I am sitting at my kitchen counter watching a trio of not-so-little-anymore black kittens lose their minds because the landscape crew are here trimming bushes right up against the house. The kittens are dashing from window to window to alternately watch and freak out when the hedge trimmer revs.
This is book marketing in one tidy metaphor.
Authors race from thing to thing, claws scrabbling for traction on the hardwood in their desperation to abandon FB ads for Amazon ads. Or BookBub. Or whatever else is au courant. Sixty seconds later, the scramble is on again.
It's interesting to watch. Certainly someone is making book marketing work for them or the rest of us wouldn't be chasing around trying to replicate their results. And with that sentence, you can surmise that I have no idea how to play Moneyball with book promotions. What you may not know is how much it annoys me. The whole point of the movie, Moneyball, was using hard data to drive decisions. Not instinct. Not heart. Not gut. Numbers. That's possible in baseball. It is almost entirely impossible with books. Especially if you're traditionally published. It is not possible to trace a customer from ad click thru to a purchase. I should imagine customers would be annoyed if we could track them like that. I would be. But it does make the entire book marketing thing a bit of a black box. Somewhere inside of it, weird magic happens, and we don't get to observe it happening.
Yes. You can run A/B ad tests. But unless you are direct selling through your own website only, you cannot possibly track sales. You can only track impressions and click thrus. You can infer from your click thru rates which ad drove the most buys should you see an uptick in sales, but you cannot prove which ad actually drove the spike.
You may now picture my little SQL database-driven heart trembling in rage.
My take away is that if you want to play Moneyball, you need to change to a career with actual, trackable metrics, cause this ain't it. We're all of us dancing on the edge of the volcano with book marketing - basically pleading with the gods and offering to sacrifice pretty much anything for just one shot at selling enough books to make the mortgage next month.
I comfort myself with the adage that your best marketing for your last book is your next book.
