Marketing Monday

Raether’s Amazon Ad

“So, you have a new novel for me?”

“Yes, sir, I do. It’s a thriller/sci-fi/superhero mash-up with an amazing premise, a smart, sensitive hero, bounty hunters, dogs, aspiring supervillains, monsters, hackers, magic, secret identities, gunfights, and a cure for cancer!”

“Wow-wow-wow!”

Raether’s Enzyme is a story I like. The design of the paperback and eBook are excellent. Readers from my circle of family and friends enjoyed it and wanted to talk about it. I remain confident that there are many more people out there who would like it too, but that confidence is largely a matter of faith.  Sales so far have been scant, but the handful of ratings that have trickled in have been good.

The new challenge is to connect my book with readers who might enjoy it. The name of the discipline that encompasses this endeavor is: marketing. I am now consciously incompetent at marketing.

Cosmic Justice

I spent most of my adult life being unconsciously incompetent at marketing, and proudly so. As an engineer, I disdained the marketing department. They were foolish, superficial people who brought nothing but confused “customer requirements”, suspect “market research”, and undue authority to the product development process. Any failure of our efforts in the marketplace were obviously attributable to the gross incompetence of the marketing department. It is right there in both words: market. Case closed. Engineers rule. Marketing people drool. Any Dilbert fan knows this.

Yeah. About that…

Now that I am responsible for both producing the product and marketing it, I regret my former arrogance and apologize to any marketers out there who are reading this. I’m sorry. I should have had more empathy and respect for the people who work hard to identify potential customers and divine their wants and needs. I should have been more curious about how that side of a business works. Having failed in these ways, I have made a thing—a good thing—without a plan or clue as to how I might show the right people that it exists. There are infinitely many ways to fail at marketing and a small number of ways to succeed. My inability to tell the difference may doom my book to obscurity. If I can’t up my game to a baseline of conscious competence (or get very, very lucky), I fear that I will have squandered the contributions of the friends and collaborators who helped Raether’s Enzyme get this far. I will own these manifold failures from end-to-end. It will be my own damn fault.

Beyond doom and gloom

Recognizing you have a problem is the first step to solving it. As a young engineer, my next step would have been to come up with my own definition of the problem and set about solving it. Asking an actual customer for their input would only have constrained my immense creativity and innovation. As a more mature person working in a domain where I am consciously incompetent, I knew that I would need to learn, experiment, and fail repeatedly to make progress. In the months since Raether’s release, I have divided my time between marketing tasks, drafting The Gray God, and playing Cyberpunk 2077. I won’t claim to have found the optimal balance here, but I have committed one day each week to turning the learn-experiment-fail crank. I call it: Marketing Monday.

Learn

An older post offered a high-level, author’s-eye view of the landscape of the traditional publishing ecosystem as I understood it. I went with self-publishing. That landscape is similar, but there are distinct features that I should document at some point. For the purposes of this post, I’ll call out one such feature. I’m not sure if it fits my para-publishing or para-marketing categories. Let’s just say that there are many people out there who offer insight, advice, plans, and coaching for indie book marketing. Many, many people. Since I haven’t successfully employed any of their advice yet, I can’t make a recommendation as to who one should listen to or pay for. There are some common themes I’ve picked up on.

Marketing begins months before launch.

I launched Raether prematurely. I knew this at the time but didn’t want 2020 to find a way to kill me and/or destroy civilization before I had published at least one book. A prudent and planful book launch includes building buzz on your mailing list and social media, seeding influential reviewers with advance reader’s copies (ARCs), and other networking efforts. All of which require a marketing plan to identify receptive parties and shape advertising copy (which is an art distinct from fiction prose).

The Amazonian Gambit

Amazon wants to sell books. It doesn’t necessarily want to sell your book. If enough customers buy your book for it to rise in the sales and popularity ranks (in general and within the book’s category), your book will earn a position of visibility to book browsers. It falls to the indie author to bring readers to Amazon for your book or to find readers within Amazon via well-placed Amazon advertisements. Making the latter work requires insight, a bit of data science, a good cover, and a great blurb. Marketing and sales stuff. Raether has a good cover. I am working on the rest.

The insights you need include a list of books and authors whose readers are likely to enjoy your book. This list allows you to bid for ad placement on the pages for your targeted books. Then, if your cover is good and your tagline is great, a reader might just click on that sponsored product link and consider your book as well. These kindred books may also lead to further insights as to how to best categorize your book. ‘Thriller’ is a broad category. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense\Thrillers & Suspense\Technothrillers is a more specific category that gets you closer to readers who like a little science and technology in their thriller. Fortunately for Raether, which includes elements of thriller and science fiction (in the most general ‘what-if?’ sense), Amazon will let you file your book under multiple categories.

Amazon will also let you associate keywords with your book. These are invisible to customers but not to Amazon’s search engine, which may use them when a customer isn’t searching for a particular book but is in the market for a story with a ‘strong female lead’ or ‘dystopian fiction for adults.’  You only get to assign seven keywords to your book in KDP’s self-publishing system, but you can use many more in an advertising campaign. Picking keywords starts with your own ideas as to what readers might be looking for when they don’t yet know they want to read your book. You should test your ideas by searching for them on Amazon and seeing if your book fits in with the rest of the results. Alternately, tools like PublisherRocket will mine Amazon for you. This process may result in additional insights regarding similar books and authors.

With the right categories and keywords, you can, in theory, become visible to readers. If some of them buy, enjoy, and rate/review your book, the odds of it creeping up the sales ranks improve.

Finding your book’s Facebook friends

Your friends read your book because they are interested in you. Who is inclined to be friends with your book? Advertising on Facebook is a test of how accurately you can describe your ideal reader. What age range do the fall in? What educational level do they have? What interests do they pursue? Those interests can be genres (categories), authors, or specific books. They can also be medieval Scotland or space exploration. Facebook will use its creepy insights into strangers’ lives to target your ad without those strangers having expressed a desire to buy a book about a medieval Scotsman travelling to Mars. On the plus side, you can reach readers who didn’t know they wanted a book like yours. On the downside, they may not be in the market because their to-read stack is already full, thank-you-very-much.

Organic crops are labor-intensive.

I confess that I harbored a ridiculous fantasy. I told myself it was nonsense but deep down I hoped that I’d tell two friends and they’d tell two friends, and the miracle of exponential growth would popularize my book by word-of-mouth. 100% organic success. I wouldn’t have to work for it and could put all my energy into the next project. This didn’t happen. Duh. Not that my friends let me down. They helped me and my book with generous plugs and the book launch was much stronger for their contributions. I am heartened and thankful.

The book marketing coaches say that authors—and new authors in particular—benefit from being recognized contributing members of bookish communities. If readers (and writers, who are also passionate readers) know who you are, you’re not some unknown author to them. If you’ve entertained, enlightened, or encouraged them, they already value what you write. This needs to be a long-term relationship. You can’t just parachute in, flood the zone, and pitch your book.

As someone who burned out on the dramas and politics of online communities before many people knew such things existed, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make this work.

Another approach is to build an author platform. Make yourself known as an interesting person. Your platform can consist of a blog, a podcast, a Facebook page, general recognition of your expertise, all of these, and more. Having earned an audience in this other domain, you have potential readers who will trust you when you say, “Hey, gang, I’ve got a book coming out. I think you’ll like it.”

Having a platform is critical to non-fiction authors. It answers a reader or publisher’s first question: “Who is this person and why should I care what they think?” Having a platform works for new fiction authors who can say something like: “If you’ve enjoyed my articles on medieval Scotland, check out new novel. It’s set in medieval Scotland.” Established fiction authors have their prior work to build their platform on.

As someone whose labored in obscure bowels of tech behemoths until recently, this platform thing has a chicken-and-egg flavor to it. Building the platform entails the same work as marketing my book.

Experiment

So far, my experiments have all been baby steps.

Raether Zero

The simplest Amazon ad campaign you can run is to set automatic targeting. Amazon will use your categories, keywords and whatever secret sauce seems appropriate. If a customer clicks on the ad, you pay for the click based on a bidding range you set. My automatically targeted campaign named Raether Zero generated 7,780 impressions (it was shown to that many customers), 7 clicks, no sales, and had cost me $15.85 by the time I turned it off and scratched my head. The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) was low and the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) was high. This can be attributed to poor placement or a bad ad. The problem is that the ad is the book cover and a short bit of text. I’m committed to the cover and will need to scratch my head some more to improve the tiny blurb the ad allows you to work with.

Raether’s Kindred Books

The next experiment involved targeting the ad at two books I think are related my story. Raether overlaps in style, setting, and plot elements with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Raether’s dystopian aspects and concern with a young woman losing claim to her body relate it Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Perhaps readers interested in these successful books would show an interest in my unknown novel. 11,202 impressions, 16 clicks, no sales, and $10.73 later, the answer appears to be no. Again, it may be that the ad doesn’t cut it. It may be that the book itself, as reflected in the cover and short blurb, doesn’t appear to be relevant.

Rocket 1

After pouring through How to Market a Book and Amazon Decoded, I decided to revisit my book’s categories and keywords and build a new campaign with a longer list of keywords and targeted books. PublisherRocket was my friend here. It allowed me to quickly test new keyword candidates, explore the categories of related books, and cross-reference books, keywords, and categories. I launched Rocket 1 and turned it off after 2,819 impressions. Most of the keywords were generating no or few impressions. There were only two clicks. Back to the drawing board. I may start it up again after revisiting the ad blurb and fortifying the book’s page.

The first one’s free…

Facebook kindly offered me a $10 credit to apply to advertising for my page. I had prepared an ad based on the assets supplied by my designer prior to launch, so taking Fb up on this offer was easy. I set up a (crude) audience profile and pointed the ad at Raether’s page here on my blog. Seven hundred or so impressions later I had not one nibble. This could be my ad. Or the imprecision of my audience profile. Or both. Or neither. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I am deeply ambivalent about Facebook. I enjoy seeing the good things my friends and family choose to share. I understand that employing programmers and keeping the servers running costs money and that Facebook needs to make that money somewhere. It makes it by selling advertising opportunities based on its creepy insights into its users’ likes and lives. And that bugs me on a gut level. I haven’t made peace with engaging with the ads they show me. Does it make sense—is it even right—for me, with my attitudes, to pay them to insert my ads into strangers’ feeds? I haven’t solved this conundrum, so I’ve been ignoring Facebooks endless notifications about how I can improve traffic to my page with their ads. A $20 credit with my next $10 of ad spending is generous, but I don’t want to give them my credit card number.

I must move past these blocks if I’m going to use Facebook advertising. I’m told it can be quite effective.

Fail

I cannot correlate any of my advertising experiments with a single sale of my novel. Bummer.

If at first you don’t succeed…

Repeat

I plan learn more about modern indie book marketing and experimenting with these channels and others. I expect I’ll fail again. And again. And I’ll repeat the process as needed. I owe it to my book and that’s what one does on Marketing Monday.