Book Marketing in 2025, Part 2

Dear Greene

if you missed part 1….

Dear Greene

Last week, we explored the data gap that exists between traditional book sales and modern eCommerce. Unless you jump on with Amazon, you are missing the connection between “clicks” and “sale,” a process called “conversion.” If you jump on with Amazon, then that is a decision worthy of a lot of research and exploring the legal issues and failed class action law suits authors have filed against Amazon for monopolistic practices.

This week, we’ll look at the various roles in book marketing. Just like last week’s letter to you on “Book Marketing” please accept that I will be a little wrong, a little right, and where disagreements exist, the disagreements are widespread. There is no set of authoritative definitions serving the industry as a dictionary.

Book Marketing Jobs/Tasks

Author

Author holds all jobs and responsibilities until that job is assumed by another. Everything after writing the opus is marketing, including query letters to agents and publishers. Therefore, until someone takes one of the jobs listed below, it is yours. 100% guarantee you will be paying for these services. The question is: Does the cash come from your pocket after sales or from the publisher’s pocket as an expense that gets deducted from your sales report?

Book Publicist

This is a marketing job unique to books. It used to be that the publicist’s value was the size of their contact list. They are the ones that get reviews in the NYT, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post. They also try to schedule author appearances, speaking gigs, and work on getting the author “publicity”–literally in print (then later on TV, then podcasts, etc).

I have a friend whose been writing novels and publishing since the early 1970s. His big publisher is telling him that he must hire and pay for the publicist (see “Author” above). The last publicist I approached would have required me to have 5,000 unit sales per month to cover that cost. And 5,000 units per month is a near guarantee that you’ve landed on the NYT best seller’s list.

Book Marketing

Book marketing kinda really means something different to everyone using the term.

Book Marketing–“A” from the last letter to you, Greene

A said: “I will write the SEO and metadata for the books on Amazon. I will plan your Amazon ads. I will push you to Bookbub and GoodReads. You’ll do GoodReads giveaways. And I’ll plan and buy ads on Meta.”

I will not do podcast planning. I will not do outreach. I do digital marketing.

Book Marketing–"Iziah"

Iziah said: I’ll build you a mailing list and connect you with BookTok and related social media influencers. I’ll write their content for them and provide the graphics. You pay me and you pay them. Most “influencers” charge between $50 and $250 for their “influence,” and as I said on the phone, Greene, you often provide their content.

BookTok and related Instagram “influencers” hawk products. I have not yet paid one who read or listened to my novel. They are not reviewing. They are not reading. They are shilling/pitching on socials for you. You create the content and you pay them to post it for you.

Book Marketing–Reedsy.com

Reedsy offers:

• “Marketing Strategy”

• “Email Marketing”

• “Advertising”

• “Metadata & Blurb Optimization”

My experience in shopping for “Marketing Strategy” has a lot to do with following the consultants’ linear suggestions. I got pissed at them all for what they excluded from “strategy.” And note that "Publicist" is not on the above list.

My frustration is that in an eCommerce world, these divisions are meaningless holdovers from a brick-and-mortar world. When you lift the hood and look at the engine that drives email marketing, advertising, and metadata/blurb, it is 100% predicated on sales/demographic analytical data. The skills are the same among these three areas, no matter what the professionals attest to. And “advertising” in this context is really only taken to mean advertising on social media platforms.

Marketing Needs

Returning to the original broad view of marketing, it is a multifaceted workplace. When I think about a Marketing Strategy it involves these elements

• Branding and brand promotion (likely author and book titles)

• Advertising (often not as in the traditional business school definition of marketing)

  • Social Media

  • Print-like media–newspapers, magazines

  • Gatherings (tradeshows, conferences, etc)

  • Influencers

• Publicity and Outreach

  • Podcasts

  • Book reviews in publications

  • News articles in local news media

  • Political outreach if topics warrant it

  • Print interviews

  • Guest essays/guest writing spots

  • Book/publishing gatherings

  • Award submittals

• Data Analytics–sales data, website traffic, traffic to whatever other sites we can get data from. Maybe we can find out who is buying our books?

• Mailing Lists

  • Curation and development of mailing lists

  • Appropriate use of mailing lists

2024 Book Marketing

Greene, you now have access to all of my decisions and efforts related to marketing The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County, my debut novel. Over the 12-month endeavor, I have accumulated the following resources.

Mailing List–approximately 5,000 people. With good management and careful use, the open rate is 36% and the click rate 9%. Those are outstanding numbers. 3% click rates are generally accepted as “industry standard.” In 1 year, the list remains within a few percentages of this 5K target. This is our most valuable tool and we ought to invest more here.

Vermont Digger–we did one ad. It was “sponsored content” costing us $600. We reached 41K people with a click-through-rate of 1.4%. This is low. But, the audience is reading the daily news of Vermont. It is our audience. This sort of ad does well to increase awareness of the brand and products (“Aiken” is brand, “novel” is product). Some one once told me it takes about 7 impressions for someone to recognize a brand. I fully support doing more with VT Digger.

GoodReads–We did at least 4 giveways with GoodReads and have 13K GoodReaders listing the novel in their “Want to Read” list. Does this generate sales? I have no idea (see my first letter to you, Greene). Analytics make little sense here because we do not know the “impressions” count. We spent $500, so the cost per entry on the “Want To-Read” list was $0.04.

Meta–We spent over a grand on Insta/Facebook ads. We hit nearly 80K views, 72K impressions, and got a CTR of 3.6%, which is solidly mid. The cost per click over the entire run was stupid high: $1.24/click. When we drill in to the details, we had 12 ads that had good click rates and low costs. The overall average kicked up due to early mistakes tuning the effort. Note that Meta’s stock is dropping in April of 2022 based on fears that Chinese merchants won’t be advertising aggressively. Maybe pricing with change at Meta??

My Dream Marketing Partner

To the person I have not yet met, I remember setting up investment plans and 401Ks when I was younger. There was this person (these people) who possessed a broad understanding of financial markets. We explored my risk-taking nature, my long term goals, and the resources available in the investment world. I got a series of strategic trainings on how to think about investments over a lifetime.

Similarly, in the corporate world where I have spent a few decades as a business owner, marketing is a multifaceted tool. We often hire a "chief marketing officer." This person is responsible for the diversity and distribution of all marketing answers.

Each role, tool, need (as listed above) is a facet of a unified structure. I want someone to sit me down and ask:

What are your goals in publishing novels?

What are your goals with marketing?

What is your budget?

Where do you think your readers will be found?

What marketing resources to you have at hand?

What appears to have worked in the recent past?

Then we follow that up with rather objective discussions about the allocation of the budget, time, and energy to the various tools at hand. We evaluate, and we tune. This person, if good, is worthy of praise.

Advertising, of all types, is a fairly tactical and technical operation. The advertising professional knows how to manipulate SEO data, analytics, and momentary trends to capture attention with keywords, hooks, and such.

Scammy Landscape

There are good people in the book industry. But there are a fair number of bad actors. I get approached on Meta and Bluesky by marketeers who tell me what I need and what I must do. So often they forget to ask me what I have, what I have done, or what I want. The greater the confidence in the marketeer attitude, the greater the likelihood that you and I are facing a scammer. Sorry, not sorry.

Books are not eCommerce. Traditional book sales through non-Amazon book sellers do not provide detailed analytics. We, authors, cannot link a marketing activity with direct results in sales. We get cool stats such as “views,” “impressions,” “clicks,” “CTR” (click through rate), and “CPC” (cost per click). The value we do not have is “conversion.” We cannot follow a user from view to impression to click to sale (or conversion). It doesn’t exist for us. Therefore, anyone who wants you to focus on the numbers is dazzling you with nonsense.

The landscape is scammy because we (authors, publishers, author/publisher) need to hire experts in this landscape. We are buying hope. Hope that we sell books because we did X or Y or Z. Selling hope to hopers is a perfect opportunity for scammers and fraudsters to find their marks.

Dear Scammer, if you follow my suggestions here, and ask me the right questions, I’ll likely swallow that bait whole. I am just as vulnerable.

One of my goals is generate revenue that exceeds expenses. Corollary, I must sell books. Conclusion, the only number that matters is unit sold on the semi-annual sales report that is distilled through Ingram to my publisher. Unless you, dear marketeer, can adjust that number upwards, then we didn’t do the job correctly (or we have a shitty book).