Book Marketing in 2025 - Part 1
A note to my writing daughter Greene Pearl. Writing requires honesty and courage. Publishing is a game. Let's look at the game board together.
Let’s talk about Book Marketing in 2025. I’ll get as much right as I do wrong. Wrong is good sometimes because it allows us wiggle towards right. I don’t mind being a little wrong. I am an author not a publisher nor a marketeer.
In early 2024, knowing that marketing a book is a responsibility shared between author and publisher, I decided to do what any businessperson would do stepping into a new market. I went to find and hire qualified professionals to guide my efforts. With decades of experience owning an IT firm, I get tech. I first wrote software on local networks then later on the internet. I still write application software that is being used on several continents daily. There’s nothing about “the tech” I don’t get, except…
I am also a nepo-baby. My father was a successful commercial novelist with more than 20 books and something like 4+ movies. My grandfather also published over 20 novels and had several films. My grandfather’s work was being published 100 years ago. I never knew my grandfather, he died before I was born. And then there was that moment after I graduated from university where my father blew up our family. Before that I grew up with knowing award-winning novelists, actors, movie people, music people. I grew up knowing my father’s editors, publicists, and hearing talk of publishing and marketing. Books paid for my life and education. I’d watch my father on the TV doing interviews. He was terrible on TV, I thought. Whatever the family drama, my family has been writing and earning money from novels since 1915.
This world is not my father’s world. Funny thing about be tossed out of a family—it also involves fleeing. Therefore my flight or my father’s push commenced a four-decade gap. A gap in my knowledge, and a few changes in the technology of books. Given this, I approached book marketing with more humility than you might expect. I don’t know shit. First, I must acknowledge that the industry had to respond to the internet, to digital commerce. Second, book marketing is not what is was in the 1970s and 1980s when I was a kid. Time to learn.
But I am hindered by my technical background, and by a healthy dose of skepticism, and by reality, because I write software that runs on the internet.
I hired “A” in Feb 2024 from Reedsy. Reedsy is a pay-as-you-go gig thing. It is better than Fiverr. Fiverr proved terrible. Reedsy claims to screen their folks. I’ve tried rather a few folks from there. Reedsy and Fiverr are gig-based work, but they are not a gig-based car/driver service. At least with car/driver services, patron and driver agree to a destination and the driver will likely follow a well-known digital map that both parties can monitor. It is easy to say, “Wait, you’re going the wrong way.” Reedsy and Fiverr both lack maps and concordance on destination.
I hired “A” for a year at about $500-600/month. We setup an ad budget. I’d see ad bills comes through every few days at $20-$50. “A” only advertised on Meta. For novel “The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County,” we spent approximately $1,200 in 12 months with Meta. “A” was most comfortable on Amazon, but because I have a publisher, I don’t get publisher’s rights on Amazon. Six months after applying to Amazon as an author, I got accepted. I don’t know what it means. Suppose there are secrets for me to discover? Riches to be found? I doubt it. I haven’t explored
Here's some crap I learned and sort of know. I am a writer and technologist who happens to own a business. Restated, I didn’t do business school.
Sales versus Marketing
Sales is a direct effort to put a book in a buyer’s hand. Bookstore employees “sell.” Author’s “market.” Marketing is the effort to create an environment that promotes sales. Author’s can sell. Famously, one well-known author drove around with a car filled with books and sold them on the street. Some marketing people will refute that advertising is a discipline within marketing. Then of course, others disagree. Therefore, management of advertising may be or may not fall under the classic definition or marketing.
Books vs eCommerce
ECommerce
Books are fucked up.
Make believe you are not an author for a mo but a product designer. You make a widget, the Binford 9000. Now you own the intellectual property of the design because you patented it. You own the branding because you trademark the name and logos. You arrange for an eCommerce platform, say Amazon, eBay, Etsy, or host your own site. You get instantaneous knowledge (called analytics) about who visited, who selected products, who abandoned a purchase, and who bought. You know a fair amount to browsed by kicking proverbial tires. With every purchase, you get email, name, shipping address. You get information about the buyer’s demographics such as age, computer type, location. Oddly 80% of the internet seems to be 25-year-old males (because that is the default, if a web browser can’t figure you out). In your browser is an advertiser’s key that make you unique to them. 100% of what you buy and browse is captured into massive databases. If you have Facebook/Instagram on your phone, then 100% of what you do with your phone gets reported to Meta for the same analysis. They sell this to big brands. If you put a link to a Meta site called a pixel, it will report 100% of the traffic on your website to the lovelies at Meta where they will then bundle and sell your data (back to you because they can prove that their ads worked. Clever?!)
This eCommerce is optimized by Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon (and the Chinese firms too: Tiktok, Shien, etc). It is all the same with different branding. The data collection and aggregation is a massive business. Gmail launched on 01 April 2004. They now have 1.5 billion users and support communication in 133 languages. Somehow this service is free to a lot of people.
A kinda basic business rule I didn’t learn in the business school I never attended: Free ain’t free. You pay for a commodity or service you need because it has perceived value. If you get something for free, then you are the commodity being harvested and sold. Hello, green lettuce. You daughter shall be the commodity. Sit with me in the bin of green lettuce.
Books
Since I mentioned patents and trademarks above. Books are copyrighted, which used to mean something. Confusingly you cannot trademark your book title, and you cannot trademark your book cover. And what is wrong with copyright? The answer is Large Learning Models. LLM is a type of data used for generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI). It has presently gobbled up all internet sites and all books published. Please know that Google, Apple, and Microsoft also use all email as a data source for LLM. Oddly, weeks before my debut novel The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County was published, the audio version appeared on YouTube as a free podcast. That’s right, my copyrighted materials were released by Google to the public domain. I just looked again (on April 3, 2025). Google still has my stuff out there, but under the name “preview.” One such “preview” is an hour long. Thank you Google for totally violating copyright. The normal exception is that folks can quote excerpts for review. And there is an acceptance that others can quote your work as fair use. Guess what, depending on your YouTube status, you may be forced to watch an add while I read my book to you, with the money going to Google. They published an hour long sample of the book. Feels like theft to me.
Back to the topic at hand…
Books are an old industry that lost the fight with eCommerce. Books were sold by independent bookstores and a few chains. The publishers were cozy with them. They created an ecosystem around books: publicists, bookstores, print media doing book reviews. Even as Barnes and Nobles grew to be a giant then killed local bookstores, the industry tolerated it as progress.
Then in the mid-1990s a bookstore called Amazon came along. Amazon, within a few years, created its own ecosystem for sales. They ain’t what they was. Today, Amazon sells services to authors. Authors pay to publish. They pay for marketing and ads on Amazon and on GoodReads (owned by Amazon). Amazon sells the books to consumers. When an author signs an agreement with Amazon to be under exclusive Amazon control, every process of bookifying demonstrates control and taps revenue from conception to retail sale.
This business model has been outlawed several times in the US.
Oil / Petrochemical–it was determined by US Courts that no one company can own the oil fields, and refine the oil, and transport the oil and sell the gas/oil retail. Technically, doing so isn’t a monopoly but a cartel. You can’t tell today, but the government broke up the oil industry, specifically, the Rockefeller’s and their Standard Oil, in 1911.
Movies–the studios used to own actors and directors via contracts. They would make moves that they then distributed to movie theaters that they owned. Government said: No. You can’t own the raw resources (actors/talent), and the manufacturing, and the distribution, and the sales of a product. (I am sharin’ experience off-the-cuff, but one citation is US v Paramount 1948.)
Amazon is a monopoly that benefits Amazon. I have spent $2,500/month for 10 years at Amazon hosting our software. I know Amazon’s tech pretty well. As an author, I am hesitant to nibble at the edges of that cookie. Amazon tells authors that if they want this privilege or that benefit then you must sign exclusive with them. Amazon bought all traditional audio distribution channels, centralizing it into Audible which is owned by Amazon. As a dyslexic person, I used to order physical books-on-tape and books-on-CD. Look in my living room. I have hundreds. All gone, ok mostly gone. You can still buy books on CDs. But computer manufacturers kinda stopped putting CDs readers in devices, noticed? It is a broad push towards streaming and subscription verses buying and owning. You own a CD. You subscribe to digital content. Audible has like a 65% market share and Amazon an 80% market share. Like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, they are each contemporary monopolies that openly thwart anti-trust laws. They created a world that returns all benefits back to Amazon with little regard for authors and publishers. As we are publishing this, stock prices for these firms are down 22% in the period between late January 2025 and early April 2025. And even after giving millions in political contributions, Meta may find itself in court in 2025 over monopoly-like practices.
There is no effort at Amazon to curate their publishing efforts. It is just a million people publishing a million books a year. Why curate? Amazon’s purpose is revenue for Amazon. They charge authors for publishing. They charge for advertising. They charge for distribution. They collect more revenue at point of sale. They make money even if a book doesn’t. Amazon is now a movie studio and bought MGM+(ePix) in 2021. They own or control the intellectual property for the written word and moving pictures, and they are certainly trying to capture the market share with music as well.
Book Industry
Unless you have at traditional publisher or a hybrid cost-sharing model with a publisher, and your patrons all buy your books at a bookstore, then there is a 100% guarantee that Amazon, Google, or Apple will control and influence the sales and distribution of your intellectual property.
What did the book industry do? Kinda nothing. Head in the sand. Publishing has been around since 1500s. They thought, “We’ll be fine.” As a result we have a mid-century analog industry in the middle of an eCommerce focused planet.
You, dear daughter, have little access to advocacy and allies in the protection of your intellectual property rights on a global scale. Amazon, Google, Apple are global yet the laws are national. You, Greenie, and I and every other writer is the commodity being harvested for sale. And you will make less money than anyone on your thoughts, words, emotions, and characters.
Not eCommerce
Because the book industry did not respond to eCommerce and did not update relationships with bookstores when both bookstores and publishers were on their knees being crushed by Amazon, the book industry preserved 19th century sales practices. Idiots.
In eCommerce, you know instantly who bought what and where to ship it (even with a virtual product like software). Conversely, when a bookstore “buys” a book, they buy it on consignment. They pay for the book after it sells. They kinda believe that they (the bookstores) are doing a publisher favors by letting a publisher have shelf space. If a book doesn’t sell, they box it and ship it back. These are called “returns.” They consigned 10 books, sold 7 and returned 3. The publisher now pays for the shipping of that book back to the printer and the publisher is free to sell it again. The bookstore never “owned” it, and nobody bought it. So now there is a cost of processing the Return: shipping, inventory, and such. Guess, what? Publishers don’t print books. Publisher’s don’t have warehouses. A lot of print houses now print books on demand and don’t have warehouses. Authors should expect 30% “returns.” For every 100 books shipped, 30 will be “returns.” Returns may become “remainders” and/or be destroyed. This matters to you because you—as a writer or reader—will pay for that. I pay for it.
The books don’t get returned. They tear the cover off and the publisher removes “return” costs from book sales. Over the last 30 years, payment of return has come to fall on the authors’ shoulders. Why would the publisher carry that risk? So they pass it on. Imagine a grocery store returning wilted lettuce and unsold cheese to the manufacturer or wholesaler for credit.
Oh and Greene, grocery stores have a back-door revenue for their shelves, in case you didn’t know that. They sell placement and shelf position to their vendors. Stores rent their shelves out to vendors and pay for their product’s placement before it put up for sale. Rotten shit goes to the compost bin and not back to the farmer. Imagine the farmer who pays for lettuce that rotted after the farmer sold it to the store. Do books spoil? They do when sitting on a shelf unsold. They do when in boxes forgotten in warehouses.
Remember that instantaneous sales report you get in eCommerce? No such thing in traditional publishing. The printing/distribution house (Ingram) reports your sales (revenue) and your returns (negative revenue) and you know cost of printing (expenses). That’s the formula:
sales(revenue) - returns - costs = publisher’s revenue
We get this each 6 months. There are no eCommerce details. There are no analytics. There is just a number.
Book Math
Let’s make believe that you and your publisher share the spoils of sales 50:50. Book sells for $20 retail at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Vermont, up the road from here. They get a 100% mark-up. Therefore they bought the book for about $10. This is napkin math. It is aproxi-math. So, $10 gets split between you and the publisher. The book production costs money. Print on demand is expensive per unit. A smart publisher will make an order for a print run. So 5,000 copies. Printing is cheaper, but storage is a cost. Let’s say the book printing is a couple of bucks (and lets hope we have some domestic printers; e.g., my publisher has been printing in Hong Kong, which is now facing new import taxes).
$10 becomes $7. Then you and the publisher split that. I get $3.50 per unit sold. For 100 units sold, I get $350. But 30% of those will be reported as Returns. Now there is a deduction for $105 because your lettuce wilted while sitting on a shelf in a bookstore. Net value of 100 units sold? $245. Because novelling isn’t my sole source of revenue, that income gets taxed at my normal income tax rates, plus state taxes plus Medicare/Medicaid taxes. I make $125 for each 100 novels sold at a bookstore. Call it a buck-a-book.
Oh, and what happens to the 5,000 copies the publisher ordered from Hong Kong? What doesn’t sell becomes a “remainder,” and like returns, these are costs that likely land on the author given someone will deduct the cost in some formula.
Meanwhile, you go look at your book on Amazon and they are discounting your retail price below bookstores to pull the traffic back to Amazon.
The math for audiobooks and ebooks is entirely different and likely controlled by Amazon. Amazon has an 83% market share for ebooks and a 65% market share for audiobooks.
Unless your readers buy with Libro.fm for audiobooks, then a portion of the revenue is shared with a local bookstore. Your readers can buy audio CDs from Barnes & Nobles. But in general, audiobooks fall pretty close to the subscription model not the ownership model. I cannot listen to a Libro.fm book unless I have access to the internet via WiFi or mobile phone service. I know this because I have to hit play on when in my yard and in WiFi range. Why? Because for the first 30 minutes of any drive, there is no mobile signal. No mobile signal, no audio book.
Analytics from Book Sales?
We honestly have no idea who is buying the book, when they buy it, or even much about where it’s getting bought. It is the 1970s with respect to that data. Sure, Amazon knows their sales data instantly. As does any on-line book retailer. But your publisher will NOT know because it is not data owned or gathered by publishers from bookstores. Publishers derive their revenue report from the aggregated sales of books sold from distribution/printing houses such as Ingram. There is a gap that the data does not just step over.
When I ran a podcast a few years ago, I had instant access to who listened, where they were and general demographic data. With these analytics, I could tune my advertising and marketing efforts based on facts. Yes, I advertised in Ireland, because I had a big Irish following.
Books? Nada, mija.
The traditional book industry has told us: We are not changing. We will not provide you daily and detailed analytics from our point of sales systems. We will not pay for a book unless we sell it. Bookstores have been getting screwed over the last 4 decades, and I love bookstores.
What do to?
I sure would like daily sales data from bookstores to flow the distribution houses then to the publisher. You might see who bought what where on a given day. Imaging getting that daily or weekly instead of a static number six months after the end of a six-month sales cycle. Talk about stale produce? That lettuce is only good for earthworms, it is so gonzo.
My last sales report was for the period spanning March 2024 through the end of September 2024. I got the report in early March of 2025. The book released on September 10, 2024 Therefore, I got 20 days of sales reported to me six months later as a single set of numbers: sales and returns.
Want real eCommerce?
If you want eCommerce, sell your book via an exclusive agreement with Amazon or do your own sales. Be one of 1,000,000 titles published. It is a coin toss! Good analytics. Authors do keep trying to sue Amazon about their monopolistic practices. No joy, yet.
Book Marketing
There is some math and analysis involved in marketing. To call it a science doesn’t feel right. Regardless, analytic data on unit sold/bough, where, by whom, and maybe even what link the customer followed to get to the sale is of massive benefit.
You can correlate your marketing activities with your sales activities. This ad on Meta generated 100 views (impressions) and 5 clicks. Blah, blah, you get to your CTR–your Click Through Rate. In this example, the CTR is 5%, 5 clicks in 100 impressions. A CTR is one step shy of a conversion. Ok, they clicked the link in your newsletter, your ad, your post. You got the click. Your CTR ticked up. You paid for that click. In order for you to be paid by that click, you must convert the click to a buy. That is a “conversion.” The series goes:
Impression → Click → Conversion → Sale → Revenue
The impression and the click cost money. The conversion to sale earns you money.
When done well, you find the optimal solution between paying for Impressions (ads) and earning Revenue (sales of ebooks, paperbacks, audiobooks).
If you make a buck-a-book, then your costs per impression ought to be lower than the revenue generated. It is just math. Sure, you will pay a lot more up front to generate interest and call that an investment. Over a five-year period, make sure that your costs per unit sold is less than the revenue per unit sold otherwise, you are losing money.
Now you can see why book marketing is such a mess. If you ran an ad in March and your sales cycle ends in September and you get your sales report the following March—which ad, which campaign, which appearance provided the most impact to your costs or to your revenue? Time to consult your Ouija board, Tarot Cards, Magic 8 Ball, and a D20 die, because the rest is a guess.
Your formula looks like this:
Impression → Click → ???
We can not measure “conversion” and sales reports come in so late, the analysis is moot. To own the conversion process, you must own or buy into a eCommerce point-of-sale process. Do that, and you can not say: “Just order it at your local bookstore”.
My 5,000 member newsletter generates a 35% CTR. Yay for me. I have a well curated mailing list that I don’t abuse and people trust it. Did it generate sales? I have no f’n idea.
Credits
Narrative: I.M. Aiken
Editor: Lora Herrara