Episode 48: Book Marketing

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Hello all my beautiful cinnabar moths or any type of moth you’d like to be. Welcome to the writers triangle, a podcast about all things publishing and books. And today we’re going to be talking about marketing. And we’re going to start with things you can do for free, and go all the way up to things that can cost hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And everything in between. This is always a love letter to authors. And I want authors to know that you can market your book effectively, for really low cost. And for those that have a larger budget, there are things that can maximize what you’re spending and how you’re spending. I think that all marketing plans, but again, with just that, a marketing plan, what do you want your marketing strategy to be? And that starts for me with budget, I start with how much do I want to spend marketing this particular book? And what, how can I maximize each dollar spent when I’m looking at marketing. So I start with what we can do for free. And the thing that we can do for free is have our books ready to go to market, at least three months before their publication date. So we can get those review arcs out to reviewers. And we can sign up on book sirens and have a good run. And that’s one thing not look sirens, but reaching out to reviewers and magazines for reviews, trade magazines, it free, you can do that for free, there’s it’s a roll of the dice as to whether or not your book will be reviewed, make sure that the magazine that you’re reaching out to has a history of reviewing the type of book that you’ve written. And if that’s the case, absolutely send it to them. If your book is not the type of a book that they typically review, it’s probably going to be a long shot or a no for them to to review your book. So that’s one thing we can do. And so the four to three months, some places for those reviews require a script for months. Other places are great with three months. Right now we’re currently doing three months in the next year, we’re hoping to advance that that four month mark. And that’s because you have to have the books, to be able to edit the books and get them, get them ready for market. And we did a really quick turnaround on our first batch of books. This is our second batch of books. And we’re hoping to come to marketing what I think of as marketing maturity. For the 2023 calendar year, this is 2022. And we sold our first book in 2021. Now it takes a couple of years to get that that lead time because we didn’t buy all of the books that we wanted to publish. Before we started the process, we started the process and then bought books. So that made it a quicker turnaround. And that quicker turnaround is, you know what got authors to be like, Hey, we absolutely want to sign with you because it’s going to be a quick turnaround.

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That’s enough about us. So the review arcs, I want to circle back, circle back around and talk about that a little bit later. When I’m talking about paid things. I want to talk about promotional swaps, and social media, blogs, zines, websites. All of these things are opportunities for free advertisement. So promotional swaps is if you have social media or a website, you can tell someone, hey, if you promote my book, I’ll promote yours. If you give me a shout out or a retweet on social media, I’ll give you a shout out on every tweet on my social media. And most people if they have the same number of followers, or you have you or up to the rubric, I use up to three times as many followers. Those are people that that you can make that exchange with. And there are a couple of people on social media that even have, you know, 30 or 40,000 followers that are still open to doing those promotional swaps. And just look at what they tweet, and are they tweeting other people, if they’re tweeting about other people’s work or asking, you know, doing follow Fridays, or any sort of mention of other people on Twitter where they’re adding people in the mentions, that’s usually an indicator that they’re open to doing some sort of promotional swap. And I’d say it’s absolutely worth reaching out to them. I want to be clear that if you know if you’re in publishing, if you’re a reviewer, if you’re a zine writer, or if you’re a zine publisher or an indie publisher, anybody who’s in publishing, we are more than happy to do those promotional swaps. And we absolutely enjoy, you know, promoting other people as well as, as our authors and the price and the easing. And we really, really want to have it be a collaborative process and build that community and Doing those, those swaps is really helpful. Another thing if you’re an author, and you’d like to be interviewed on the podcast, hit us up at Media at cinnabar moth.com. And we’ll absolutely, absolutely check out your stuff and arrange an interview time. We enjoy interviewing anybody in the industry. And that’s a type of, of swap, right? You come on the podcast, your interview, we promote on social media, you promote your interview on social media, and then we’re getting that cross promotion. And that’s how cross promotion works, you do something for me, I do something for you. And we’re both being mentioned by each other, and talked about by each other, and spreading awareness within our circle. And you’re spreading awareness within your circle. And we’ve promoted across across all of our social media platforms. And then there’s also promotion on our cinnabar moth collections. General athletic collections website is another opportunity for cross promotion with us. So that’s social media, and cross promotion. Another way that you can get a good cross promotion going is if you do do reviews, asking people to review your writing, or promote a magazine that you’re in or wherever your work appears, if that’s your medium, or your blog, or what have you, and exchange for doing a review of their work, I find that reviews really, really helped create traffic for the cinnabar moth literary collections website, because every author that we review, we do we have three different reviewers and we do authentically Andy, which is indie authors knowing how they like that best seller, not the best sellers. And then we also have the poetry reviews. So we find that having those three different types of reviews, were able to when we’re promoting the reviews, they tend to retweet and promote that we’re doing reviews and that improves traffic to the website. So if you’re doing a blog, make sure that you’re tagging people on social media if you are doing reviews, as they well done tend to retreat to retreat or reshare your post or like or interact with your post and also follow you on your various social accounts if that’s what you’re doing. And I think that that is a great way if you don’t feel comfortable pre approaching folks that you can do that sort of soft exchange where you add them when you when you’ve promoted something of their so I find that super easy, no fuss, no muss way to get that cross promotion, going. Talking about trains and all of that these are all free things that you can do

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everything I guess that before now for us we’ve been able to do at no cost to us, other than you know, time and energy, looking at things that are a little bit of cost but but not much is the industry reviews because that just cost you a copy of your book. So that’s fairly low cost and some industry places allow you to send them electronic copies of your books and then that’s that’s no cost and that’s awesome and beautiful. There’s also review arcs, review arcs. The two biggest I think, well known publication for review arcs are BookBub and book Siren’s. BookBub is a little bit complicated to me, I find it challenging to work with. And it’s just easier for me to do books Iran’s books, islands is 10 United States dollars. And for me if just if nobody writes a review, it’s worth the 10 bucks because it allows me to put the book up there. It gives me how many people saw the cover how many people read the snippet that I put how many people decided to read it after that. And if anyone decided that they couldn’t finish it, they DNF it do not finish did not finish and they tell why the person did not finish it. And that not always made public some people make it public and give a partial review. I feel like that’s a little burnt like Ouch, you know, just keep that between us kind of thing that’s completely their right to their right to to write any type of review that they choose. And all reviews are Hey, I reviews. I want to say all reviews are good. And I know I’ve said that in the past. I feel like all reviews are good for a publisher. If we get a bad review, we get to know what someone doesn’t like about the book and what we might tweak when we’re buying books and editing books and such. But I find for authors bad reviews are never good is always hard. I encourage people to if you’re going to do less than three stars Think about not leaving a review, right. But that’s just me. Another benefit for doing book sirens is that you get to read the reviews before they’re posted. For us, that’s just invaluable, because not all of our authors read reviews, they don’t go on Amazon and check their books, they don’t go on Goodreads and check their books. So for me, I like to pass along the good reviews and anything under three stars. I just don’t mention it to the author. But I do give them the reviews before they come out on Goodreads. Usually, if I’m on top of emailing, but I get busy, I don’t always, but I do when the book is in that pre launch phase, I do send them reviews them because it can take a really long time for a review to to publish. And so I want them to know, Hey, folks are reading your book, they’re interacting with that. Here’s some of the reviews.

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So for me, the 10 bucks for the sirens is well worth it. BookBub isn’t an auction. And I’m not going to go into all the details details of BookBub because we don’t do it if you use BookBub. Let us know in the comments. What been your experience? Do you find it convoluted? Is it challenging for you? Or do you find it to be straightforward? Educate me, let me know. Looking beyond ARKS, Ark reviews that you send, you know, to trade magazines and our advanced reader copies are copies that you send, you know, that you make published through either Goodreads or book sirens. There’s also if you belong to library things, which is a book club, I know that librarians publishers, and I believe authors can Him belong as well. You can nominate your you can do an advanced an early bird review of your book before it comes out. And you can make however many copies you like available. I really love library things because it forces a level of discipline that I don’t have without it. And that level of discipline is looking at comp titles. There are six comp titles for every review that we put up, I’ll admit that I do three comp titles, not six, I feel like six is overkill for me and my attention. So I do three for each book. And it really makes me aware of what’s being published, not similar to the books that we’re publishing. And also what’s going on in any specific genre, or any specific theme and our books as unique as I think they are, what’s similar and what’s different, and has me thinking about ways to market. And also by looking at comp titles, which you can do for free. And I just put in whatever genre my book is I’m looking for, for example, I looked up LGBTQ i plus drug addiction. Ya. And there was just a ton of books to do comps with and looking at those books looking at how they’re performing, looking at what marketing there is that’s simply taking a comp, but once you read the blurb, if it feels like it’s a good comp book, then taking that and putting it into a search engine. Looking on Goodreads, how many reviews does it have looking on Amazon, and you can kind of get an idea of of how the book is doing. And also by googling it, how many things come up when you list it. This is not the end all be all, I find that that our books have about six pages worth of Google results. But I don’t know if that’s the case for someone who hasn’t been googling the book for you know, three to four months, some of our books, I’ve been Googling them for a year. And after a year of of googling a book, it doubles to about 12 pages on on Google, which makes me feel good. I feel like I’m accomplishing something like see it’s out there in the world. So for me I find googling the other books and looking at what reviewers are saying about it looking at how many pages on on Google does it have really is is helpful for me. And I don’t I don’t really judge sales off of not because some books can have 1000s of ratings but really low sales. And that for me also sales are are a sticky wicket because you don’t know. What was that sale? Was it a 99 sale? Was it a free sale, a free book that was marked as a sell or you know, I don’t know how these people are getting the books to review. And I’m also not trying to clock anyone else’s money. I’m not into anyone else’s pocket and I don’t really care how much books are selling only just like a rough estimate, right? I’m not trying to get a heart as much trying to get a rough idea with How much the public is interacting. And that gives me an idea like, okay, you know, this book is selling? Well, we have books that have no reviews that are selling great. And, you know, as of August 2022, hopefully that won’t be the case, you know, going forward. So it’s, you know, it’s not something challenging to tell, you know, book sales, but that’s for a different episode. I love library things. And look, sirens because of all of the information they give. And you know, book sirens, 10, back study reviews,

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they match those those 30 spots, and I share that link with, with authors so that they can give them to people. And it’s no 10 bucks, completely reasonable to me, library things is free, except for the cost of the books that you have to give away after they do the raffle the because it is a giveaway. And then the next thing that’s another giveaway is Goodreads giveaway, I’ve read a mind a lot of really mixed opinions about Goodreads giveaways. For a Kindle or ebook, it’s $119 USD and August of 2022, to do a Goodreads giveaway, for me that $119 is worth it. Even if we don’t generate any sales from that giveaway. Because of the data that we were able to collect. It gives us a number of how many people join the giveaway, how many people put the book on their shelf to read, and how many people clicked on the giveaway? After reading the blurb and the cover. So I like to see how many people clicked on it. How many people actually entered the giveaway versus how many people clicked on it? And how many people shelved it to read. Those are all really interesting numbers. Because something that was really challenging for me, is not, it feels like shouting into the void. Publishing does. It’s so hard to get numbers. How many people have seen this book? How many people have heard that this book exist? How can we get those numbers, book Science Library things and good reads. Those three will give you some idea of how many people have seen your book, you will know at least you know this many people have seen it based on how many people look clicked on it for books, irons, how many people you know clicked on it through library things and how many people clicked on it from Goodreads. And that’s important to me, it’s important for my own mental health and publishing to have some, I’m very much a tangible numbers person. And if I don’t know those numbers, it can drive me to distraction because it can feel like if your sales aren’t what you want them to be. And if you’re not getting the number of reviews that you want to get that you’re hoping to get. It can be really challenging, and really disheartening. And I want to to move that away. For authors, I want to remove that. Also, when you do a giveaway on Goodreads, they’re more likely to leave a review on Goodreads once they have the book. For me from the time that someone gets the book to a review, I think is anywhere from three to six months has been when I’m looking at the numbers and looking at, you know who’s read it versus where if and when the reviews are showing up. So the arcs are really great to get reviews before the book is published and not have to wait. And the giveaways are good for that as well not having to wait until six months after but this published to get your first review. And you know the industry ziens are a really hidden myth. There’s no guarantee that your book will be reviewed and also doing you know book reviews exchanges. If you have a book review blog, getting people to review your book and reviewing their book. That’s another way to get those reviews and get feedback and all of that going. There’s only one that I have that is a must. And this is just for audiobooks. I feel like for audio books net galleys is a must, is a must and net galleys is expensive. It is going to hit your pocket. It’s over $200 to do to put your book on Net Galley for for Net Galley reviews. And it varies I don’t know how much it is for authors. I only know how much it is for us as a press and because we haven’t ever done just one book. I know how much it was for two books with the discount and all of that and it was over $500 So that’s how I know it’s it’s over $200 to put those those two books up. But for audio books I like it because audiobooks are really hard to get reviews,

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there’s no other place that does reviews. For audiobooks. That’s where you’re gonna find out you know, is your narrator hitting and our narrator hits. IV is absolutely amazing. And if you can, can book IV if it has time, definitely, definitely worth booking. For if you need a narrator for audiobooks, it’s all around good person too. So that’s a bonus, you get to work with an amazing person who’s also amazingly talented. But after you do your audio book, even if you record the audio for yourself, putting it on Net Galley, that’s really important. And it’s even more important, if you’re trying to get library distribution. Most of our audio sales are through library distribution, and they’re not really a sale, the price that we have mattered is we’re basically giving them away to, to libraries, but that more important than libraries, it also has a lot of educators on it. And something I find exciting is several of our books were adopted and used in a college curriculum, that was so exciting for us. And it was also really great for the book. And because if you have one college professor using your book, using as part of their required reading, then you know, all of the students that are teaching have to purchase your book. And so the university will do a bulk buy of your book, and getting it and you know, in university bookstores, they always buy the least in our experience, universities always buy more than what the order is what the order request is, from the professor’s so that they’ll have a couple copies in the bookstore. And we’ve really, really done well with that. Also, if you’re doing y A or middle grade, you know, you have those high school teachers and also elementary school teachers on Net Galley. And they tend to be really voracious consumers of of audio books, which I absolutely love. And I’m so grateful for, it’s just a really great way to reach teachers to get inside classrooms, we’ve had a lot of luck, all of our books are in classrooms and part of someone’s curriculum. And that’s really exciting. It’s not always as it’s not always a big sell to be able to boast that sometimes it’s small, smaller batches. And sometimes it’s just being part of their suggested reading on their syllabus. So not, excuse me. So not everyone will will necessarily choose our book to read from the books that are that are listed. But that’s still really exciting to have that recognition. And they’ll put that in the Net Galley review, they’ll have whether or not they’ll use it in their classroom, or whether or not they purchase it for their library and whether or not they recommend it to their students.

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So I find that information to be, again, really, really exciting. And I think it’s no surprise, I’m obsessed with information. I just really want to know, like, are people reading our books are people hearing about our books? Are we getting noticed, you know, and I want to be able to share that with our authors and have them feel positively and have them have good self esteem about the writing that is being received in the world, and cherished by somebody other than the press. Because, you know, authors want their stories to be read as y’all know. And I want to make sure that we’re helping authors who are looking to market their own book market in a way that’s going to give them positive feedback. So I’m talking about the things that make me feel good. And the things that are off the author’s report, make them feel good in the hopes that it’s something that will make you feel good. And if not, that’s cool, too. If you have some way that you’ve gotten low cost or free, because now we’ve ventured out of low cost to the more expensive ways of promoting books, if you’ve got some leads on some free hot ways to to market books, let us know leave a leave a comment down in the comment section. Or if you’ve had a good experience or bad experience with any of the ways that we’re talking about let’s get the conversation going. And, you know, leave a comment. And while you’re leaving a comment, be sure to like this video and hit the subscribe button and the notification notification bell so you can be notified every time we drop. A new podcast episode, which we do every day come out every Saturday, and we do a mix of me on the mic talking about the publishing side of things, author interviews, videos of our authors doing live readings. If you’re an author and we didn’t publish you but you did a live reading and you have a recording of it hit us up and let me know. And we’ll absolutely be willing to, you know, promote it and put it on our YouTube page and On our Spotify playlist and all of that, so to share that and get it, you know, get some eyes, and some ears on your reading of of your book, because we are passionate about this indie scene and we want the indie scene to thrive. Excuse me. So we were talking about net galleys, which is a little bit more expensive, a lot more expensive than what we were talking about previously. Something that I find, has a variable and cost, and can either be really inexpensive, or really expensive, is Amazon and Google ads. For me, Amazon and Google ads, again, are too much work and require too much maintenance. And I’m just not into heavy expense and high maintenance. And I also don’t like with with Google ads, if I were to put a Google ad, sorry, the Google ad would appear first. But right underneath the Google ad would appear all of my free links. But the reason Google does that is because people usually click the first link, me myself, I always skip past Google ads. And look, if there is a Google ad that I find interesting, I then Google the thing that’s in the Google ads so that I can find it for free, cuz I’m not trying to charge them for a click. And I don’t like those Pay Per Click kind of setups. And I also don’t like having to pick the limited region, because we have global distribution. And I feel so limited for only advertising and one market, I find that to be really challenging. So I don’t do that. And because I don’t do that we don’t have any Amazon or Google Ads experience. I will say I did use Google ads for my therapy practice. And I saw no return on that. And the same thing with Facebook ads for my mental health practice, and saw no returns on that. And based on that, I was like, No, I’m not going to mess around with with Google ads, I’m not going to mess around with Facebook ads. And the same with social media ads, because I don’t want to target any specific geographic area. And those types of ads are really tied to geography. And sorry, and I don’t find that to be my bag, or, you know, I don’t find that to be interesting. It’s not something that I want to do. Looking at something, you know, keeping that that upward climb and cost is advertising and, and trademarks.

K
And I think that if you’re going to advertise in a trademark, such as you know, forward reviews, or Paris Review, any of those, those literary trade mags, I would say, join a Writers Association first and see if they offer discount advertising. Because subtle advertising can be started about I want to say around $500, and goes all the way up to I think the most expensive magazine ad I saw was was $50,000 for an ad and I was like, okay, that’s nice. If you have it, I’m not, I’m not rolling like that. Even if I was willing like that, I don’t think I would spend it on a single print ad. I don’t think print ads are that effective based on my own experience, looking through magazines, and looking at advertising. And so for me, I just don’t value that. But if you do absolutely pursue it. And that’s where joining these various associations, writers associations, can be helpful because they do often for their membership have discounted rates. I know some of the associations that we belong with provide us discounted rates for Library Catalog advertising, and as well as some trademark, trade magazine advertising. Beyond all of these types, there’s also when we’re looking at switching from internet and switching from print advertising. There’s also television, Spot advertising, radio advertising, bus stop advertising, all of these other tend to be at the higher end. And they all tend to be geographically locked. So a bus ad will cost about $6,000 for 30 days at any particular bus stop at least in the United States. In Japan, they don’t do bus stop ads and I haven’t looked it up for the UK, Europe or Canada to see if they do it. I did look investigated in the United States as something to consider for doing in our author’s town right for for local advertising. And I was just like, I don’t know. I again is that being geographically locked, I really struggle with radio ads, again, are also geographically locked. And do your target readers, listen to that radio show, or listen to that podcast, I consider podcasts to be part of radio and YouTube. Also, I kind of consider like TV radio. So finding the right fit for that is so high stakes because of the price tag from my perspective, and then being geographically locked, and then being audience locked. Because if you do best ads, you’re locked into primarily people who are either foot traffic or waiting for the bus, the bus line traffic. And I don’t know any particular neighborhood to know which bus line besides where I where I’ve lived, right to know which bus which bus lines would be most effective. And to be honest with you, I haven’t been motivated. I’ve never been motivated by a bus stop. And I’ve never been motivated by a television commercial. And I have no desire to do infomercials about the books. And so for me, television and radio are kind of I do you think podcasts are great if you can be a guest on the podcast, because then you get the whole episode. And it’s not just a blurb about your book, you get to represent yourself as an author. So you get to sell yourself and your full catalog, you get to sell your most current thing that you’re out plus your back catalogue. And also if you have, you know, smaller short stories, or novellas in addition to the novel.

K
So that’s basically where I’m at now in in my terms, in terms of my understanding of, of how to advertise books, and I might do it part two on marketing as my own understanding rose. But this is sort of building off of giving talks, and doing a writer, I’m giving talks, and you’re attending conferences, joining book associations, and all of those types of things that we were talking about. I talked about a few podcasts ago. And I hope that this has been useful if it’s, if it’s been useful, let me know down in the comments. And if it hasn’t been useful, let me know down in the comments. I’m trying to get our comments bumping. So make sure you leave a like and subscribe and hit the notifications bells. I’m trying to become more proactive and promoting the podcast, especially on YouTube as you can tell from this because I don’t haven’t previously. I’ve only recently started asking people to like and subscribe. And I started doing that because when I’m watching a video I don’t always subscribe it when they say hit the like button. I tend to hit it because I’m like, Yeah, I didn’t enjoy this and it cost me nothing and hit the like button right on because the algorithm already knows I watched it so it doesn’t matter if I hit like or not. And that’s our podcast for this week. So I want to thank all of our beautiful cinnabar moths or any kind of moth you’d like to be and you can even be a butterfly, but I’m not Mariah Carey and I’m not trying to bite her rhyme. Talk to you soon. Bye