Is book marketing bad?

ByJohn Brown

At CONduit I spoke with an author friend who thought that marketing was indeed a bad thing, especially marketing for YA, because said author felt it didn’t build an audience based on the merits of the book. It built one based on hype and buzz.  Instead of buying a book because it delivered a wonderful experience, readers would be buying only because it was what everyone else was doing. Furthermore, publishers only have so much money, and by choosing to put the dollars behind some books, they choose to let other books, which might deliver a better experience, languish.

I understand wanting to build a readership that’s based on love, not hype. But what I think my friend is overlooking is that you can’t love something if you don’t try it. And you won’t try it if you don’t know it’s there. Marketing and PR help make sure people know the book is there.

Yes, some readers might try it the first time because it’s what everyone is doing. But if the book is really that good, i.e. it actually delivers a wonderful experience for the target audience, then those readers will come back for another serving. They might look initially because everyone else is, but they’ll stay for love.

One of my editors just forwarded a link to “Not Quite a PR Campaign” by Sherry Thomas. Lots of interesting details there about what she does for PR, but probably one of the most important ideas she shares is the fact that marketing & PR don’t build an audience. A great story experience does that. However, marketing & PR can get the book in the audience’s hands.

What we all want to happen is word-of-mouth. PR doesn’t really create word-of-mouth, love does. But readers won’t read a book until they know it exists. So then the point of a PR campaign, if a PR campaign has any point at all, is to create awareness and hope that awareness will translate into love, once a critical mass of readers have read and enjoyed your book.

Readers may miss many high quality (i.e. they deliver a great experience to the intended audience) books because the lion’s share of the publisher’s marketing budget is being spent on a small group of books, and the author who gets the leftovers just doesn’t have the cash or know-how to do it themselves. But that doesn’t mean marketing is bad. It means that getting a big marketing push is like any other lucky break or opportunity.

I just started reading Guide to Writing Fiction by Phillys A. Whitney (a huge seller in the 1970’s and 1980’s). It’s a wonderful, slim, down-to-earth volume. She opens the book with a chapter called “Opportunity is Like a Train.” She maintains that her success did not come from starting with loads of talent. In fact, she says her ability was “modest.” She certainly wasn’t as gifted as many other authors she’d worked with in the writing groups of her youth. Nor did it come from immediate initial success. It came from being ready when opportunity knocked. 

Of course, I have been lucky. I’ve had extraordinary breaks come my way–along with some pretty bad blows and disappointments. There’s been bad luck too, but that doesn’t always show. Good fortune and unexpected opportunities are always coming along. Perhaps opportunity is like a train on an endless track. Now and then it makes a stop at your station, often without fanfare, and without warning.

…What is important is not the lucky break, the stopping of the train–that’s only part of it. Life is full of trains that stop. What counts is what we are doing with our lives when there is no opportunity and not a train in sight.

James Dashner is someone who is getting a big promo budget from Random House this year for Maze Runner. A very big one. But if you read his story about how he got published (links to all nine parts of the story are in his sidebar) and what got him to this point, you’ll see this promo train was a long time coming. 

Meanwhile, if the big promo budget ever stops at my station, I’m going to hop on. Until then, I will keep writing the best stories I can and make my current marketing budget (part publisher, part mine) go as far as possible. I’ll do the one for the love, the other because I can’t share the love if nobody even knows it’s out there.

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    Your local zombie author appears on Writing Excuses, Plus the Writing Debrief explained

    ByJohn Brown

    After a cancerous death, I appeared on Writing Excuses this week to groan and hold forth with the guys on writing second novels and second books in a series.

    During the podcast I talked about my practice of debriefing after every writing project. A reader just asked what that was, and so I thought I’d explain it here.

    The debrief is a simple thing. I learned it back when I worked as a business consultant. It always provides great insights. Sometimes  it provides massive insights. The principle is to pull back and look at the big picture every once in a while. So here’s what I do. When I finish a project, I sit down and simply list out what I struggled with, what went well, and anything I learned. I list out things I’d do again that worked particularly well and things I’d do differently. This might be about craft or process. Sometimes I might take some time to reflect on the nature of story and read a favorite book about the craft or perform a story analysis on another movie or book. Then I write up my insights in a form that I can read later and know what the heck I’m talking about. This can take a few hours or a few days. This last debrief after draft 3 of CURSE coincided with my preparation for a day-long workshop I had agreed to give on story, and so the insights came thick and fast. I recommend the practice highly.

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  • Can you make a living writing short stories?

    ByJohn Brown

    We already know that many people break into the novel market WITHOUT writing short stories. So they’re not necessary for starting a writing career, although they might have helped some folks. See this page http://johndbrown.com/writers/writing-business-facts-figures/ for links that will show you how people break in. But some people just love short stories, so the question is can you make a living writing them?

    The answer is yes, you CAN do it–you go into television and get hired to write scripts for TV series (grin).

    But what about doing it in print? Well, let’s try some conservative math.

    1) How much would you need to sell?

    TARGET: a conservative $30,000 gross per year.

    The median household income in the USA is $50,000. But you can find a place (rural Ohio or Indiana or North Dakota etc.) where housing is relatively cheap and live on $30k. I think this is a reasonable target. So let’s make some assumptions about the stories. We’ll assume each short averages around 4,000 words and that you get paid seven cents per word. To earn your target amount you’d have to sell:

    • TOTAL WORDS YOU NEED TO SELL: 428,571
    • TOTAL STORIES YOU NEED TO SELL: 107 (words divided by average story length)
    • TOTAL STORIES/WEEK: 2 sales per week (weeks in year divided by number of stories)

    At 10 cents a word:

    • TOTAL WORDS YOU NEED TO SELL: 300,000
    • TOTAL STORIES YOU NEED TO SELL: 75
    • TOTAL STORIES/WEEK: 1.4 sales per week

    No, this doesn’t count reprints, movie deals, gaming contracts, etc. But reprints usually don’t pay well and movie deals, while they pay well, can’t be counted on. Besides, we’re being conservative. 

    2) Is this a feasible production rate?

    Again, a little math.

    TARGET: 2 stories, 8,000 words average per week

    If we assume you write five days per week for six hours per day at a rate of 500 words per hour, which may be very aggressive if you try to include thinking and revising time in that, then you’ll produce 15,000 words per week.

    So, yes, this is a feasible, if aggressive, production rate–on paper. But I don’t know anyone finishing this many stories per week. Furthermore, it’s highly unlikely you will sell 100% of what you send out. So you need to actually produce MORE than two stories per week. You might have to end up writing three or four. Week after week after week. That’s one story every day or two.

    Theoretically, yes, that rate of production still fits in the 15,000 word capacity. But I’m going to say it’s doubtful anyone can do this because I haven’t seen anyone do it. Have you? 

    But even if you were the Lizard King of writing and could pull this off every week of the year, the question is can you sell all those stories?

    3) Is it feasible to sell two stories per week?

    According to http://duotrope.com/index.aspx there are about 200 venues for short fiction paying pro rates, which for them is 5 cents or more. No,  anthologies are not represented there. But I’m not sure it will change the equations that much. So you have to sell 107 stories to these 200 markets. I don’t know how many slots are open in these places. Some of these venues publish one story per year, some publish twelve, some more. Some are published semi-annually, quarterly, bi-monthly. Let’s say there are 2,000 slots. Of course, we might need to count total wordage up for hire at these venues instead, but we’re just doing this on the back of a napkin. So 107 stories out of 2,000 slots means you’d have to make up 5% of the market. You sell five of every 100 stories these folks buy.

    FIVE PERCENT OF THE WHOLE MARKET!

    Nobody makes up 5% of the whole short fiction market. NOBODY. Okay, let’s say there are 4,000 slots. Each venue averaging twenty stories per year. So you have to make up 2.5% of the market. Nobody does that either. What about 1%? Anyone? One out of every 100 stories? No.

    Is this because writers are lazy? Could it be done? You might be the first?

    That’s lotto thinking. What you want is demonstrated income, i.e. people have DEMONSTRATED it can be done. Nobody has demonstrated this can be done in the current market. So it’s not reasonable to expect you’ll do something nobody else is doing.

    So the answer is that even if you produce three to four short stories per week, you’ll never be able to sell enough to make a living. Now, I know of a few authors who can make a few thousand dollars per year writing short stories. I’ve heard of one guy who made $10,000 a year for a few years. But can you live on that? Even if you move to a place where housing is very, very cheap? Besides, we’re trying to avoid lotto thinking here. We’re trying to be practical and conservative. This is one guy. Do you yourself know anyone who has done this? I wouldn’t want to base my future on what one guy did.

    CONCLUSION: there’s no evidence that strongly suggests it’s feasible to sell at the necessary rate to make $10,000 per year let alone $30,000.

    4) Re-purpose the wordage to Novels!

    Go back up and look at the annual output of words. If you can write 300,000 to 450,000 words per year, you could write four to six young adult novels (averaging 70,000 words per book) or two to three adult novels (averaging 120,000 words per) in that same time.

    Why not build a career in novels?

    Yes, you may start at $5,000 – $6,000 advance per book. But if you sell well, that goes up. Plus, if it does sell well, you get royalties. Plus you can sell foreign novel rights. Plus you get an advance to help with some expenses. More importantly, we have thousands and thousands of folks DEMONSTRATING they can make a living writing at that pace.

    So write short stories if you love them, but don’t expect to make a living at it.

    5) But what about Amazon and self-publishing?

    Could you make a living selling your shorts out there?

    Only if your shorts were once worn by Brittany Spears.

    For more on e-book sales, let me recommend you read a few posts by J. A. Konrath. I’ll let you decide. But please note that he’s selling NOVELS. And as always, you want to be realistic about this and make sure you see many people DEMONSTRATING it can be done. Do you think Konrath presents such evidence? You tell me.

    Postscript

    Read these two posts by Dean Wesley Smith where he busts some big myths about not being able to make a living writing:

    Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Only 300 Writers Make a Living

    Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Can’t Make Money in Fiction

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    News

    ByJohn Brown

    Interview with The Man Monday night

    Dungeon Crawlers Radio interviews The Man Monday, March 8th at 10:30 PM MTN. You can listen live or to the archive they’ll post to their site. All brought to you by UtahFM. Malak and Revan are great guys. I had a blast with them.

    Cool facts on breaking in, advances, etc. for writers

    New page on writing facts & figures in the On Writing section.

    Novel update

    CURSE OF A DARK GOD is moving along. You should see the progress bar move along quite a bit this week.

    Initial Schedule for American Fork Arts Council Conference for Writers

    This is a cheap day-long writers conference and looks like it’s going to be another great one.  I’ve highlighted what I’ll be doing in red. I’ll be making adjustments to the HOW TO WRITE A STORY THAT ROCKS presentation for things learned at LTUE.

    Here’s their website. That night I’ll probably be attending the Whitney Awards Gala which is also being held down in Happy Valley, Utah.

    DATE: Saturday April 24 2010

    8-9 a.m. Registration
    9-9:10 Welcome (Plenary)

    KEYNOTES
    9:10-9:40 Keynote #1 Ginger Churchill, “What I Wish I had Known as a Beginning Writer”
    9:40-10:10 Keynote #2 Ally Condie, “My Journey to National Publication”
    10:10-10:40 John D. Brown, “Aiming for National Publication”

    INTRODUCTIONS of editors and authors
    10:40-11:05 EDITORS: Derk Koldewyn, Granite NAME
    AUTHORS: Caleb Warnock, Linda Jefferies, Shannon Guymon

    11:05-11:20 15-minute break

    11:20-noon BREAKOUT ONE
    Upstairs room “Crafting the Novel” with Shannon Guymon, John D. Brown
    Downstairs One “Finding and Working With an Agent” with Ginger Churchill, Ally Condie, Caleb Warnock
    Downstairs Two “Taking Your Questions about Publishing” with Deseret Book and Granite Publishing

    noon-1 LUNCH “Mix and Mingle with Authors and Editors”

    1-1:40 BREAKOUT TWO
    Conference One Derk Koldewyn of Deseret Book “What Deseret Book is looking for now”
    Conference Two Ginger Churchill “How to Write and Publish Picture Books”
    Upstairs room John Brown, “How to Write a Story That Rocks Part 1: First Principles & Story Concept”
    Office room Caleb Warnock “10 Things Every Writer Should Know about Copyright”
    Downstairs One Granite Publishing “What Granite is looking for now”
    Downstairs Two Ally Condie “Writing Young Adult Fiction”

    1:40-1:50 Ten-minute break

    1:50-2:30 BREAKOUT THREE
    Upstairs Room John Brown, “How to Write a Story That Rocks Part 2: Character”
    Conference Two Ginger Churchill “Genres of Children’s Books, from Board Books to YA Novels”
    Conference One Derk Koldewyn of Deseret Book “National Publication with Shadow Mountain”
    Office room Caleb Warnock “How to Write the Query Letter”
    Downstairs One Granite Publishing “Publishing Options with Granite”
    Downstairs Two Shannon Guymon “How to Write Romance”

    2:30-2:40 Ten-minute break

    2:40-3:20 BREAKOUT FOUR
    Upstairs Room John Brown, “How to Write a Story That Rocks Part 3: Plot”
    Conference Two Ginger Churchill “How to be a Writer and a Mother Too”
    Conference One Linda Jefferies “Writing Poetry”
    Office room Caleb Warnock “Write a Synopsis? I’d Rather Gouge My Eyes Out!”
    Downstairs One Ally Condie “Succeeding as an LDS author”
    Downstairs Two Shannon Guymon “Writing Nonfiction”

    3:20-3:30 Ten-minute break

    3:30-4:10 BREAKOUT FIVE
    Upstairs Room John Brown, “Writing Scenes: The Basic Units of a Novel”
    Conference Two Ginger Churchill “Querying Agents and Publishers”
    Conference One Linda Jefferies “Publishing Poetry”
    Office room Caleb Warnock “Okay, You Were Rejected – Why, and What to Do Now”
    Downstairs One “How to form a critique group that works”
    Downstairs Two Shannon Guymon “Succeeding as an LDS Author”

    4:10-4:20 PRIZE GIVEAWAYS, GOODBYE

    REVISED (MAY CHANGE)

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    Get great writing tips, for cheap!

    ByJohn Brown

    The annual Life, The Universe, and Everything writer’s conference is being held this year February 11-13. It’s chock full of panels and presentations from working authors. And this year you don’t have to live within driving distance of Provo, Utah to go because they’re doing it all online (thank you, Covid).

    I will be delivering two hour-long presentations. The first is about plot, where you learn the John Brown Story Framework that makes plotting so much easier. Heck, it makes story much easier. The second is for folks new to self-publishing and is called Indie Publishing 101.

    If you’re a new writer or looking to hone your craft, you will want to check it out.

    Go to the LTUE site

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  • Meyer on the Brain

    ByJohn Brown

    Watch an interesting Borders interview with Meyer about Host and Twilight. The thing I keep seeing in her interviews is that this woman follows her passion. She follows the story that wows her. It’s nice, of course, that millions of fans want to share that wow with her. But I don’t know that a writer can be successful doing anything else.

    Here’s Orson Card’s blurb about Meyer in Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People

    Nobody was looking for Twilight. A Mormon housewife writes a young-adult novel about a love affair between a teenage girl and a vampire?

    Is this Anne Rice lite? Not in the eyes of the teenagers—and their mothers—who have embraced the book.

    But Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight does raise some questions, and I’ve asked them. “You really want your teenage daughter to live inside the story of a girl who lies to her parents, invites a boy to sleep in her bed and trusts him not to take advantage of her?”

    These women look at me as if I’m insane. “But she can trust him. He really loves her. He’s…perfect.”

    In an era when much of the romance genre has been given over to soft porn, and dark fantasy is peopled with one-dimensional characters bent on grim violence, many readers have become hungry for pure romantic fantasy—lots of sexual tension, but as decorous as Jane Austen.

    Meyer, 34, did not calculatedly reach for that audience. Instead, she wrote the story she believed in and cared about. She writes with luminous clarity, never standing between the reader and the dream they share. She’s the real thing. Still, who’d have thought it? Today Mr. Darcy is a vampire.

    Card is author of Ender’s Game, Empire and Women of Genesis

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2 Comments

  1. Yeah, I’m with you. Why wouldn’t you want to tell people about your book? *shrug*

  2. Could not agree more John. My first book with a small local publisher is coming out about the same time is yours, so all I can learn from you is great.

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