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.
14 Comments
Harvey Stanbrough
Great stuff, Dean. I mentioned it in “Of Interest” in today’s issue of TNDJ, and in tomorrow’s I’m going to do a push and include a buy link to your How to Write Fiction Sales Copy. My paperback copy is dogeared.
dwsmith
Thanks, Harvey!!
Kristi N.
This chapter is really eye-opening and sobering at the same time. I’m glad that 20 books seems to still be the threshold for discoverability, even though I seem to be stuck at 5 right now. (Roof replacement during one of the worst severe weather summers for the Upper Midwest–not conducive to getting room to focus on writing and publishing.) I agree about the importance of endings, too. I read a Jude Devereaux book that was highly reviewed as romantic, fulfilling, and riveting. Then the hero died in the past at the end (never married) and was reincarnated in the heroine’s present. I felt cheated out of the happy ending, and unhappy about investing in a story that didn’t end with the main characters together. (I consider the reincarnation a ‘cheat’ since the heroine didn’t recognize him, and there was only the hint that it was possible it was him.) It made me more determined that I would take care of my readers and make sure that part of my brand is staying true to the tropes for genre endings. There’s enough misery and loneliness in the world without having to burden a reader with unresolved misery and loneliness in my romance book endings.
Brad D. Sibbersen
I suspect in six months I’m going to look back at this post as the one that solved my biggest problem. Unfortunately I’ve got a ton of covers to tweak now and I’m not looking forward to it.
Chong Go
One of my favorite authors (and a best seller) wrote a great book in his main series. Rich, deep, and it just kept pulling me from page to page. Then I think he hit his max page account, because the book just suddenly ended with the psychopathic killer popping up and kidnapping the MC’s adult daughter. The end. To be continued, in the next book, next year. Talk about anti-promotion.
I would have thrown the book at the wall, except it was my wall and my kindle. I’ve never bought another book from him again.
Nissa Harlow
You’re right. The stuff about author names on covers was not what I wanted to hear. I wish someone had told me about branding thirteen titles ago! Instead, all I heard was: “You have to match your covers to existing books in your genre.” I write in more than one genre. My covers (and author name treatment) are in different styles as a result.
But I am glad to hear that I haven’t reached the real point of discoverability yet. With my dismal sales, I was afraid I was doing something wrong! (Well, I obviously am with the branding. But I thought maybe my books just sucked. At least I have time to work on the branding issue.)
Brad D. Sibbersen
Don’t know if this will help but I created a sort of template with my name at the top and space for the title/hype and plan on just dropping my original artwork from the old cover smoothly into the new. I have about 40 titles to do but once I get the template tweaked to my liking I think it’ll take, at most, an afternoon.
Mangala McNamara
Good idea.
Dean’s course, Covers 101, on Teachable points or how to look at all the parts of a cover.
Getting on mine (24 as of today) shortly and planning for big re-launches for each series over the next year. It’s gonna slow down pouring out new work, but if it gets people to actually read them… time well-spent
Cynthia Gilbert
I design my own covers, thankfully, because I clearly need to make my author name bigger. I need it to take up the bottom third.
I write gothics so that part of the branding is relatively easy, a girl running from a haunted house, a disembodied girl head over a Victorian house, a girl with her back to the viewer in front of a creepy house and so on.
As an aside, I taught myself Photoshop and simple book cover design. It wasn’t easy but 100% worth it. I knew nothing about either when I started. I really, really enjoy them now.
dwsmith
Cynthia, not it needs to take up the TOP third of the book. And yes, Photoshop is wonderful.
Mark Leighton Fisher
On titles, to paraphrase Jim Lovell:
“We have 100 problems, and author branding is #1. You are on #47, ‘Titles.'”
Cynthia Gilbert
Thanks, Dean!
Kate Pavelle
Catching up here… well, this might be one of the most useful and illuminating summaries of how I managed to sabotage my writing business. I somehow ended up conflating my publishing business name and my pen name back when I changed pen names – and that has got to go.
Nobody cares about a business.
Readers follow *people.*
After that, the rest can be worked into regular inventory maintenance.
Thank you for putting all these points into one place, Dean. I got stuck in the weeds for s long while, trying to fine-tune a dysfuncional system.
FUN FACT: not having sales despite doing stuff sure feeds that critical voice. I haven’t become a worse writer, I have just overcomplicated and tangled up my discoverability system.
THIS IS GREAT! I want to jump out of the tub and streak around neighborhood, this is a solid “Eureka!” moment. Took me long enough, but better late than never.
Mangala McNamara
🤣
Loved your “plan” for the “Eureka moment”!!
I’m in the same boat…