Advanced Magic Bakery… Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight… The Basics of Anti-Promotion

Promotion for writers and indie publishers can go in so many ways in this modern world, but going to start here with the basics of anti-promotion, or how to at least give your book and your store a fighting chance.

So let me give you some guidelines. You might not like these, but alas, they have facts and studies behind them.

The magic number of major books you need in your magic bakery is around 20, where discoverability starts to kick in. (Lots and lots of advertising studies back this up.) Novels, stand-alone novellas, collections, and omnibus.

Discoverability is the number of ways a reader can find a book and then find more. You have to help this along, but that is a future chapter. For now just think 20 major books as a goal.

Before that your magic bakery just looks empty to customers coming in. Short stories published stand-alone help a little, but not much. You will be in the area of making coffee money. Nothing wrong with that. We all started there.

So when you have less than 20 books, what is your best promotion? It is following the cliche…

Your next book is your best promotion.

Simply put, just write and publish.

THE ANTI-PROMOTION PROBLEMS TO FIX TO HELP…

Author Name and Brand…

Say you have five books with your name small at the bottom, a couple more books in different fonts with your name sort of in the middle, and two or three with different fonts with your author name at the top. You wonder why you don’t get much money in.

You are doomed to fight a long, long road to making more than coffee money, even if you get to more than 20 books. Why? Because looked at as a whole, you have no author brand. No reader would see one of your books and know it was like one they had already read and liked.

Studies for a hundred years have shown that the number one seller of books is the author name, and it does not matter if you are a bestseller or on book three. Author name is what readers look for and what other readers tell them about.

Titles are way, way down the ranking. In other words, no one cares about your title. Get over it.

Your magic bakery is your name. Ever walked into a store and still could not tell what the store was? That is what happens to your readers when you can’t brand your own name and put it filling the top third of your books.

If you name is not what a reader sees in thumbnail on a web site, you have screwed up. If the look of your name is not consistent with your other books, no matter the genre, you have screwed up.

This is called anti-promotion.

Art That Fits Genre…

Book covers are second on the list of what helps readers buy a book. If you are just gabbing some art that fits your plot instead of finding art that fits your genre, again you are just doing anti-promotion. For example, putting real photos on science fiction covers… Really???

Your Sales Copy Sucks…

And trust me, early on, yours does. It is dull, full of passive verbs, and all about the plot without once telling the reader what the book is about. The book is not about your plot.

If you have not learned to write sales copy (and most of you reading this have not), again you are doing anti-promotion. You are boring readers before they open your book. Oops…

Your Openings and Endings Do Not Do Their Jobs…

Openings with great depth and character and voice pull in the reader, get them hooked. Your ending and how you handle the validation sell your next book. Keep learning craft to get better as you write new work. Last thing you want is a reader to find your book, open it up and then go “Nope.” Or worse yet, get all the way to the ending, hate the ending, and decide to never buy another of your books. Anti-promotion.

So to do promotion for your magic bakery, you first have to just stop hurting it.

And if you are like thousands of writers I have met who will just ignore this and not even try to get their books to neutral for promotion, jump to the next chapter. None of it will do you a lick of good, but it won’t anger you by making you face the four elements above.

But if you want to start licensing more of your magic pies, fix the elements above, then come back to the next chapter. The cash flow just might increase.