Covers That Don't Know What They Ought to Be - AND Cover Reveal

What a serendipitous topic for this week. Deceptive marketing/book covers. I was just given the new cover for Enemy Within. You'll be the first to get a look. And we can analyze. 

This cover had a very tall order standing behind it. I wanted it to do several things: 

1. Convey Science Fiction

2. Convey Romance

3. Convey that this story isn't entirely a light read - I hope to all the gods it's fun, you know? But there are -- issues. And there's a body count. The heroine has PTSD for a reason. So I really, really wanted the cover to not be all sunshine and roses. Basically, I didn't want my cover to sell the promise of a light SFR when I've been told I'm writing grim SFR. 

How do you think the cover does?

Because this is a rerelease, several of you will remember that this book was originally pubbed with a very different cover (which I cannot link in because it is the property of the publisher.) THAT cover had a very different look and feel. It was sunnier. The background was bright yellow. The heroine was in a very different posture on the cover. Over all, I felt like that print cover did a better job of conveying Urban Fantasy than SFR. But I'll never be able to prove that hindered the sale of the book in any way. I can only speculate. 

Keeping in mind that this rerelease is coming out as an ebook, I have to say I like this new cover. It's clean. It's simple (apparently TWRP has done a serious bit of reader surveying about covers and came up with a 'no more than three elements per cover' rule to accommodate thumbnails). I feel like it communicates more than it shows, if that makes any sense. Now, granted, I have no idea whether that will translate into book sales, but hope springs eternal. Or maybe wishful thinking does. 

I think above all things (and as a great surprise to me) I really love that the woman on the cover comes across as both vulnerable and capable all at the same time. That, to me, feels like a hit out of the park. Now I hope readers will agree.

Broad vs Niche: When Marketing Leads The Reader Astray

There's been a theme on Twitter this week about book reviewers who get mad because a book of a certain genre failed to meet their expectation...an expectation that is the antithesis of the genre. E.g. "LOTR had some good characters, but it was just so unrealistic I had to give it a one star."  "50 Shades of Grey had a hot chick in it, but there was too much sex. One star."  "This could've been a great fantasy if the characters weren't so young. Harry Potter: Sorcerer's Stone gets one star."

Are the reviewers daft or 

did the marketing of the book target the wrong audience?

This week on the blog, we're talking about the latter. Why, oh why, a business would waste money tricking someone into buying their product? Are they trying to get bad reviews? Short answers are Hope and Nope. While I could write a thesis on this topic, I'll do my best to keep to the top-line point. Before that, let's clarify terms:

• Marketing is the encompassing umbrella for the promotion, sales, and distribution of products/services from producer to consumer. 
• Advertising is about piquing interest. This is where the adage, "Introduce the Problem, then Solve the Problem" comes into play.  Example: Wrinkles make you less attractive. Use this serum to fade the appearance of wrinkles and become desirable.
• Sales is about converting interest into purchases. Example: Customer walks into a store (demonstrating interest). Sales person's job is to remove customer resistance to purchasing (identify what interest brought the customer into the store, present [limited] options to satisfy the interest, offer a discount) and complete transaction. 

Marketing = Plan; Adverts = Awareness; Sales = $$$

In book marketing, there are four primary opportunities to gain/lose buyers. Depending on who owns the marketing of the book is how much say an author has in the process. Indie authors can own every step or pay someone else to do it. Traditionally published authors own little to no part of the process.

1. Cover: Front Art and Back Blurb
• See Jeffe's post from Sunday about a cover art trad-published experience in which the marketing plan seemed to be a broad romance campaign rather than the niche sub-genre-specific campaign. The generic image suggests the publisher is after eyeballs more than sales. I'll get into broad vs niche in the next section.  
• Indie authors have huge control over their covers, which is often lauded but can backfire worse than a generic publisher-directed cover. 
• Back blurbs are usually written by the author to briefly summarize the book (think under 200 words) and use "grab words" to entice a reader to buy the book. Sometimes marketing folks at publishing houses rewrite the blurbs.
2. Advertising: Creative and Placement
• What ads look like, what they say, where they appear, how often they appear
• Every ad-placement has rules and they often differ.
• E.g. Sex Sells...but No Nipples (even men's nipples). Don't use the words "sale, free, % off, or discount." Images must contain 92% art and no more than 8% text. Products targeting a mature audience will only appear after 9:00PM Eastern. Creative must be static, no animations. 
• There are lots of ways for ads to go wrong, from cringe-worthy creative to tech glitches to underfunded budgets. There's an entire industry around advertising for good reason. Getting it right is a real struggle for amateurs.
3. Point of Sale: Convenience and Competitiveness
• Where the product is available, in what formats, for what regions, at what price, in what time for receipt, gift options, coupons, type of payment accepted, perceived security of payment process, returns policy, troubleshooting/customer support, resale value, etc.
• Most authors go through vendors like Amazon or Apple to shoulder the bulk of the POS, while publishers have printing and distribution networks layered in between. 
• Yes, yes I know the other meaning of POS, and sometimes it suits this part too; especially when products are damaged, the wrong file is received, payment is rejected, etc. However, more hybrid and Indie authors are taking the risk and moving to direct-from-author POS usually via their websites in an effort to divorce themselves from complete dependency on 3rd party retailers.
4. After Sale: Review and Retention
• The bulk of this falls on the author, and/yet requires consumer consent prior to contact. Yes, a chicken-egg situation. A vendor may automatically send a follow-up nudge to review, wherein the act of the purchase default opts-in the consumer to additional contact by the vendor, but that opt-in does not give the author permission to contact the buyer (unless the author is the vendor).
• Reviews are advertising. It's the closest thing to viral marketing short of in-person recommendations from trusted sources. We've blogged on the importance of reviews earlier this year. 
• Retention through Newsletters and New Release Notifications; be they author-generated, publisher-generated, or vendor-generated the point is to get access to and permission from customers to directly market to them. It's a much lower cost with an exceptionally higher Return on Investment (ROI) than any other form of marketing. These are customers who are asking to buy your product(s). You want to know them, keep them, and sell to them for as long as you can. 

Now, about that Broad vs Niche Marketing Strategy. Using Jeffe's example (not to pick on Jeffe; she simply happened to post a great example of an initially baffling publisher decision) why would her publisher opt to target the larger romance demographic where they'd get more eyeballs but fewer sales-per-dollar? Why not target the erotica readers where people are more likely to buy what they see? Why not target the sub-sub-sub romance demographic of erotica retellings customers? Don't they have that info? Wouldn't those sales be almost guaranteed?  Wouldn't the reviews be more positive? 

Top 3 Reasons to Market to Broad Genre:

Note: I use "publishers" here to mean anyone who has control of the marketing strategy from traditional publishing houses, and small presses, to indie authors. 

1. The Marketing Strategy is about elevating Publisher Brand Power not selling an individual book. 
• Seems counterintuitive, why sell a concept not a specific product? It's a longer-term strategy that's focused on the publisher's business. Their customer, in this case, isn't the individual reader, it's the middlemen, the vendors and retailers. It's about negotiating more favorable distribution deals through economies of scale. "Look at all the products we offer in this market." 5,000 romance novels is more impressive than 12 erotica retellings. Vendors counter with "look at how well we move 5,000 romance novels" because the data is more impressive than how well they moved 12 erotica retellings.
• On a smaller scale, this is akin to how hybrid authors position themselves to agents/houses. "My author brand moved 100k books in a year" is more compelling than "Grooming Brindled Pomchicis was a B&N bestseller in the category of Caring for Vanity Teacup Breeds for the first week of August 2008."
2. The Marketing Strategy is about Building Out Direct-to-Consumer Sales Lists.
• In this case, the publisher's goal is to build a list of reader-customers who like This General Type of Story so they can sell books by semi-specific genre rather than author.  It's not a bad thing at all, particularly if you're a no-name debut author who's given up 70% of their profit in hopes being discovered by avid readers. Midlist authors also benefit from niche-to-broad expansions.
• "If you like vampire stories, you'll also like shifter stories, and if you like shifter stories, you'll like alien-shifter stories, and if you like alien-shifters then you'll like science-fiction stories." This is how publishers move buyers from Jeffe Kennedy books to John Scalzi books (and vice versa).
• To continue to earn profits, the publisher needs to lead the customer via interest to additional sales opportunities. It's like going to Target for a t-shirt, and the pants are right beside them because if you're interested in a new shirt why not buy the cute high-rise pants that won't show plumber's crack? And the undies are by the pants because those new pants might show panty lines so best pick up a pair of thongs, and the underwear section backs to the feminine hygiene section because...well, you get it.
3. The Marketing Strategy is about moving backlists (aka existing inventory).
• Publishers have rights to books for years and years and years. Ebooks allow them to keep selling those books without the overhead of printing and warehouse. Slap a new cover on it, something proven to appeal to a broader audience (aka naked man-chest in the romance genre), and boom new sales. Similar theory applies to taking an ebook-only offering and putting it in print for a limited run, possibly as an exclusive with a brick and mortar retailer. Suddenly, there's a print-only audience ready to be assailed with advertising. Discounts and product bundling entice readers from other loosely-related genres to dabble at low-risk to the publisher and the reader.

Broad Marketing strategies often work. We've all heard the "I didn't expect to like this, but I ended up loving it." As authors, we LOVE getting those reviews. Yet for those successes, there are also the misfires of "Ugh, The Notebook was advertised as a resale guide for Moleskine collectors. It never once mentions Moleskine!" 

If you're an author who has control over your marketing strategy, sometimes being a little less niche is a good thing. Trying to reach new audiences is part of the gig, but it's betraying the reader's trust if you advertise your elves vs orcs epic fantasy as a metaphysical healing guide. 

When Book Marketing Betrays the Reader

Recently an old family friend asked me for advice. She was coming out with her first book, had hired someone to help package for it - formatting, cover, uploading, etc. But she wasn't happy with what that person advocated for the cover. She wanted an image that represented her author's vision of the story, which was her coming to peace with a problem, whereas the designer's cover images all focused on the problem.

I gave her my pick from the choices, and then explained that it's not the job of the cover to express the author's vision. The entirety of the INSIDE of the book does that. The cover has two jobs: 1) to entice a reader to look more closely, and 2) to convey the genre and kind of story it will be. In her case, a cover that transmitted the problem was what she needed, so readers would understand what the story would be about.

The cover above is one of my least favorite because it fails on both parts of its job, in my opinion. I don't think it's particularly enticing, as the guy looks ill enough to be mostly dead. Also, nothing about this cover communicates erotic paranormal. The font looks like something post modern, and he... well, NOT sexy. MASTER OF THE OPERA is actually a modern retelling of The Phantom of the Opera, set at the Santa Fe Opera. Kensington published it as a six-act serial novel starting in January 2014. Those covers are marginally better - at least giving a Phantom of the Opera vibe - but I think the genre communication is murky still. Also they didn't do the marketing the way a serial novel needs to be promoted.

Anyway, the zombie cover (though Assistant Carien says I'm insulting zombies by calling it that) was on the print version that brought all six acts together in one place, which came out in the fall of 2015. I asked then if there would be a digital version compiling all six and they said no.

Then, last week, I got tagged on new release congratulations for ... the digital version compiling all six acts, complete with zombie cover and a release date of April 30, 2019.

Surprise!

So, no. This isn't really a new release at all. It's barely a new format. Coincidentally enough, our topic at the SFF Seven this week is marketing suckering readers into reading a genre they don’t enjoy.

In this case, I'm irritated by the marketing attempt to sucker readers into thinking this is a new release from me. The cover mostly just fails to do much of anything, really.

It's even worse, however, when the marketers decide to cash in on, say, the Romance audience. I think this mainly happens with Romance, though I'll be interested in the takes from the others in the SFF Seven if they've seen it happen in other genres.

What happens in Romance is, a story with a love affair in it gets marketed as Romance, but then has an ending that doesn't satisfy the Romance promise. The affair ends in some way - with a death, a sacrificial parting, or a permanent parting of the ways for one reason or another.

It happens a lot in Romance for two reasons: 1) The Romance audience is huge, avid, and passionate, therefor a tempting market, and 2) marketers (and some authors) regard Romance readers as kind of silly and short-sighted in their desire for a happy ending to the love affair. They think the readers don't know what they really want and that this book will change their minds because it's just THAT good. Either that or the marketing folks don't care past getting that one sale. The advertisers of widgets can be like that, not understanding that the book is not simply a one-sale product, but the beginning of a lasting relationship.

(Of course, this is also why the big box bookstores failed. They never understood that readers have relationships with the books they buy that goes far beyond something like acquiring groceries or the latest tech gadget.)

The thing about reading is we do it for pleasure. We scour covers, copy, and reviews to find the story that will sing to us. If we get suckered in by misleading marketing and are disappointed in the end?

UGH.

(But MASTER OF THE OPERA is a Romance and the story is way better than that cover. Just saying.)

Reviews: Don't Confuse Marketing with Sales

I'm loving the topic this week of "Reviews: Are they worth it?" Mostly because I keep hearing Missy Elliot, and now I want to put my thing down, flip it, and reverse it. (I'm sure if I did, I'd pull my back and break my hip.)

As readers, it likely comes as no surprise that authors are under pressure to amass reviews on leading retail sites and in reader communities (eg, Reddit and Goodreads). Whether it's in hopes of improving our odds at being discovered through word-of-mouth or triggering algorithms to have our book(s) surface at the top of search results, we're all eager to make that next sale. Our great fear is that someone will happen across our book, see it has no reviews, assume it's horribly written, thus not buy it.

Of course, our worst nightmare is that we'll get reviews, but they're mostly negative. 

That's enough to send us rocking in the corner, sucking our thumbs. 

It is too easy to lose sight of reviews being a marketing tool. Marketing not Sales. Big difference. Marketing = Spaghetti Against the Wall. Sales = Revenue. Marketing trends are ever-changing. The current fad is reader-reviews (ten years ago, the trend was blogging). There are many authors who give away their book for free trying to hit a magical and moving target number of reviews that the elusive "they" have defined as being effective. Note: It's a different goal from those authors who list "first in series free" in hopes of enticing new readers to pay full price for the rest of the books in the series. Still marketing, but repeat customer is the goal there not reviews (though reviews are still nice).

Bless the readers who post reviews. We love you. Really. 

So, to the question of the week, "are reviews worth it;" the answer is "depends on the size of the ulcer you're giving yourself trying to gather them." It's okay to ask for reviews, just don't let it become your primary marketing message. Put a "please review" reminder at the end of your book, put it in your newsletter as a footnote, post it monthly-ish on your social media feeds. However, never lose sight of SALES being your primary goal.

As many of us have said over the eight years this blog has been around, the best thing you can do to drive sales is Write the Next Book. Building your backlist is like stocking your store with inventory. The more items you have available, the more opportunity you have to make money.

Book Marketing Rage

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.

Book Marketing - What's the Trick?

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is: Trying to Moneyball Book Marketing: Is there One Simple Trick we’re all missing?

"Moneyball" refers to the movie with Brad Pitt and Robin Wright - and an early career Jonah Hill. It's an excellent movie, well worth watching, and one we happened to recently rewatch. (Although I'm not the one who suggested this topic.)

In the movie, "moneyball" is actually employed in a snide sense, because Brad Pitt wants to implement a new system for choosing baseball players. Apparently based on real events, as general manager of the team, Pitt hires Jonah Hill to run the statistical analyses on past performance of players to compose a winning team. The old guard, particularly the scouts and other team managers, fiercely resist this system because they believe in going with their gut about players. Also, the statistics tend to disregard the glamorous and high profile players, instead favoring the workhorses who turn in consistent but not necessarily spectacular results. Because Pitt is trying to maximize team composition on a lean budget, they accuse him of being interested in moneyball instead of baseball.

I mention all of this because I hear "moneyball" used in the sense suggested in this topic quite a bit, and I don't think that's what people necessarily mean. Really, we should be talking about if there's a way to moneyball book-writing. That would be a more direct analogy.

The real question of the week - is there a simple trick to book marketing that we're all missing? - gets a "I really don't think so" from me. I'm not a marketer, by profession or inclination, but there are plenty out there and I don't see any of them using any particular tricks beyond pouring a lot of money into broadcast advertising.

Could be the other folks here have other suggestions!

But I do think there are ways to moneyball book-writing. At the risk of sounding like the intransigent scouts in the movie, I don't much care for that approach. I know a lot of self-publishing authors scan the top 100 lists on Amazon, see what kinds of stories are selling  hot and write those. That's not something I want to do. Arguably I am being like the old guard of baseball, waxing on about the art and heart of the profession, but that's where my values fall out. I'm a writer first out of love. If I wanted to play the odds, I'd do something else.

There is a lesson to be taken from the moneyball concept that does harmonize with how I approach writing: the long game. Most of my books are slow and steady performers. I have not (yet?) had the glamorous bestseller that everyone talks about. But my books sell decently. They earn out the advances I'm given or the money I invest in producing them. Like Jonah Hill, I run the numbers on my sales and track which do well, which have increasing or decreasing sales. I know which are my steady performers, and I value them. With each new book, I gain readers for the backlist and see nice bumps in sales.

In fact, if there IS a marketing trick that I've heard passed around and that has worked for me, that's to write another book. It really does work.

Speaking of which, WARRIOR OF THE WORLD releases on Tuesday, January 8, 2019!

On My Mind: Failed Marketing

"Gimme the damn cookie, woman."

On my mind this week is...marketing. Primarily boosting consumer awareness of my books and how to do it without being a nag while having some fun.

On the social networks, August has become #Dogust. As some dear readers may recall, earlier this year I had adopted a new-to-me hairy beastie. I hatched a silly little promo plan of having my dog pose as my protagonist in various recreated scenes from the books with the intention of uploading the photos alongside a book quote.

I ordered the wig, amassed the props, readied the backgrounds... I did not, however, consult the star of the ad campaign.

She is having none of my weird.

But she will take the many, many treats I've used trying to get her to wear the wig instead of eating it. 🙄

Best laid plans and whatnot. Alas. On to Plan B...

Hey, I wrote some books. Buy them? 

https://kakrantz.com/books

Dear Readers: A Short Thank You

A few weeks ago, we talked about newsletters and expanding subscriber lists. I mentioned including flash/short stories in those newsletters. Since readers sign up to read my works, I figure one-off shorts are a great way to thank the readers for supporting me. The short is most likely from a POV of a character who didn't have that honor in the main book--say a side-kick or an unnamed character the main book's protag noted in passing. It captures just a moment, a scene, a different perspective that hopefully entices readers who haven't yet purchased the latest book and rewards those who have.

Until retailers allow self-pubbers to create coupon/promo-code campaigns, short stories are the best way I can think of to thank my readers.

And to those of you reading this blog, THANK YOU.

All I Do Not Know

The cat is back. Her feeding tube is out and she's recovering really, really well. My heart, however, is now in for some serious stress testing, apparently.

Aaaand, had you been subbed into my newsletter, you'd know all of this already because I just sent out a newsletter (the third in like three years) this past week. This is to say that when it comes to email lists and newsletters, I'm a learner, not a master. My email list is tiny. As in double digits tiny.

Finding how to subscribe to my email list is probably more difficult than it should be. KAK's excellent write up made that plain to me. Also plain to me is that getting my sign up put up as easily as Marshall did his? Yeah. It's not a thing. I have no way to grab my sign up box and put it where I want it. I have to send you to the Contact page on my website. Not sure why mine is coded that way. Dumb. But there you go. I will be asking my web mistress, I assure you.

My main issue with the whole newsletter/email list thing is that I have no earthly clue what to say. Ever. So my newsletter subscribers are mostly people who already know me from other endeavors - the international cat fancier's list I belong to, for example. So yes. My cats star in my newsletters. Kinda like they do everything else. As a result, I haven't ever really pushed for email sign ups.

The other issue is that I am scattered across a wide array of genres. SFR. UF. Fantasy. Paranormal Romance. In no case have any of my series been completed past two books. Usually, in a push for email sign ups, an author has something to offer - a free book, short, novella, something. And I do. But it is the sole example of sword and sorcery that I've written. So it's an odd lead-in to the rest of my list, right?

Sigh.

I think if we want to be really straight here, this is me. Drowning in all I do not know.

Email Lists & Selling That Book You Wrote: 5 Tips

Give me your email address! All the email addresses! One address. Two address. Three address!

Yeah, I know sometimes it feels like you can't go anywhere on the web without someone demanding your email address, and you don't want to be one of those people. Yet, you kind of, sort of, awfully badly want to be one of those people whose books sell.

Here's the thing, second only to writing the next book, email lists are the best marketing tool. To make it sound less sales-oriented and more about connecting with the reader, the authorverse often refers to email lists as newsletter subscribers. In the world of marketing, there is a difference, but for the sake of this post, I'll use the terms interchangeably.

If you're feeling skeevy about email lists think of them this way: these are people who want you to tell them when you have a new book out. They want to buy your book. Why wouldn't you tell them?

SPAM. 

As in, you don't want to be spammy. You hate being spammed by overenthusiastic authors who somehow got your email address and now they're like your crazy aunt who won't stop emailing you.

There are scads of How To Build Your Newsletter Subscribers classes out there, and too many of them advocate mailing campaigns that are better suited for retailers than authors. There absolutely is such a monster as Too Much Communication, especially when there is no value-add for the customer. Want to know how to tell when a Big Retailer has someone on-the-ball in heir marketing department? Their newsletter settings allow the customer to define how often the company contacts them: Daily. Weekly. Monthly. Quarterly. Only When There's Big News. Do I think you need to have that setting? No.

You're an author not a retailer.  

Anything you do that takes away from writing the next book, better have a high Return On Investment (ROI). That is why I am a proponent of less is more. I believe strongly in the unspoken agreement between reader and author. One part of that agreement is the author will never abuse information given to them by a reader. This includes their email address.

How often you should send a newsletter and the content of your newsletters are different posts for different days, but the short version is: send when you have a new book to sell. If you are a writer who drops a new book every month, then you have a reason to send a monthly newsletter. Same thing for quarterly. If you're releasing serialized works in addition to novels, those two lists should be separate.

5 Things To Do To Build Your Email List

• Make it easy for people to subscribe. Put a link to your subscription page in the back matter of your ebooks. Put the subscribe box on the main page of your website. 
• Note: Popovers (those windows that appear over the web page) do generate a lot of subscribers but they also turn away a lot of potential readers. The jury is split on their effectiveness. It's the latest way to combat "sidebar-blindness" in which the visitor ignores whatever is in the sidebar/header/footer, etc.
• Cross-promote in author newsletters that are in the same genre as your book
• Note: That promotion should go to a landing page that should include your subscription widget. Same applies to landing pages from ad campaigns: they should always include the option to subscribe to your newsletter.
• Offer a free short story exclusive to subscribers
• Note: Some authors offer other freebies with a "chance to win" to "new subscribers only." Some offer offline-tangible things (like swag). Do what's right for you. Keep in mind, you're an author, the product you're selling is your stories, so no need to go overboard with prizes. Don't make it complicated. 
• Remind your social media followers to subscribe. Remind them there are things in the newsletter they won't see in 140 characters and a gif. 
• Note: Be selective about when you do it, say a week before you drop a newsletter. Don't do it daily or weekly, it becomes noise that's easy to ignore.
• Plug it. Pin it. Embed it. Everywhere your author bio appears should also include a reminder to subscribe. If it's digital, then include the link to the subscription page. Twitter and Facebook had "pinned" posts option, rotate in a subscription promo when you're in the lull after new release promo. Offline, verbally encourage subscriptions. Remind readers of the benefits. 

Remember it's quality over quantity. Valuable subscribers are the ones who actually open your emails, then go buy your books. Brace yourself. Open Rates are a small fraction of your total list. Click Thru Rates (CTR) are a fraction of the Open Rates. Buy Rates are an even smaller fraction of CTR.  

Never, ever, ever sign people up for your newsletter without their consent. 

In some states, that is how you run afoul of anti-spam laws. 

Keep your efforts focused on your primary goal: Sell Your Books.

More Important than Money

Caught this gorgeous full moon setting in the warm sunrise colors on my run this morning. Glad I took my camera along. Although it annoyed me bouncing around, so I had to tuck it inside my zippered hoodie - which made me look pregnant, though unnaturally so.

Unnatural camera baby, ftw.

This week at the SFF Seven - whether by deliberate ploy or mental lapse (there's some debate on the topic - our calendar guru KAK missed giving us a topic. Therefore this week is an open "on-my-mind" theme.

What's on my mind? I hate to tell you guys, but it's marketing. And the love of money.

Quite topical, really, with the U.S. Presidential election coming down to its final days, with one candidate a multi-billionaire known for his devotion to building a commercial empire, his campaign heavily funded by other corporate giants.

But really it's mainly on my mind because I discovered last week that a "new" author selling incredibly well in a subgenre is a pseudonym for an woman who wrote in a totally different subgenre last year (and sold well, I understand) under a different pseudonym, both of which were different than the name under which she wrote a prominent review blog well known for taking authors to task for bad books and bad behavior.

Without going into detail, I can only say that this disturbs me because it feels so calculated. More than one of my sister authors - all equally disturbed - in discussing this new revelation said, "well, I guess she's laughing all the way to the bank."

And right. So it goes. She's found a formula that works, that apparently satisfies readers, and is making money at it. A lot of people will say there's nothing wrong with this, and there isn't.

There's nothing wrong with money. I happen to be a big fan of money, mostly because it makes for a much nicer quality of living. As someone who now totally relies on my book sales to pay the bills, I like for them to sell. Like most all of us, I suspect, I'd love to have a lot of money. I have a bathroom/kitchen dream remodel I like to fantasize about (and maybe collect pictures for, mumble, mumble). I'd love to travel and do it high end style. I'd like to have enough money that I wouldn't have to worry about money.

But there are more important things than money.

What's weird to me is that, several times lately when I've given my reason for not wanting to do certain kinds of marketing, or to plan books a certain way - which is that I believe some things are more important than money - people have actually laughed. And then they stop when they realize I'm not joking. Then kind of subside into an uncomfortable silence.

I suspect they think I'm being weird by saying that. Or perhaps naive.

Both could be true.

Still, I believe in this. The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil and the Taoists say that putting the pursuit of money above all else maddens the mind. This is a real thing - becoming consumed in the acquisition of money above all else can drive a person crazy. That's why we say money can't buy happiness. Sure, as David Lee Roth famously said, "Money can't buy happiness, but money can buy the big yacht you can park right next to where the happiness is." Why not? Hey! A big yacht could be great fun.

But there are more important things than money.

I had a birthday in August and, as is our culture these days, I received many good wishes via Facebook. It can be staggering, all those people - from ones I've known all my life to those I've never met in person, who may have only read my books - wishing me a happy birthday. A few however, were static images that said "happy birthday" or some such, along with the author's website address and book series. This was the first year I'd seen that. And I could imagine just how that came about. Some marketer gave the advice that when you wish someone a happy birthday on Facebook, you're missing a promotional opportunity if you don't have your author information on there.

My point is, what's more important to you - grabbing that promotional opportunity or wishing me well on my birthday? Maybe some of you are saying both. Maybe you're wisely pointing out that rando person I don't even know doesn't actually care about me or my birthday, so why would I even be naive about their intentions.

I just find it troublesome. If even wishing someone well on their birthday has an alternative agenda, what does that say about what's most important to us?

For me, writing books and telling stories is an expression of art. And I feel funny even typing that. Some of these writers of genre would curl their lip at me for that. Funny thing is - I've always celebrated that aspect of genre-writing. I started out in the literary/arts council world and grew weary of the nobly poor writer. I have zero patience with the idea that writing a good book takes years of angst and thrashing. When I transitioned from writing creative nonfiction to writing novels in fantasy and romance (and the interstitial places between), I loved this community for focusing on making it into a business. We're here to make a living at it. I've written before about the concept of selling out - and how I didn't believe in it. That "selling out" essentially demonizes making a profit from our art and that's bullshit.

I still believe that.

I also believe there are some things more important than money.

Telling a story for the story's sake is one. I think there's a huge difference between trope and formula. I believe there's a huge difference between art and manufacture. They might be difficult lines to draw, but I think we all have to find them. I believe there's a difference between creating something out of love versus designing it to sell. Maybe not in the end product - they may be indistinguishable - I mean for the creator. It's another version of me wishing someone a happy birthday out of a desire to celebrate their existence in the world and in my life, as opposed to doing it to gain attention.

I think personal integrity is more important than making money. I don't believe they're necessarily in opposition - you can both make money and have integrity - but if it comes to a choice between the two, then I choose integrity. My integrity may not be yours. Only we know what we're at peace with in our hearts. But I do think we all have to make this choice. It informs who we are as human beings.

I read an interesting essay recently by Joyce Carol Oates, Quilts, in a collection edited by Elizabeth Benedict called What My Mother Gave Me. (I linked to my Goodreads review of it - very much recommend the book.) Oates talks about an old quilt her mother gave her decades before, now very worn, and the comfort it gives her, now that her mother is gone, along with both her first and second husbands. She says,

In extremis we care very little for the public life - the life of the career - even the life of literature: it is comfort for which we yearn, but comfort can come to us from only a few, intimate sources.

There are more important things than money.