing habits.
But now we need to learn to think like consumers.
What do readers want to know?
Simple. They want to know if they’ll enjoy a new book that crosses their path…or they want to know where they can find a book that’s like the one they just finished…or they want to read the next book by their favorite author or their favorite series.
So ask yourself how you the writer could best answer those questions for you the reader. Those answers might vary depending on who you are as a reader. The answers might vary depending on what you’re marketing. And the answers might vary depending on which niche market you’re appealing to.
And yes, this means that I’m going to do a new series for the first part of the summer. It’ll be on niche marketing for 2023.
Wish me luck. I suspect I’ll need it just to keep the series under control.
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“Business Musings: If Not Big Names, Then What?” copyright © 2023 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / Photobuay