7 Ways Authors Can Avoid Being Scammed By Online Book Promotion
Online marketing can be very useful, but when does it become a time suck? Are there industries where online marketing is more likely to fail? Or are any potential failures just the result of bungled efforts?
I recently read this article about an author’s problems marketing her novel online: One Author Speaks Out About The Bad Side Of Online Promotions. It was interesting to read a post that contained both missed opportunities on the part of the author as well as justified limitations to her online marketing efforts.
The author in the blog post felt as though she had largely wasted her hours of online promotion for a recently published book. I would like to offer the following advice both as a humble rebuttal as well as in hopes of helping other authors think about their online promotions.
Lessons To Be Learned
There are a lot of lessons illustrated in the author’s blog post. Here are a few that jumped out at me, along with corresponding quotes from her interview:
“I blogged, guest blogged, blogged at Amazon, podcasted, was interviewed by books bloggers and book review websites, joined Facebook, and Twittered. I also joined several networking sites and writers organizations associated with my genre.”
Lesson #1: Don’t spread yourself too thin. I’d recommend only participating in the number of social networks where you can provide value. It sounds like the author was spreading herself across the entire internet, rather than focusing on a targeted community and fulfilling a need they had.
“I concentrated all of this effort in the month my book released and the two immediately following.”
Lesson #2: Don’t wait until the book is out to build community. This is possibly the biggest mistake for any author. Waiting until your book is published before starting your online community building is like waiting to buy flood insurance until after the waters recede – you should have thought of it before the big event. Work in advance to build an audience so you can all start promoting the book once it hits shelves.
“For three months, all the time I normally spent online and more was focused on Internet promotion: 3 to 8 hours a day…This interview, for example, took me 9 hours to write.”
Lesson #3: Need to manage expectations and time. Authors should plan to spend a good deal of time with promotion, depending on their motivation, size of potential audience, and other factors. (Good) online promotion takes a real investment of time. That said, 9 hours on a 6 page interview seems way too long to me. If that’s a regular occurrence, you should consider honing your verbal skills and complete other interviews orally.
“…I was able to track the outcomes of individual interviews. The results were shocking. After an interview posted on a website claiming thousands of unique visitors per day, exactly one person followed the link to my website.”
Lesson #4: Clarify your goals. Earlier, the author stated that the goal of her online promotion was to increase name and book title recognition. If so, then don’t judge your success on CTR or web traffic. Determine what you want, figure out success metrics (ask “How do I envision success”), and then execute.
“I know some will say I’m missing the point; that the objective of all this activity is to build the author’s long-term [i]nternet presence and establish a brand. But to a newly published author, ‘online promotion’ is synonymous with ‘sales.’ It has to be.”
Lesson #5: Community leads to sales, not necessarily vice versa. If you only go online for the sale, you will fail; if you go online to provide value/access, you will make the sale. Consider David Meerman Scott – he is active in the community and gives most of his content away for free. Crazy? Nope. He knows that he attracts fans through the free content and he makes his money selling books to this targeted, pre-engaged audience and by speaking to them at conferences. A short-sighted attitude toward sales will kill you online.
“Once content is posted, it doesn’t go anywhere. It just sits for awhile, then disappears. By contrast, articles and blog posts made at the major online magazines and newspapers show up at dozens of other websites within minutes.”
Lesson #6: All traffic is not the same. Besides showing a somewhat alarming naivety regarding search, this quote implies that all online traffic has roughly the same worth. For most authors, a targeted focus on niche audiences is far more likely to yield interest, buzz, and sales.
“[N]o one even knows if Twittering and social network sites sell books.”
Lesson #7: Social networking sites don’t sell books. You sell books. Read that sentence again and really take it in. It might be the most important thing you find in this post.
With that in mind, consider that Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff compares the traditional sales function to “energizing” in their fantastic book, Groundswell. Instead of hard-line sales tactics, social networking “[m]akes it possible for your enthusiastic customers to help sell each other” (page 69).
Or, if you’re still pessimistic about the power of your online connections, consider this excellent article by David Alston called “Social Media ROI – What’s the ‘Return on Ignoring’?” Alston makes the convincing, even simplistic, case that doing nothing will result in…nothing.
“But what does “return on investment” really stand for in a business? Roughly translated, it means the value we expect to get out of all the effort we put into something. It’s the definition of the output (return) from an input (investment).
But here’s the trick: ignoring the input, or doing nothing in social media, will surely guarantee no return at all.”
The Right Attitude
I don’t want it to sound as though the author was clueless; that’s certainly not the case. Throughout the blog post, I marked sections where I thought her concept of social networking and online marketing were correct.
For instance, as an unschooled professional, she taught herself a lot about the importance of search. Despite one or two missteps, she does present search accurately and astutely as a marketing tool. In fact, she may not give herself enough credit for the results she had (which were fairly fantastic).
Readers could also tell that the author had a long history of being online, even if she wasn’t marketing herself this whole time. Familiarity with the online channel greatly decreases the learning curve for online marketing.
And finally, she seems to have a good understanding (more than me, certainly) of the relationship between author and publicist regarding online promotion. If she’s to be believe – and I have no reason not to – the book publishing promotion world still seems centered on in-store and other offline promotions. On the flip side, she also understands that relying on a publicist for online connections would be a mistake.
Worth A Read
In general, I enjoyed this post because it gave me a lot to think about and showed insight into a field I know less about, though am interested in.
The point of this post is to help other authors avoid the pitfalls she went through. Was this helpful? Or did I skip over an essential lesson? Please leave your comments and suggestions for other authors below.
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Tags: author, authorship, blogging, blogs, Books, Marketing, Online marketing, podcasts, PR, promotion, publishing, Social Media, social media strategy, Strategy, Web 2.0, writing
One important lesson should also be “how” you promote yourself. You need to develop a clear message that is compelling and memorable and one that will spark interest in your book. You can spend an enormous amount of time marketing your book, but if you don’t spend the time preparing a great message, your efforts will fall flat.
DJ,
Sounds like she was taking a cold call approach to social media. Cold calling is selling everyone and hoping some are ready to buy. Social media is about having valuable relationships that occasionally lead to people buying each other’s product if it makes sense.
BTW, did you know I just finished writing another marketing book?
DJ-
Thanks so much for verbalizing so many things I was thinking.
Many authors go into online book tours thinking they will become an instant bestseller. Online promoters try their best to give them reasonable outlooks, but the authors cannot seem them because of the dollar signs in their eyes.
There is definitely a place for online marketing, but it isn’t just about sales. It’s about building your community, reputation and brand. Eventually, I think these will pay off into sales, but when you are first starting out, it is more for branding than anything else.
The other top issue is getting authors to set REASONABLE online goals to go with those REASONABLE expectations. The problem is there are too many so-called “experts” out there, telling them to be everywhere at once to get sales. I’ve been in a few groups that provided incredibly misleading information and pushed authors to the point where they never wanted to hear the word “blog” again.
After authors set up a marketing plan, they should figure out what a reasonable amount of time they can spend on marketing each week. Many don’t want to bother because it infringes on writing time, while others go the complete opposite and wear themselves thin.
As you can tell, these are sticking points for me – and a few reasons why I started Market My Novel. If I don’t stop now, I’ll write a comment large enough to crash your server. LOL
Thanks so much for this post! If you ever want to drop by the blog to chat about VBTs or other online marketing venues for authors, let me know.
Angela Wilson
This response to the author’s post is excellent. One thing that could be expanded on is your answer to this comment:
“I concentrated all of this effort in the month my book released and the two immediately following.”
You are absolutely correct that promotion must start much earlier, including building social networking relationships not just based on selling your book.
AND two months after the book comes out is nothing. Efforts must continue months and months and possibly years afterwards. And these efforts must include sharing information with people online that has nothing to do with selling your book.
Promoting a book is an ongoing project that must be done with the understanding that there is not necessarily an immediate payoff and that at any moment the strangest connection can lead to unexpected results.
Thanks for all of the great comments! I just wanted to make a few quick comments about them:
@Bonnie – You make a great point about *how* you market yourself. It’s always important this figure out how you fit into the world, why people read you, who would get the most out of your book – these are the unique selling points that will help translate your online marketing efforts into real sales. (Go simple – this should be easy to do. It just gets lost in the myriad of other things authors have to worry about!)
@Michael – Totally correct about the cold calling approach. Since I’m from Ohio, I think of it as a shotgun vs. a sniper rifle. Shotguns just blast everywhere; hence, they’re very inaccurate. Be the sniper.
@Angela – Thanks for your comment and for doing all of the hard work! Reasonable expectations are so important. Honestly, that’s something I struggle with. I get so excited about the potential that I need to take a step back and figure out what’s realistic.
@Phyllis – I considered making this the central point and I should have done a better job of emphasizing it. A lot of the success authors have found online starts months or years before the book comes out. And you caught me – I should have mentioned all the work that continues afterwards! That’s so important. You can’t build a community, then collect the checks and leave. If you want that next book to have continued success, you’ve got to keep up the community. It’s like baseball – it’s all about lifting during the winter months and working hard in spring training. That’s what brings World Series victories, not a lot of effort when it’s late in the season.
Feel free to keep leaving comments! This is a great conversation.
Excellent post, not just for writers but for publishers, too, who are increasingly dipping their toes into social networking in the misguided belief that it’s the latest silver bullet to save them from evolution. The title is a little misleading, though, as there’s no “scamming” involved, beyond that which the writer in question inadvertently did to themselves as a result of their own wrongheaded expectations.
I’ve seen a few RTs of this noting the “time suck” reference, which completely misses the underlying point that building a community takes time and resources and should be the MAIN point of social networking. As you wisely noted, “Community leads to sales, not necessarily vice versa.”
Kudos!
I also feel the title is wrong. Scammed is the wrong word here for what occurred. More accurately, authors need to match their expectations with their efforts.
Unfortunately, most authors don’t know how to build community, how to build relationships. So many of them expect miracles from two weeks work (or 12 weeks work). Many books don’t take off until months or years after they first come out, including a good number of bestselling books.
In teaching authors online marketing, I’ve had to fight that impulse in writers (and probably a lot of Internet marketers) to go for the quick fix, the amazing new program, the person who promises the world for only $497. Most authors would rather pay someone else to do their marketing than to take a little time to create the relationships that would propel them to great long-term sales.
This sounds like a lot of what happens to authors with online promotion efforts. Many don’t realize that although the web is “fast” in several ways, it is still a medium that takes time and effort to see results. Marketing a book is a long-term process, as you need to not only promote it directly, but you need to get the buzz or word-of-mouth marketing working for you, which takes people reading your book. An author, to be successful with online promotion efforts, needs to promote their book online for at least 6 months before it’s release (if not more), and for at least a year after its release.
For long-term sales, online book marketing requires a consistent and comprehensive approach.
The last few comments illuminate to me an interesting dynamic – the speed of the interaction versus the time to solidify human relationships.
Perhaps that’s the way to explain it – that we have a variety of ways to communicate and it’s quicker and more efficient than ever. BUT, these are still humans on the other end of the computer screen!
I hear this a lot from B2B marketers – they insist that their industry works completely different from B2C. But they fail to realize that we’re all humans. If you’re good at human interaction, you have the potential to be good at online marketing, no matter if you’re selling ball bearings in Peoria or books in Manhattan or tacos in L.A. (http://realbusiness.co.uk/news/internet-business/5564926/twitter-for-your-taco.thtml).
I feel like Charlton Heston in Soylent Green: It’s PEOPLE! Online marketing is all about people!
P.S.: I hear you re: the title and that was partially intentional. In the MarketMyNovel.com interview cited in the blog post, the author talks about writing a post called “Internet Schminternet: How Authors Are Being Scammed by the Lure of Online Book Promotion.” In her words, she was reacting to her (correct) opinion that “[t]he Internet is not a panacea that’s going to cure publishing’s ills.”
My title was just a riff off of that one. Plus, I knew the word “scam” would draw people’s eyes. Sorry, a little bit of linkbait, but mostly an homage.
[...] just came across this interesting post that outlines 7 Ways Authors Can Avoid Being Scammed by Online Book Promotion. It is a response to an author’s article about problems she encountered trying to promote her [...]
[...] it, move on and start getting shit [...]
[...] “Community leads to sales, not necessarily vice versa.” [...]
This post would be an excellent reference guide for anyone who is attempting to promote anything. Here are some more tips to consider. Find the appropriate niche market first, this should be determined ahead of time. Ask your self who is your audience for example is the book a science fiction novel or a book based on drama or is it one with horror as the theme. This will help you determine which communities and or audience you should focus your attention on. This will go a long way in narrowing down where you focus promotion.