Black Friday is such a powerful phenomenon that it has spread to countries that don’t celebrate the American Thanksgiving holiday. In many places, Black Friday has become the biggest or one of the biggest shopping weekends of the whole year. Millions of books are sold during Black Friday weekend. For authors, the Black Friday marketing phenomenon is an opportunity but also a threat. 

In this article, I share some powerful tips to supercharge your book sales, but before I do, we need to know why Black Friday, more than any other day, motivates people to buy. 

Why is Black Friday so much more motivating for buyers than Labor Day or Saint Patrick’s Day sales? Many businesses offer sales around those real holidays. Black Friday isn’t technically a real holiday, yet many people take the day off work.

If you have listened to Novel Marketing for a while, you know the answer can be found in our marketing psychology episodes. 

Black Friday leverages several social triggers:

1. Anchoring (Prices look low compared to regular high prices.)
2. Urgency (Act Now)
3. Scarcity (Limited Quantities)
4. Social Proof (Crowds Draw Crowds)
5. Loss Aversion (Avoiding Loss of an Opportunity)

How can you, as an author, take advantage of Black Friday?

1. List-Build Ahead of Time

For authors, Black Friday is primarily a tactic for your email list. If you don’t have an email list, running a Black Friday sale is tricky.

Check out the following episodes to learn how to build your email list:

• How to Grow Your Email List Using Delicious Reader Magnets with Tammi Labrecque
• How Jason Porterfield Grew His Email List from 0 to 6,000 in One Year
• 8 Tools to Help Authors Get More Email Subscribers

If you subscribe to my emails, you’ll get a front-row seat to how an email list can be used for Black Friday book promotion. Author Media will have its biggest Black Friday sale in years, but it will only be available to authors who subscribe to our email list. So, if you want to get those deals, sign up now!

2. Create a Gift Guide for Your Timothy

A gift guide is fun and can be a good source of affiliate revenue if you participate in Amazon’s affiliate program. Creating a gift guide for your Timothy is also a great way to see how well you know your target reader. If you can’t think of a gift your Timothy would love, you probably need to get acquainted with a real-life reader and learn about your audience.

Holiday gift guide sign – a paper price tag with a twine iagainst burlap canvas

3. Write a Christmas Short Story that’s Only Available to Black Friday Buyers

You can set up a system where anyone who purchases your book gets an exclusive short story. 

Offering a short story works well for traditionally published authors who don’t have control over their prices. You can email your list saying, “Anyone who buys my book over Black Friday weekend and emails me the receipt will get a free short story!”

This tactic can be particularly motivating because it takes advantage of urgency, scarcity, and anchoring. It’s free, but only for a limited time! It also utilizes loss aversion. If you’ve built a reputation for writing fun short stories, you’ll benefit from this tactic.

4. Raise Your Base Price Ahead of Time

Make sure you clear the decks of any sales ahead of Black Friday.

If you listened to my recent episode on pricing and have been meaning to raise your price, do it now! The higher the base price, the better your discount will look. 

But make sure you’re offering a real discount. You want to demonstrate integrity and honesty, so when you announce a discount, it needs to be real. Don’t raise your price right before Black Friday, then “discount” your book to the regular price on the big day. Online retailers use disingenuous shenanigans like that all the time, and it’s a bad practice. 

However, inflation is real, and you probably need to raise your price. The beginning of November is a great time to raise your regular price. 

5. Create a Black Friday Promo Alliance with Similar Authors

Connect with other authors in your micro-genre. Ask if anyone is running a Black Friday sale and if they’d like to trade book promotions. You feature a link to their book on Amazon in your Black Friday emails in exchange for them featuring a link to your book in their Black Friday emails. 

Trading Black Friday book promotions is especially beneficial for an author who only has a couple of books. If you have one book that’s $2.00 off, that’s not a huge motivator for readers to buy. But if you have 12 books and $50.00 worth of discounts, suddenly, people will be more interested. Plus, it’s a great way to build relationships with other authors and their audiences.

6. Create a Black Friday Book Bundle With Other Authors

Creating a book bundle is an advanced version of the previous tactic of creating a promotion with other authors. The book bundle tactic works best if you (or the hosting author) are set up to sell books directly on your own website. It’s relatively easy to set up your own Gumroad or Payhip account to sell books directly.

The bundle could be five different full-length mystery novels for $9.99. Readers would pay less than $2.00 per mystery!

Books with ribbon bow as gift on wooden table at library

When setting up your bundle, make sure the author hosting the bundle is financially compensated for the bookkeeping, monitoring, and setting up the online store. Don’t split the earnings even-steven because the hosting author will have to put in more work.

If I were hosting an author bundle and selling from my website, I would take 25% of sales as the bundle host. 

I would also set up an affiliate program where authors get 50% of the total sale for sending someone to the bundle. The remaining 25% (or 75% if no affiliate referral) would be split evenly between the authors. 

The affiliate program would allow an author with a much larger list to be compensated for their participation. Without an affiliate commission, the large-list author may feel like they’re carrying everyone else and might not want to participate.

But if you have a smaller list, you really want that large-list author to be involved. The affiliate program is one way to motivate that large-list author to get involved, and it will make the endeavor a win-win for everyone. 

7. Create an Email Plan

Before you create an email plan, you have some decisions to make:

• What are you putting on sale?
• What emails will you send?
• How long will your Black Friday sale last? Just Friday? Just Monday? Throughout the Black Friday weekend?

Make those decisions and clearly communicate them to your author partners. 

8. Schedule Your Emails Ahead of Time

If you’re an American, the Thursday before Black Friday is a very busy day, especially if you’re helping prepare the complicated and robust Thanksgiving meal. You also want to enjoy Thanksgiving day with your family without worrying about work.

So, write your emails beforehand and schedule them to send while you’re celebrating Thanksgiving. If you’re selling directly from your website, you should be available on Friday to answer customer questions. But if you’re sending people to Amazon to buy, you can make money while you’re watching football on Friday!

Be aware that if you’re running a Black Friday sale, you might not want to mention it ahead of time. Doing so will shut down all your sales until Black Friday because people will wait for the sale to buy. However, since I want to show you how to implement this tactic, I’m going to disregard my own advice and reveal my email plan.

My email plan for this Black Friday is to send four emails.

• Black Friday Morning: Announce the Author Media Black Friday sale.
• Black Friday Afternoon: Email Black Friday deals for authors that I’ve found.
• Cyber Monday: Email the same discounts as Black Friday. It’s important that Friday’s discount be better or the same as Monday’s so your Friday customers don’t feel like schmucks for buying early.
• Cyber Monday: Last Chance Email

Writing and scheduling emails ahead of time will allow you to enjoy Thanksgiving. ConvertKit (Affiliate Link) and MailerLite (Affiliate Link) allow you to schedule emails. 

9. A Few Warnings

Don’t Promote on Thanksgiving! 

I’m not a fan of running promotions on Thanksgiving Day, but some people do it. In America, it’s a very positive holiday based on gratitude, and using it for commercial purposes tends to ruin the tone of the day. Besides, most people in the United States won’t be checking emails on Thursday. If you’re in Europe, that advice doesn’t apply.

Don’t Send Email Without a Discount Deal

On Black Friday, people will open their email and browse for deals. More than ever, people are shopping online, and they’re looking for Black Friday discount deals. If your email isn’t full of discounts, people will ignore it.

Don’t Run the Sale for All of November

A long sale window ruins the urgency. People will not be motivated to buy now if they can buy it at a discounted price at any time throughout November. 

Apple runs a very limited Black Friday sale every year for only a few hours. It creates a major sense of urgency to buy from Apple. But instead of offering a discount, Apple offers a bonus with your purchase. Your bonus might be store credit or an iTunes gift card. 

Your sales window doesn’t need to be that small, but it should be fairly limited. I’ll run my sale Friday morning through midnight on Cyber Monday.

You Can Also Ignore Black Friday

You’re an adult, and it’s a free country. You are welcome to ignore Black Friday and still be a successful author. Many authors who ignore Black Friday will see their sales dip as other authors run sales over the weekend, but that’s okay! You have 51 more weeks to promote your book. 

If planning for Black Friday stresses you out or you’re busy preparing to host family, you can ignore Black Friday. This marketing event will not make or break you, but it can be a nice way to boost sales and revenue as you head into the Christmas season.

Sponsor

Do you want a heads-up on deals for authors after Black Friday?

Throughout the year, I scan the web for deals and discounts for authors, and I regularly post them on the Author Deals page at AuthorMedia.social. You’ll find discounts for products and services I often recommend, such as Vellum, Divi, Bluehost, and Depositphotos.

Check out all the different spaces at AuthorMedia.social. 

• 💬 General Discussion 
• 📘 Novel Marketing Podcast
• 📕 Christian Publishing Show
• 🖥️ Platform & Promotion
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• 👥 Collaboration 
• 🎉 Celebrations 
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Featured Patrons

A special thanks to our new October Patrons who help keep the podcasts on the air.

• Shelby Cook
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Related Episodes

• Anchoring
• Urgency
• Scarcity
• Social Proof
• Loss Aversion
• 20 Ways to Promote Your Book During the Holiday Season

The post Black Friday Book Promotion Tips for Authors appeared first on Author Media.

There is a new scam targeting authors. An enterprising scammer can use AI to write a book similar to your writing style. Then, they can use AI to create a cover similar to your other covers. The scammer can then publish the book with a pen name that just so happens to be your name. 

Sometimes, Amazon even puts this book in your Author Central account so customers who click your author name will see the AI book you didn’t write listed with the books you did write. Amazon might even email your fans, telling them you have a new book out. 

The crazy thing about this attack is that it might not even be illegal. It’s certainly unethical, but as far as I know, there is no way to copyright a writing style.

Maybe this kind of attack is false advertising. Maybe it violates the Lanham Act. But “maybe” is a risky place to stake your reputation. 

And this is a real problem. Jane Friedman and Chris Fox have both recently experienced this kind of attack.

It is such a new type of attack that there is no name for it yet. For the purpose of this episode, I’m going to call it “reputation theft.” Reputation theft is where someone you don’t know uses your name and style to sell their own books. 

How do you protect yourself from reputation theft? 

In this age of AI-assisted writing, how do you navigate the many other legal dilemmas authors face?

I invited Lloyd Jassin to guide us through this legal forest. He’s a literary lawyer and publishing insider. He advises writers, publishers, and literary agencies on contract, copyright, trademark, and defamation issues.

Before we begin, I want to share a quick disclaimer. It’s important to remember that the legal principles we discuss with Lloyd Jassin are subject to exceptions and qualifications and are highly fact-specific. Therefore, if you need legal advice, we strongly recommend consulting with an experienced publishing attorney who can provide tailored guidance for your unique situation.

Consider this a general education. It won’t replace advice from your own attorney.

How would you advise a bestselling author who was concerned about reputation theft?

Lloyd Jassin: For bestselling authors, I’ve registered their names as trademarks. The term is actually a service mark. Bestselling authors are providing a writing service, and providing a service is your ticket to a very cool tool that’s available to brand name authors: the Amazon Brand Registry.

The brand can be used to take down content masquerading as yours. Those kinds of issues fall under the heading of Right of Publicity, which is the right to control your name, likeness, or signature. The prerequisite, though, is that you must have a registered trademark.

Beginning authors early in their careers are unlikely to have the charisma that attaches to a brand. If you’re a brand-in-the-making, you’ll have a tough time getting a registered trademark, which is the price of admission to benefit from the brand registry.

Thomas: There’s a Hebrew proverb that says, “A rich man can pay a ransom, but a poor man has no fear” (Proverbs 13:8). You’re either not worth kidnapping because you have no money, or you’re wealthy enough to pay a ransom. You don’t want to be somewhere in between.

Lloyd: It’s an apt saying. My first recommendation is not to register your name if you’re only one or two books into your career unless you’ve had a massive bestseller.

Other tools or approaches are available to you if you’re at the beginning of your career. One approach is to register your series names. That’s a much lower bar. You can register the first book on an “intent to use” basis. The trademark office wouldn’t want me to say this, but you’re basically reserving your right to convert the title into a trademark.

Single titles are not entitled to trademark registration. When you publish your second book, if you do everything right, you will have a “specimen of use,” which shows that there are two books in the emerging series.

As you have said, Thomas, a brand is a promise that the next book will be as good as the last one. That’s the concept behind single titles not being entitled to registration while series titles are.

Thomas: Historically, authors were discouraged from creating a service mark or a trademark for their name because it was expensive. In addition to the expense of filing, you have the expense of maintaining the trademark by being able to defend it in court.

The court authors are using in these cases is not the United States court or state court. It’s the much scarier court of Amazon.

Lloyd: You’re not the only person who’s been taken aback back when I invoked Amazon as a force for good. It does seem counterintuitive, especially considering that the drums I hear in the distance say the Federal Trade Commission is coming after them.

But in this instance, Amazon acted in the interest of the public good. They’ve given trademark owners an opportunity to click boxes in their dashboards, which causes these infringers to have their works blocked.

Thomas: That’s right. But many authors are saying, “Won’t copyright protect me from this kind of attack?”

What’s the difference between trademark and copyright?

Lloyd: Trademark is what’s on the cover. Copyright is largely what’s between the covers.

The confusion stems from the fact that copyright and trademark are fellow travelers. As an author, you’re potentially the owner of a series trademark, which is a “badge of source.” A trademark says that this book comes from this particular source and it has a particular quality. Copyright is about the way you express ideas.

Trademark is about branding, packaging, and goodwill. Copyright is about content that’s expressed in a creative way. The amount of creativity needed to qualify for a copyright is quite low.

You can also use the federal government’s DMCA Takedown Provision. If you find one of your books has been infringed and you wish to take it down, you could approach the online retailer where the infringed book is being sold, fill out the form, and they will take it down expeditiously.

DMCA Digital Millennium Copyright Act and laptop.

Thomas: But it won’t work unless they’re actually violating your copyright, which protects your words. It doesn’t protect your writing style or your character named Jack. Those things aren’t protected under copyright.

However, if they copy and paste your chapter three and put it in their book, then a DMCA takedown is a very efficient method. That process is a well-worn path. It’s not exotic, and it doesn’t require thousands of dollars in legal fees. Sometimes, it just requires 20 minutes.

Lloyd: It’s an effective tool for the job. The infringer can send a counter notice if they believe the takedown notice was sent in bad faith. If they send a counter notice, the book goes back up, and then the potential plaintiff has the option to sue in federal court.

Most things that come down stay down, but that’s not always the case.

Thomas: The vast majority of DMCA takedown notices are filed by robots working on behalf of major rights holders. The music industry has robots looking for people infringing content and automatically filing the takedown notices. It’s so simple even a robot can do it.

Lloyd: That’s true. This non-generative AI has been taking over the role of paralegals for quite some time now.

Thomas: You’ve mentioned in the past that we’re living in a post-copyright world.

What do you mean by saying we live in a post-copyright world?

Lloyd: My point is that AI can emulate without infringing a copyright. It’s like a middle school student who has to turn in a paper. They can get it done efficiently, and it might qualify as plagiarism, which is an ethical violation but not one that’s recognized by law.

I’ve quipped for a while that trademark is the new copyright. And what I mean by that is the provenance of information should be important to people.

If you’re foraging for mushrooms, you may want to think twice about buying a $1.00 book on KDP that might have been generated by AI. You proceed at the risk of making the fatal mistake of not spending $19.95 for a Peterson Field Guide to Mushrooms.

The end of copyright requires me to take you on a short journey.

Copyright was designed to foster a public good to create more books and further the progress of the arts and sciences. In 1710, the Statute of Anne was passed, and that was the first copyright act. It was meant to help authors, publishers, and booksellers feel secure in investing in printing presses, which were expensive.

It gave authors and publishers exclusive rights for a period of 14 years, and then if they chose to renew their copyrights, they’d get another 14 years. It was all about scarcity of information and serving the public good. They gave authors and their publisher partners a limited monopoly so they would spend the money.

Today, we don’t have scarcity. Everybody can publish in multiple forms. Originally, though, some exceptions to copyright were built in to further the progress of science and useful arts.

The first major built-in exception is that facts and ideas are not protected under copyright law. Facts and ideas are the building blocks of progress. The other exception is fair use. Fair use defends copyright infringement. It favors things like criticism, news reporting, bad reviews of books that might quote a copious portion of a chapter, parody, or bad theater.

Fair use is a hazy shade of the law. There are no mathematical rules, but it looks at four factors:

• Factor 1: The Purpose and Character of the Use.
• Factor 2: The Nature of the Copyrighted Work.
• Factor 3: The Amount or Substantiality of the Portion Used.
• Factor 4: The Effect of the Use on the Potential Market for or Value of the Work.

Factor 1: The Purpose and Character of the Use.

Is it commercial or noncommercial? As you can imagine, noncommercial uses are looked on more favorably.

If you’re wondering whether you can use a work without getting permission, consider the purpose for which you’ll use it. If you’re going to comment on the original and bring new insights or meaning to it, that’s a favored use. It’s actually called a transformative use. You’re using it for a different purpose than it was originally used for.

Factor 2: The Nature of the Copyrighted Work.

It looks at the nature of the work. Highly creative works such as poetry, song lyrics, photography, and fine art are protected to a greater degree than prose.

Factor 3: The Amount or Substantiality of the Portion Used.

It looks at how much content you’ve taken and how important that content is to the original.

Factor 4: The Effect of the Use on the Potential Market for or Value of the Work.

It also considers the economic impact. Is it a market substitute? Or is it a market that the author or publisher, although they may not presently be exploiting it, may have a right to protect?

Thomas: It’s important to clarify what economic impact means. You might write a review of a poorly written book and quote a poorly written passage. If your review hurts the sales of that book, that is not the economic impact we’re talking about.

We’re talking about somebody using another person’s words to create a competing product. Since the review is transformatively different than the book itself, it doesn’t have economic impact in this sense, even if your review is scathing.

Lloyd: It’s also about permissions. Let’s say you want to use someone else’s words to start chapter four. You’re not commenting on those words. You’re just setting a tone. For that kind of usage, you should probably be paying a permissions fee.

The point is that copyright was designed to protect against copying, and generative AI doesn’t copy. It emulates. For generative AI to qualify as copyright infringement, there has to be copying. The copied portion has to be the expressive element. 

If you’re just drawing inspiration from 500 years of print history and the last 25 years of the open internet, then what’s being generated in response to prompts is just something inspired by or informed by someone’s work. It lacks substantial similarity.

Thomas: In many ways, AI learns as a human would learn by viewing art at a museum. You’ll see artists in museums viewing masterpieces and emulating that artist as they learn. They’re painting, but they’re not selling that masterwork. They’re just learning from the masters. Then they go on and create their own unique work, but it’s influenced by all the paintings they’ve ever seen.

Every artist is inspired by the art they’ve consumed. Musicians and authors are influenced by certain songs and books.

Some artists have a Spotify playlist they listen to while writing. Those musicians don’t have a right to your book just because you were listening to their music while you were writing the book.

Generative AI and large language models work in that same way. At least, that’s our understanding of how they work right now. For that reason, copyright really isn’t the right tool to rein in AI.

Lloyd: That’s the dilemma. Until a new law is made, it’s not really a copyright issue. It’s a failure of copyright to protect the author’s sweat-of-the-brow labor.

Copyright is having a tough time because AI isn’t reproducing anything. We’re talking about generating content that was learned. If you believe in the freedom to read, it’s odd that you have a problem with AI having the freedom to read, but it’s understandable.

I heard somebody say, “It’s an automation issue, not a copyright issue.”

Generative AI is an incredible tool. It’s transformative. That’s the other thing that makes copyright law an ineffective tool. Generative AI does exactly what you said. It’s a jazz musician in that it’s interpolating all of humanity’s creative works.

Thomas: Many authors believe that if you use AI in writing your book, you cannot own a copyright on that book. But based on a previous case, in which a monkey could not own the copyright to a photo he took simply because he pressed the button, the court determined only people can own copyrights.

Corporations can own copyrights, but monkeys and AI are not people. There was recently a case where someone said, “AI generated this book completely without my input. Can the AI own the copyright for the book?” They looked at the monkey case and said no because AI isn’t a person.

But I don’t think that that court case said the person couldn’t have owned the copyright for his work in pushing the button to make the AI go.

Do I understand that correctly?

Lloyd: You explained that well. The monkey isn’t entitled to the copyright of the photograph because the monkey didn’t need an incentive to create, nor does AI.

Copyright was a monopoly given to authors. In 1710, few authors had printing presses, so it was really to benefit their publisher partner and booksellers so they could proceed knowing that their investments would have an opportunity to pay off due to their exclusivity. But you nailed it.

What is copyright recapture, and how can somebody use it to get the rights back for their book?

Lloyd: Copyright recapture is buried in the Copyright Act, and it’s a paternalistic provision that exists.

There are policy reasons for everything, and the policy reason for copyright recapture is that young authors, musicians, or composers will often sign whatever is put in front of them very early in their careers.

Two out of the four Beatles had to have their parents sign their first recording contract. Copyright recapture was intended for folks like them. It would allow you to send a notice of termination announced to your publisher partner that within the next two years or ten years, however long the math dictates, you’d get your rights back.

It’s an inalienable right that you can’t waive unless you are a work-for-hire. It basically gives you back your rights. It’s typically used to renegotiate the terms of your original agreement.

In the publishing world, if the rights are still valuable, your publisher will want you to stay with them. You can get another advance if you’re represented by a crafty agent or attorney. You could improve your royalty rates. If you’re the manager of a famous dead author’s estate, you might be able to negotiate that they dust off the franchise and rejacket everything.

It’s a powerful right that can be exercised by the author or their heirs. Very specific rules must be followed in order to draft these and serve them.

Thomas: I get the impression you need an attorney for rights recapture. It’s technically complicated and involves a degree of negotiation. You may not necessarily want your rights back. Perhaps you just want a better deal with your publisher. Maybe you want help navigating that.

Lloyd: It also involves math, and that is a challenge.

Thomas: I know an author whose books are no longer in print, but her publisher still has the audiobook and ebook available for sale. She wants to get the rights back for her book. The book is fifteen years old, and the publisher has moved on. But the ebook is still around, and the author knows she can squeeze more juice out of that orange than the publisher can.

What’s the process for getting the rights back on a book like that?

Lloyd: First, look at the contract. Is there a contractual out? Typically, the Out of Print Clause will specify under what conditions you’re allowed to recapture your rights.

The problem is that books no longer technically go out of print because of the perpetual availability of ebooks. The digital rights and the ability to print on demand basically mean a book never goes out of print.

If you don’t have a contractual right after a close reading of the clause, you could simply ask, “Pretty please.” You might be surprised.

If the book doesn’t have economic value to the publisher, and if you can make a case that you’d like the rights back, sometimes publishers will relinquish rights to slow-moving books. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s also not uncommon.

Sometimes, it’s a matter of the agent or attorney having a relationship. I can’t promise anything, so don’t hire me with the expectation that I’m going to be able to perform magic.

The problem is that the long tail has complicated the out-of-print reversion of rights scenario for many authors.

Thomas: Sometimes you can get the rights back for free. Other times, it’s a matter of the publisher stating a number to begin negotiation. If your book is making $10 per month for your publisher, they’d much rather have your $3,000 today than $10 per month into the future.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. You’re offering your publisher a bird in the hand as opposed to the possible long-term sales into the future. It’s often a matter of getting to that negotiating table to see if you can find a number you’re both comfortable with.

Lloyd: Independent publishers will be more amenable to that than the Big Five, but it doesn’t hurt. Negotiation is a good thing.

Thomas: You really need an agent or a lawyer to get you to that negotiating table. Many authors have a hard time getting responses to their emails when they try to do this on their own.

Lloyd: That’s one of the many benefits of having a reputable literary agent or publishing attorney. They’ll take your phone call or respond to your email. But if the book is at the end of its economic life, there’s really no reason for the publisher to hold on to those rights.

If you get somebody on the phone or get an email response, you might get lucky.

Thomas: And the fact that you could do that in the future puts an end time on the $10 per month. Your publisher won’t earn $10 per month until the end of time. They’ll only earn $10 per month until that 35-year termination. Presumably, the kind of author who wants the rights back today is the kind of author who will leverage copyright recapture when they get the chance to do it in the future.

There is a finite end. As the author, you want to make it less hassle for the publisher to just give your rights back than to keep the rights.

Lloyd: Sometimes, the threat of termination is enough to get the publisher to the table and renegotiate a reasonable deal.

What sorts of AI-related cases are you seeing?

Thomas: There’s a lot of uncertainty and doom related to AI. But I’m wondering if any of it is getting turned into court cases that are affecting real authors.

Lloyd: Michael Chabon and other eminent literary figures have recently filed a complaint. They didn’t claim copyright infringement. They implied that AI fed on a library of pirated books, but the complaint lacked a claim that there was any substantial similarity.

The books were ingested by AI without permission, and since AI is slippery and avoids substantial similarity, which qualifies as infringement, I’m not sure they’ll get far.

Cases that are more likely to survive a motion for summary judgment concern artwork and photographs.

Getty filed a case where the output includes images that were altered, but you can still see Getty’s logo. Some generative AI images have captions (although short phrases and sentences are not protected by copyright), so they have a good argument for substantial similarity for copyright infringement and unfair competition since the Getty logo is still present.

I think the caseload will be made primarily when dealing with music soundalikes and visual images. It will be harder to protect text because there are just so many ways you can say something and generative AI is emulating, not copying.

Thomas: There are many ways to avoid having the AI detected. For example, right now, Amazon is telling people to disclose whether they used AI. But how will they know?

What would keep a human from generating something via AI and changing every seventh word using a thesaurus, or perhaps a different AI to disguise the primary AI?

Copyright symbol of the yellow square pixels on a black matrix background. Author rights concept.

Does using AI prevent you from copyrighting your work?

Thomas: If someone uses GPT to help brainstorm book ideas, does that mean they can’t get a copyright? If Grammarly suggested a better way to phrase a sentence, would that AI prevent me from copyrighting my work?

Lloyd: No, not at all. AI is a tool. It’s not a database of sacred knowledge that you want to rely on, but it can say things better than I can when I’m pressed to send an email. It can help you find a friendlier, less confrontational way to make a point.

Plots are not protected under copyright law. It’s what you stuff into the plot, such as pacing, characters, events, and tone, that are protected.

I’d like to see a lawsuit against ChatGPT’s overlords about synopses of books. A synopsis of a Seinfeld episode is not necessarily a fair use because you’re taking very creative elements like the plot and summarizing it.

AI may get caught in the world of book publishing by summarizing plots because that can be protected.

How can authors contact you for legal counsel?

Thomas: If an author wanted you to look over their contract or send a stern letter on their behalf to their publisher to get their rights back, how would they go about doing that?

Lloyd: I blog at copylaw.org with some frequency, and my email is jassin@copylaw.com.

Thomas: As you build your author team, I highly recommend hiring a CPA and, if you’re traditionally published, getting an agent. Having a literary attorney does not replace the need for an agent, but you will need an attorney as well.

A stitch in time saves nine, as they say, and having a conversation with an attorney on the clock can save you from having dozens of conversations with many attorneys later. People rarely regret paying for wise counsel to help them avoid these legal landmines.

If you have a legal question to ask Lloyd Jessen, he is joining us on our next patrons-only Q & A episode. Normally, I answer patron questions during that episode, but this time, I’ll be joined by an intellectual property lawyer who likes working with authors who will also be answering your questions.

If you’ve wanted to pick the brain of an IP attorney, this is your chance. Become a patron today to join us. The webinar will be on November 10th, 2023, at 4:00 PM central.

If you miss it, you can still become a patron and listen to the recording.

Featured Patron

Marissa Shrock, author of Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind

One night, Bobbi Sue Baxter spots what looks like an alien. A blinding light flashes, and when Bobbi Sue can see again, the creature has vanished. She says nothing, but when well-known townsman Ross Garland is found shot dead in the area where she saw the figure, Bobbi Sue knows she can’t stay quiet. She has no idea more excitement than she’s ever wanted is about to come after her.    

Sponsor

The Tax and Business Guide for Authors

In this course you will learn:

• How to qualify for tax deductions for your writing-related expenses (not all writers qualify) 
• 19 tax deductions authors can take advantage of. 
• How to start making a writing income before your first book comes out. 
• When and how to form an LLC, 
• How to create a business plan 
• How to reduce your chances of being audited by the IRS. 

The course is taught by Tom Umstattd a CPA with over 35 years of experience working with authors. 

Learn more at AuthorTaxTips.com.

Patrons save 50%!

Related Episodes

• What Every Author Needs to Know About Copyright Law with James Scott Bell
• Plagiarism, Copyright and Is Piracy Really a Problem for Authors?
• AI Tools for Authors
• AI Book Covers & ChatGPT
• How to Work with an AI Writing Assistant

The post How to Protect Your Writing From Reputation Theft appeared first on Author Media.

How much should your book cost? 

Your answer is critical to your book’s success and your author career.

Most authors simply price their books like the authors around them. But I want you to make informed pricing decisions to understand the why behind book pricing. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the second P of the five Ps of marketing.

The Five Ps of Marketing

1. Product
2. Price (this post)
3. Place
4. Promotion
5. Purple Cow

Your book’s price is prominently displayed wherever your book can be found, whether on a physical bookshelf or Amazon. Price says a lot about your book, but it’s easy to overlook this important marketing tool.

Some authors ask, “Shouldn’t I just price my book so it’s the cheapest option?” 

Not necessarily. As Seth Godin says, “The problem with a race to the bottom is that you just might win.” But there are times when lowering your price can be a good idea. In fact, some authors make fortunes by offering free books. On the other end of the spectrum, Brandon Sanderson made millions by selling a $200 book.

With such a wide range of pricing options, you may ask, “What is the best price for my book?” but that is the wrong question. 

Instead, ask, “What are the best prices for my book?” Your book doesn’t just have one price. Your book’s format and placement affect the price and the price changes over time. 

Once you understand pricing strategy, you can maximize the reach of your book and the money you make from it. 

In this article, you’ll learn how to think about price as a marketer. We’ll cover 14 pricing strategies authors can use to supercharge sales and profits. Knowing which one is best for you is key to your success.

Traditional and Indie Differences

Typically, the publisher controls the price of a book. Indie authors have direct control over price, while traditional authors must ask their publishers to implement a pricing strategy. 

If you are traditionally published and want to make a good case for your pricing strategy, email your publisher with your plan and include a link to this episode. If you make a good case for your strategy, they will be more likely to listen and implement your plan. 

There is an optimum price for your book. 

According to basic economic theory, there is an optimum price for your book. As you raise the price of your book, you make more money per copy and sell fewer copies. As you lower the price of your book, you sell more copies but make less money per copy.

If you chart this relationship on a graph, it looks like a curve. It’s such a common business concept that there are cheesy stock photos that illustrate the demand curve.

In my experience, indie authors often underprice their books by $2.00 to $3.00 per copy. The optimum price is often much higher than you think, especially if you already have an established readership. 

James Patterson’s ebooks sell for $14.99. Compared to that, your $9.99 ebook is a bargain. Yet, many authors think they will make more money selling at $4.99 or $2.99. But a lower price means you have to sell many more books. 

The Mysterious Forces Setting Book Prices

So, who controls the price of a book? Well, it’s complicated. 

Amazon Sets the Bounds for Pricing Expectations & Profitability

Amazon KDP offers a 70% royalty for ebooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99 and a 35% royalty for books priced outside that range. From a royalty perspective, your ebook’s optimum price will almost always land between $2.99 and $9.99. 

The Publisher Sets the Suggested Price 

While publishers can suggest prices, they can’t always mandate prices. Their pricing strategy depends on whether the book is sold under the “wholesale model,” where they have less control, or the “agency model, where they have more control. 

Wholesale Model

Under the traditional wholesale model, publishers sell books to retailers at a discount, and then retailers set the price for consumers. In this model, the publisher does not control the final retail price, only the wholesale price. 

Expanded distribution paper books often seem to be sold via the wholesale model. The wholesale model explains why you might see Barnes and Noble selling your paperback at a massive discount. Under the wholesale model, if they want to lose money selling your book, they can. If they want to sell your book at a premium, they can. You get paid the wholesale price regardless of how Barnes and Noble prices your book for the reader. 

Agency Model

Under the agency model, publishers set the retail price, and retailers act as “agents” who sell the book to consumers at that price. Retailers get a commission for each sale, but the publisher controls the price.

If you are indie published, you have full control over the price of your ebook but only partial control over the price of your paper book. KDP functions more like the agency model, while expanded distribution is closer to the wholesale model. 

The Reader Determines Whether the Price Fits

Amazon sets the bounds and expectations, the publisher makes pricing suggestions, and the readers determine whether the price fits the product. If a book looks too cheap or too expensive, a reader will pass on that book. The reader’s buying decision is like a vote influencing the demand curve we discussed earlier. So, knowing your Timothy is key to setting your optimum price. 

Brandon Sanderson’s million-dollar idea was realizing that some of his Timothys wanted a premium option, and they were not being well-served by the options available from his publisher. 

Another factor to consider is inflation because it also affects pricing. Inflation compounds exponentially. If you have 5% inflation one year and 5% the next year, the total inflation for the two years is not 10%. It’s 11% because the math compounds. The math behind inflation is the same math behind compound interest. 

The inflation rate from 2019 to 2023 is 19.57%.

If you sold an ebook for $4.99 in 2019, you should be selling that same ebook for $5.97 in 2023. If you raised your price by $1.00 in the last four years, you’re not earning an extra dollar per sale. Because of inflation, you’re only earning two more pennies per sale. And if you didn’t raise your price by $1.00, you’ve taken a $0.98 pay cut on each copy you sell. 

Authors who don’t understand inflation often struggle to pay the bills, especially if they follow old advice. If you started writing in 2019, you probably heard that $3.99 was the price you needed to stick with. However, because of inflation, you need to increase your price by a dollar or two just to keep pace with what you were earning back then. It’s important to make your price work for you.

Most authors follow the crowd like chickens follow each other in the coop. I don’t want you to be a chicken copying the other chickens. I want you to make informed decisions about your price. 

You also need to understand why your price is different and why having a different price is okay. Make an informed pricing decision, be confident it’s the best price, and your readers, who want you to succeed, will follow you. 

What’s more, if you offer your book at multiple price points, giving readers a choice in how much they pay, you’ll find readers even more eager to buy and share your books with others. 

Your book is valuable, and you deserve to get paid for your hard work. 

14 Pricing Strategies Authors Can Use to Supercharge Sales

A list of 14 pricing strategies sounds like a lot, but you won’t be able to use them all. Many of these strategies will be used at different stages of your book’s life cycle. This list will serve as an overview of the pricing possibilities to help you break out of the thinking that “My only option is to lower the price.” That thinking will ruin your book’s chance of reaching its widest audience. 

These suggestions will help you make informed decisions and have a better conversation with your publisher. If your publisher realizes you understand what you’re talking about and are fluent in the language of business and marketing, they’ll be much more likely to listen to you.

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Strategy #1: Price Anchoring

Price anchoring is a classic, fundamental price strategy. 

Since all numbers are relative, consumers anchor to a price, and they compare other prices to that anchor price. 

Is 500 a big number or a small number? It depends. Numbers are relative. 

For example, I was having a conversation with my daughter, who just turned five years old. I’d told her, “In five minutes, it’s time for a nap.” 

My daughter said, “Five isn’t very much.”

I said, “Well, I know somebody who turned five years old, and she’s a big girl.”

She replied, “Well, but it’s not a big number for minutes.”

Whether you’re measuring in minutes, years, or dollars, numbers are relative and need an anchor.

Amazon anchors its prices by default. It almost always sells books at a discount from the MSRP. When you set a price for your book, realize that Amazon will discount your suggested price, and that’s another reason to raise your MSRP. The publisher, whether that’s you or a traditional house, will want a price they can discount to make that book look like a bargain and still make money.

Check out our episode on anchoring titled How to Price Your Book Using Marketing Psychology.

Strategy #2: Reverse Coupons 

When you offer a reverse coupon, you announce a future price increase to create a sense of urgency so that customers will want to buy now. 

A reverse coupon is like the golden rule of pricing strategies. Wouldn’t it be great if companies would alert you of upcoming price increases? If you knew gas would be more expensive tomorrow, you would fill up today.

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I talk more about reverse coupons in my episode titled Why Many People Are Afraid to Buy Books (Marketing Psychology)

Through our Kickstarter campaign, I offered a reverse coupon for the Novel Marketing Conference. People who backed our Kickstarter got an exclusive discount on their ticket, which is no longer available. 

However, I’m currently offering an early-bird price. It’s higher than the Kickstarter price but lower than what a ticket will cost in December. In January, you’ll be able to buy a more expensive ticket at the door, and that price acts as a high anchor. 

The door price is also high because I want to motivate people to register early so I can plan. I need to know how many people will be at the conference, so I don’t want a lot of people showing up at the last minute. However, if somebody does show up at the last minute and is willing to pay a premium, we will sell them a ticket if we have any left.

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Strategy #3: Discounts/Price Pulsing

Price pulsing is when you temporarily discount your book’s price to generate a spike in sales and then return it to the original price. This strategy can result in increased visibility on sales charts. 

You see this strategy in action when your grocery store puts products on sale or offers coupons. 

In the publishing world, we call this price pulsing. For a limited time, you reduce the price of your book and team up with companies like BookBub or Ereader News Today to help spread the word about your special discount. 

You’ll typically see a spike in sales due to the discount, and that’s why we call it a pulse. Your sales will go through the roof for a short time, and then they’ll come back down. To learn more about price pulsing, listen to our episode on How to Use Price Pulsing to Supercharge Your Backlist Sales.

Strategy #4: Bundling

If you have multiple books, you can offer them at a discount when purchased together. Bundling increases sales volume as well as the value proposition for the reader. You can offer books online with an ebook bundle and in person with a special “conference bundle.”

Kickstarter campaigns often bundle the ebook, paper book, and audiobook into a $40 or $50 bundle. Check out my recent interview with Joanna Penn about bundling ebooks and creating beautiful hardback books to sell directly from your website.

Bundling plays well with anchoring. A customer will see your bundle of five books, each of which normally costs $9.99, and know that the value of the bundle is $50. Bundling allows you to offer that five-book bundle for $25, which is a 50% discount for the reader! And yet, $25 is a much larger sale for you than the $9.99 they would have paid for one ebook. Bundling shifts the anchoring. 

It’s important to note that for ebook bundles on Amazon, most authors price between $2.99 and $9.99 to get the 70% royalty.

Strategy #5: Loss Leader/Permafree 

Sometimes, retailers will sell a product at a loss just to get customers in the door, hoping they will buy other higher-margin items before they leave. 

For example, at the grocery store, milk, bread, and eggs are often sold at a loss and placed in separate corners of the store. Customers who want milk, bread, and eggs will have to walk through most of the store to get all three, which makes it very likely that they will buy other items besides milk, bread, and eggs.  

Authors can take advantage of the loss leader strategy by permanently offering the first book in their series for free (permafree). If the free book is well-written and ends on a cliffhanger, readers will happily purchase the sequel.

To learn more about permafree books, listen to our episode on The Upside and Downside of Free Books. 

The permafree strategy has gone in and out of fashion, but the psychology behind it is still solid. However, it only works for books that make readers fall in love with the characters. If you haven’t crafted good characters, this strategy won’t work for you. 

Permafree doesn’t work well for a standalone book. Additionally, if it takes you a long time to write books, giving one away on a permanent basis is probably not a good strategy. 

Authors who can write two or three books per year benefit from the permafree strategy. They’re not risking much by making one free. 

When I was a marketing director at a publishing company, we experimented with the permafree strategy and found it resulted in a net overall sales increase in certain series. By sacrificing the sales of book one, we sold more copies of books two and three than we were previously selling of all three books. 

Strategy #6: Countdown Deals

Amazon’s KDP Select program offers countdown deals where the book’s price gradually increases over several days. A countdown creates a sense of urgency for potential buyers. It also leverages anchoring by anchoring the countdown price to the list price. 

Additionally, when you do a countdown deal, Amazon will feature your book on a page of their website.

In my opinion, countdown deals are something to experiment with after your book has been out for at least six months. A year is better. This strategy works best for your older books.

Strategy #7 Price Skimming

With price skimming, you price your book higher when it is new, exciting, and has maximum visibility. Over time, as sales slow, you can reduce the price to attract a broader audience. 

Hollywood studios use price skimming with theatrical releases. If you want to watch a new movie, you have to go to the theater, where tickets are sometimes $20.00 per person. If you want to go with a friend, that movie will cost you $40.00. 

After the movie is out of theatres, you can purchase a copy for $20.00 and watch it at home with your whole family. That’s half the price. Soon after that, you can rent the movie for $5.00, and a short time later, the movie is offered for free on a streaming service like Netflix.

Price skimming works well for authors who want to charge a premium for their book. The best way to do it is to sell your book at a super-premium on Kickstarter before you offer it on Amazon.

Offering your book for a premium exclusively on Kickstarter allows your most passionate fans to support you by paying more and getting exclusive access to your book.

Authors who’ve used this strategy on Kickstarter have had great results. You’ll commonly see an average of $30 paid per customer on Kickstarter. Sometimes it’s even higher. And $30 is much more than the $5.00 or $10.00 you would get selling on Amazon. 

Later, you can offer the book on Amazon for $10.00. You could start doing some price pulses or countdown deals a year after your launch. 

Whatever you do, don’t discount your book right away. You need to make a statement about your book’s quality right away. If you’re not willing to put a price on your book that signals quality, no one will believe your book is quality.

Strategy #8: Price Penetration

Price penetration is the opposite of price skimming. You charge a little upfront to penetrate a new market. 

Disney employed this strategy with Disney+. They started by offering a cheap monthly subscription of just $6.99 with easy password sharing and no ads. As people got hooked on the service, Disney+ raised the price to $13.99 and curtailed password sharing. In the future, the price will continue to increase. In the long term, subscription services like Disney+ and Netflix won’t be cheaper than cable.  

So, how do you use penetration pricing as an author? By making the first book in a series cheaper. You don’t have to offer it for free. Just offer it for less. 

You might price your series as follows:

• Book 1: $2.99
• Book 2: $3.99
• Book 3: $4.99 and so on.

Penetration pricing allows readers who don’t know you to sample your writing without risking much money. The downside of penetration pricing is that anchoring works against you. The $3.99 book seems expensive compared to the $2.99 book they just bought. 

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Strategy #9: Pay-What-You-Want

Platforms like Gumroad allow authors to let readers choose their prices. This strategy can be effective, especially if you have a dedicated and supportive readership. Pay-what-you-want can work particularly well for religious and nonfiction books. However, if your audience isn’t very big, you need that audience to be really fired up.

Strategy #10: Bulk Discounts

Bulk pricing allows customers to buy more copies but pay less per copy. To offer a bulk discount, you need to sell books directly from your website. 

If you are traditionally published, your publisher may also offer bulk discounts. Find out what bulk discounts your publisher offers and pass that information to your big buyers. 

You can offer bulk discounts to book clubs, Bible studies, or conference directors who want to purchase a copy for all their attendees.

Strategy #11: Third-Party Memberships 

Kindle Unlimited, 24SYMBOLS, and Scribd offer memberships that make your book “free” to their paying members. Think of these services as Netflix for books.

For example, as an author, you can sign up for KDP Select, which will enroll your book in the Kindle Unlimited Lending Library (KU). However, enrollment in Kindle Select means your ebooks are exclusively sold on Amazon until you unenroll from the program. 

Readers who pay for KU can check out your book for “free” while you get paid on a per-page-read basis. Some authors make thousands of dollars every month from page reads. Others only make pennies. 

The Kindle Unlimited Fund currently divides half a billion dollars annually between their authors based on how many pages are read. 

Since authors get paid per page read, KU tends to favor longer works, books in series, and genre fiction. Your short, one-off nonfiction book won’t perform well in KU, but your 12-tome series on dragon hunting may make bank.

Strategy #12: First-Party Membership or Subscription Model

Platforms like Patreon and Substack allow authors to offer their own content and get paid by their readers. Some authors give away one chapter at a time for patrons. It is like having your own membership program like Kindle Unlimited, but readers only pay for your content. 

The subscription model is particularly popular in genres like LitRPG. 

Nonfiction bloggers can publish blog posts on Substack that readers pay for. They can also release essays for their patrons on Patreon. I interviewed a nonfiction author who was making around $2,000 per month publishing essays related to her nonfiction books, and that was on top of what she made selling her books.

Strategy #13: Membership Discounts

If you have a membership program, you can offer member-exclusive discounts. For example, I offer patrons exclusive discounts on many courses. 

Costco has built an entire company around this pricing strategy. People pay Costco for the privilege of shopping at Costco. Before you say, “That’s crazy,” ask yourself if you have a Prime membership.  

Strategy #14: Luxury Pricing

With luxury pricing, you make something expensive to make it unobtainable for most people. That unattainability makes it very desirable for those who can afford it. Luxury pricing works well for certain product categories. For example, no one wants to buy a $5.00 bottle of perfume or $10.00 opera tickets. 

The store Bath and Body Works decoded this strategy for the perfume industry. They realized people didn’t want to buy a $5.00 bottle of perfume, but they would buy a $5.00 bottle of lotion that’s so highly scented it might as well be perfume. They discovered they could sell perfume cheaply by calling it lotion. 

How you present your product affects how customers see it. 

Some authors have had incredible success with luxury pricing. Brandon Sanderson famously made this pricing strategy work by selling premium copies of his books for between $200 and $500 per copy.

Many other authors utilize luxury pricing by offering signed and numbered copies. You don’t have to price your books as high as Sanderson did to be successful with luxury pricing. Simply signing your beautiful hardback book and numbering it 1/100 makes it a unique and potentially valuable investment for readers. To learn more, check out our episode on How to Use Scarcity & Ubiquity to Make Your Book Irresistible.

Bookstagram and BookTok have greatly influenced the increased desire for beautiful hardbacks. Gen X may have been happy to buy disposable mass-market paperbacks, but Millennials and Gen Z prefer spending more on higher quality hardbacks. Even some Baby Boomers are starting to prefer hardbacks. 

In a world where everything is disposable or electronic, and nothing is real, people long for substance, something more than a glossy paperback. Don’t be afraid to make a luxury version of your book.

Pricing is a Tool

Price is a valuable tool. It signals quality, rekindles interest, and sets expectations. Be flexible with your pricing and experiment with different price points to find the optimum price for your book. Realize that today’s optimum price may differ from next year’s.

Sponsor

It’s not too late to sign up for the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference. The Kickstarter has closed, but you can still get early-bird pricing at NovelMarketingConference.com. 

Featured Patrons

B.D. Lawrence, author of The Coyote and a One-Armed Man

Lefty Bruder, a one-armed detective, has only one mission: rescue a young girl destined to become a slave to a Mexican cartel boss. But an unseen stalker is intent on killing him before he can accomplish his mission. Assembling a team of misfits, Lefty and his crew prepare to brave the unknown and face their greatest challenge yet.     

Related Episodes

• Book Marketing 101: How to Price Your Ebook
• How to Use Price Pulsing to Supercharge Your Backlist Sales
• How to Price Your Book Using Marketing Psychology
• How to Supercharge Ebook Sales
• Marketing 101: The Five Ps of Novel Marketing

The post Book Marketing 101: Price   appeared first on Author Media.

The Big Five publishing houses are all based in New York City. The biggest literary agencies are based in New York City. New York City’s local newspaper has a bestseller list that publishers feature on book covers. And many top authors, like James Patterson, are New Yorkers.

New York City is one of the world’s wealthiest cities, which gives the Big Five publishers a financial advantage, but this publishing concentration in one city is also a weakness.

Why? Because New York City is special, different, and weird. That’s not a controversial statement. Ask any New Yorker, and they’ll tell you proudly that no other city is like New York City.

New York City is a world unto itself, which can make it a bit out of touch with the rest of the country. It’s easy for New York City publishers, agents, editors, and journalists to be so focused on their local readers that they overlook the rest of the country. And there are a lot of readers in the rest of the country.

But having favor with New York City’s readers doesn’t guarantee that your book will sell anywhere else in the country. By the same token, if New Yorkers hate you, your book isn’t automatically doomed to failure.

But since most of the gatekeepers, publishers, and agents live in New York City, many authors ask, “Don’t I need to comply with New York values to succeed in publishing?”

Do authors need to comply with New York City publishing values in order to be traditionally published?

In short, no. No, you don’t. It’s even possible to get a contract with a traditional publisher without complying with New York City culture. In fact, it might be easier to make a living in publishing by thinking outside of the Big Apple because there are so many more readers outside of New York City.

Novelists like Larry Correia have even sold millions of books that would cause the typical New York City agent to seek a safe space.

I recently asked Larry how he became a mega-bestselling author without conforming to the New York City publishing mentality. He is a New York Times bestselling author of over 25 novels, 50 short works, and two collections, and he’s co-edited three published anthologies. When he’s not writing about rednecks with shotguns hunting vampires, he’s talking about writing on his popular Writer Dojo podcast.

How did Larry Correia get started as an author?

Thomas: How did you get started writing?

Larry: I do not have a traditional writer background.

I came from an agricultural background in the rural Western United States. I was born and raised in a very poor part of California on a dairy farm in a Portuguese immigrant community, but I have always been a voracious reader. I grew up reading tons of action-adventure fantasy. Later in life, I was in the gun business as a machine gun dealer in Utah. I was a firearms and concealed weapons instructor and’ve always been a gun nut.

I asked, “What would horror movies be like if they starred my kind of people?” And then, I wrote a book called Monster Hunter International that answered that question.

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I wrote that book before the ebook revolution. We didn’t have the capability of doing easy ebook publication, so it was a much different process back then. Vanity publishing houses were really your only option unless you were doing print runs entirely yourself.

I understood that my product would not appeal to the typical New York agent. Still, I tried the traditional publishing route, where I submitted 112 times to agents and publishing houses and got rejected everywhere.

Despite the rejections, I recognized that the product I had appealed to an audience of people who loved horror movies, horror movie tropes, and guns. At that time, I was a moderator on an internet gun forum when internet forums were the primary mode of internet communication before social media was widely used.

I was well-known in that world, so I started posting my short fiction for these other gun nuts to see and enjoy. They liked it.

I started doing an online fiction serial with another author named Mike Kupari, where we went back and forth for a summer, each writing 1,000 words per day. He’d write a scene, then I’d write one, then he’d write the next scene. We went back and forth. When it came time to self-publish this book, I did a print run and sold about 6,000 copies, which, at the time, was pretty astronomical.

Thomas: Astronomical but not surprising because you were doing the most important thing right: you had an audience and wrote a book for that audience.

You might spend a whole page in your books discussing the a gun’s caliber and which attachments the characters will take on their vampire hunt.

I imagine the typical editor thought, “Nobody wants to read a whole page about what gauge the shotgun is.” But your readers do.

Most indie authors write a book and then try to find an audience for it. You did the opposite.

Larry: I was coming from an audience that was deeply unsatisfied and lacking in product. I often heard people in my demographic complaining about the state of the market.

They complained about the state of fiction and how most fiction just didn’t scratch that itch for them. With that complaint in mind, I actually made my first Monster Hunter novel gun-nuttier. I gun-nutted it up.

Once I failed to get an agent, I accentuated those parts of the book in a final edit before I self-published it. Then, I advertised it primarily on these internet gun forums.

Thomas: It’s the kind of book you could sell at a gun show. At that time, you were the only person writing novels for the kind of people shopping at gun shows.

Larry: For years, my people would complain about how they were dissatisfied with what was available in fiction.

Several authors partially scratched the itch. Stephen Hunter was writing thrillers. Tom Clancy had the techno-thriller genre. But there was nothing on the fantastic side of things to scratch this itch.

When I was writing the book, I thought I was writing action-adventure horror because I used horror tropes. Knowing what I know now, I would categorize it as urban fantasy, but that genre didn’t exist at the time.

I took all those elements that we loved from the Stephen Hunter, Vince Flynn, and Brad Thor world and put them into the fantastical world. I threw in werewolves and vampires, and I went whole hog.

I grew up on Tolkien and Terry Brooks, so I included elves, trolls, gnomes, and orcs. I had fun with it. The stories were about mercenaries and military contractors living in a world where monsters are real and getting paid to handle monster problems. And I made it fun.

That combination was exactly what that audience had been seeking for a long time, so it blew up huge.

Thomas: It’s easy to think of fantasy as elves and orcs, but at its core, fantasy appeals to the longing of the fantasy reader to feel like a warrior or a powerful elf. Your books are fantasy in the sense that they allow men to feel more powerful than bad guys.

When a man buys his first shotgun, something deep inside him wishes that vampires were real so he could use that gun to defend his family. You see it in the movie Christmas Story when Ralphie gets his Red Ryder BB gun. He’s shooting the bad guys who are trying to invade his house.

Males want to believe they’re powerful enough to protect their families, and your books satisfy that fantasy because that’s what your characters do.

Your characters are family men. They’re married, or they have children. They value family, and protecting the family is a high value. For that kind of reader, your book scratched that itch like Tom Clancy’s work did for techno readers.

I remember a friend saying, “I just read The Sum of all Fears,” and he proceeded to summarize the 30 pages about how a nuclear bomb works. He cared less about the action and whether the bomb would detonate than about how a nuclear bomb works.

Being nerdy about what your audience wants you to be nerdy about can unlock marketing potential. Give your fans something to talk about. If your fans are in a gun store and one says, “Hey, this is the same shotgun Pitt used in the book,” suddenly, they’re talking about your book.

Larry: Absolutely. It was fun because I’m one of the only authors who does book signings at the SHOT Show, which is the big industry tradeshow for the gun business. I became the token writer of a big culture.

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I’m not alone anymore because after I did it, other people recognized there was a market there, and they started catering to it as well, which was awesome.

I originally wrote for a specific niche, but I realized I might have a mainstream career when I got a review saying, “I’m a 65-year-old grandma. I don’t like guns, violence, or monsters, but I love this book.” At that point, I thought, “Wow, I might have a mainstream career beyond catering to my people.”

One of the employees at Uncle Hugo’s independent bookstore had read my online fiction serial. He contacted me and said, “I work at a big bookstore. Would you send me an early copy of Monster Hunter International? I loved your online serial. If I like your book, I’ll show it to my boss, and he may buy some copies. I sent it. He loved it and showed it to his boss, Don Blyly, a legendary bookseller.

Don wound up printing the book on a dot matrix printer. He read it at home and loved it. I sold Don a bunch of cases of books, and he hand-sold them to his customers.

Don’s bookstore was sampled for the Entertainment Weekly bestseller list back then, so my original self-published book ended up third on the Entertainment Weekly bestseller list because of the number of copies Uncle Hugo’s had sold.

I had an independent book published as a $25 print-on-demand paperback that I was selling on internet gun forums, and suddenly, it had become a national bestseller.

Once again, this was pre-Amazon, but everything just went nuts. Baen Books approached me because they loved the book, and they made me an offer.

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They said, “We would like to publish this book, but there’s a delay in traditional publishing. It will be about a year after we get it on the calendar, print it, and distribute it, so you’ll have to discontinue the self-published version during that time.

I agreed to that. I took the advance and discontinued the self-published version. Then, for a year, all these people who had read the original book told their friends about it. But their friends couldn’t buy it because it was unavailable.

Nothing makes an American want something more than being told they’re not allowed to have it. So, one year later, in 2009, when the small print run came out for the first Baen Books version of Monster Hunter International, it exploded. We sold the entire print run in three days nationwide.

Thomas: We have a podcast episode about this phenomenon of scarcity. It’s a psychologically powerful motivator, but I haven’t heard of using scarcity like that before, where you can’t get the book.

Larry: We didn’t do it on purpose. The publisher at Baen Books, Toni Weisskopf, is a very smart woman. She’s very intelligent and knows the publishing industry like the back of her hand.

She thought to herself, “Okay, this book was independently published. He’s already sold a lot of copies, so he’s probably hit most of the available market.” For that reason, she did a small print run, assuming most people who would buy it already owned it.

However, she didn’t realize the power of word-of-mouth marketing on this product in the community I was catering to. When the book finally came out, the community went absolutely bonkers. We sold through the print run and had to hurry up and get a second print run, which we blasted through.

That was 15 years ago, and Monster Hunter International, that original book, launched my career. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. It’s become an eight-book series with four spin-offs and an anthology of short stories, with another one coming out. I’ve co-authored novels, and others have written in the shared universe.

I owe it all to being a little independent guy who wanted to write fun horror stories for gun nuts.

How do you find or grow an audience?

Thomas: The principle here is that you found an audience of underserved people, and you wrote what they wanted.

Many people don’t read because they can’t find books written just for people like themselves, most often because those books don’t exist. If you’re a New York City coffee shop attendee, you have a world of books written for you. But thousands of communities want different things, and only hundreds of those communities are well-served with books.

If you can identify an underserved community and give them what they want, you can be successful. It helps if you’re a member of the community itself, and it also helps if that community gathers online, in person, or both.

If Larry’s gun nuts didn’t have that online forum and didn’t gather in real life, it would have been harder to sell his book, but the creation of the community was already done.  

Some authors build a community from scratch, and there’s value there, but that is a slow start because you’re growing that community one person at a time.

Larry: It’s such a weird process, and it’s very hit or miss. I’ve seen authors attempt this for other groups, and I think it just has to be organic. You have to see and recognize the opportunity to fill a gap in the market.

My career has grown beyond that initial small group of people, but the key to an author career is to get enough stuff out there that people can see your quality and recognize it.

Today, I write in five different genres and several series. I do well in all of those, but it was all built upon the foundation of having that core group of a few thousand hardcore fans who were eager to tell their friends about my book.

That group of hardcore fans has enabled me to expand to other genres. After I’d written a couple of Monster Hunter novels, I told Toni Weisskopf, “I don’t want to just be the monster guy for the rest of my life. I want to try some other things.” So, I pitched her some other books. I have since written thrillers, alternate history, sci-fi, nonfiction, and epic fantasy, which is doing really well. But the key to that expansion was that original foundation.

I don’t think people realize how insular the New York publishing environment was. The independent book revolution changed publishing so dramatically. It’s so incredible. The tools available for marketing and production are just phenomenal. It wasn’t like this at all 20 years ago. Back then, you either fit into the Manhattan culture and were accepted, or you kept your head down and your mouth shut. You were either completely apolitical, or you went along with the herd. A few token people, like Tom Clancy, got a pass for whatever reason and were allowed to be different.

Anybody else who didn’t conform was the proverbial nail that got hammered down. When I got into publishing 16 years ago, it was lonely. Now, I love it. It’s enabled people from all walks of life and all parts of the country and the world to freely express themselves without having to sneak past the gatekeepers.

Thomas: You’ve provided a model for authors who’ve come after you. All the design and production tools and processes have become easier, but the necessity of writing for a specific audience is just as effective as it was back then. At Novel Marketing, we call it writing for your Timothy.

Additionally, writing for a specific audience rather than writing a specific genre gives you flexibility in genre. Even though you’re writing in different genres, you’re writing books that appeal to the same group of people. You didn’t go out and write a why-we-need-gun-control book.

Larry: No. I actually wrote the opposite of that, and that book got to number 17 on all of Amazon and number one in nonfiction.

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How does authenticity help an author?

Larry: You must be true to yourself and your core convictions. Many writers try to disguise who they are because they want to cater to one group.

That can work if you’re wired that way, psychologically. However, most creative writer types aren’t. In fact, much of the power of what we write comes from the fact that we are telling stories that we ourselves believe in or want to hear.

We all have themes in our work, and if you’re trying to write something you’re not true to just because you’re trying to cater to someone, it will stifle your creativity and make you less productive. Most importantly, you’re not going to have as much fun, and if you’re not having fun, the reader can tell.

Contagious enthusiasm is the single most powerful weapon we’ve got.

How does an author’s authenticity affect their brand?

Thomas: Word-of-mouth is still the best marketing tool. It’s the number-one way people find out about books.

Knowing who you are and staying true to yourself is what marketers call a consistent brand. The first step of creating a consistent brand is knowing who you are, what makes you weird, and leaning into your weirdness.

Your weirdness is not a liability. For example, Larry, you’re conservative, you live in the country, and you work with people who buy guns. Those are liabilities if you’re trying to be a New York author. But for you, they are strengths that make your brand consistent and show your readers that you know who you are.

The second step in the Novel Marketing branding process is to know who you’re writing to. It’s very helpful if you’re a member of the community you’re writing to.

If you’re from outside the community, you need to be transparent about it.

Larry: It comes down to a question of authenticity and passion.

Michael Connelly writes a character named Harry Bosch, a veteran police homicide detective in L.A.

Michael Connelly was never a cop, but he was a crime-beat reporter stationed in Los Angeles, so he knew the city’s crime better than just about anybody who’s not a cop. Plus, he’d worked with thousands of cops.

When he writes Bosch, you can feel the passion and authenticity. I have a lot of friends who are cops, and they say it’s not 100% accurate, but that’s not what I’m getting at here.

For some aspects of your story, you will check reality at the door to tell a better story. That said, though, Connelly’s got it. He’s got the community, and he can tell those police procedural stories in a way that makes the reader feel like they’re there.

How can using specific details about niche topics benefit your readers and your brand?

Larry: Earlier on, you mentioned Tom Clancy and the nuclear bomb. What you described is what I refer to as the Michael Crichton Effect. When you read a Michael Crichton novel like Jurassic Park, you feel smarter after you finish because you feel like you understand DNA.

Thomas: As a 14-year-old, I was excited to explain chaos theory to all my friends after reading Jurassic Park. However, my newly attained knowledge did not help me win friends and influence people.

Larry: No, but it’s a powerful thing. When people read an author who is authentically enthusiastic about a subject they integrated into their story, readers take that information and enthusiasm with them and tell their friends.

Your writing career is golden once you get a community of fans going. If you’re making those readers happy, entertaining them, and giving them what they want, you can experiment with other genres and try to grow as an artist.

It’s hard to grow and experiment if you don’t have a core group invested in your success. I love my fans. They are the greatest people in the world, and I owe all my success to the fact that they’re cool.

Can good marketing make people like your book?

Thomas: Often, people come to me with a completed book and want me to market it. Most of the time, it’s obvious that they haven’t thought about who the book is for. They think I have a magical marketing button I can push to make readers suddenly become the kind of people who want to read that book.

But that’s not a marketer’s job. Marketers can’t change people. But as an author, you can change your book. You can change it and make it the kind of book readers want to read.

I love that you edited your book to ramp up the gun details after New York said no. That was brilliant! You said, “If this is going to be for the gun nuts, then I will make a book they’ll love! They might have liked the first version, but you edited the book to make it one they’d love.

Whose feedback should an author implement?

Larry: That’s right. When I was shopping it around to different agents, I had one who was interested. She said, “If you make the following changes, I would be interested in representing this book.”

I looked through her changes, and they were not good. I was just a newbie paying for this out of my pocket based on my gun store wages, but I knew there was no way those changes would work. If I had made those changes, it would have destroyed the work.

It still would have been a book, but it wouldn’t have been what I wanted.

At that point, I asked myself, “Do I want to satisfy New York City, a place that’s entirely paved and has no shooting ranges? Or do I want to make my readers happy?” I concluded that I couldn’t satisfy people in New York and still make my audience happy. Most importantly, I couldn’t make myself happy if I conformed to her changes. So, I passed on her offer.

You have to be true to yourself and your audience.

Thomas: The moral of the story is that it’s okay to be different. There’s a push amongst gatekeepers towards homogeneity. They really like uniformity. But diversity of thought becomes an asset for marketing.

It’s okay to write a book some people don’t like. In fact, I would say it’s required. The most popular books have the most voracious haters. Think of the Bible and the Quran. Both have fans and haters. If that makes you nervous, check out our episode on handling trolls and haters.

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We often view our own weirdness or our uniqueness as a liability. If you view it as an asset, you can build your whole brand around it.

I often use the metaphor of using armor that fits. If you only have your sling and stones to battle a giant, that’s all you need. If you try to put on the king’s oversized armor, which you’re not used to, you’ll be taking the wrong approach.

Don’t try to make something fit that doesn’t fit.

Instead, look for the community that you fit in. Look for the people you can thrill. If you thrill them consistently, they’ll follow you through different genres from book to book.

Larry: I’ve tried to coach writers away from trying to placate people who aren’t in their target audience. Often, you’ll see some hashtag on social media with writing advice that says, “Don’t ever do this,” or “Always do this,” or an influencer will insist that a certain kind of person isn’t allowed to tell a particular kind of story.

But if you try to make your art fit the demands of those people, you’ll create inferior art. Don’t negotiate with terrorists. Make your own art.

Don’t let other people dictate what you can and cannot say, especially if you’re an independent. You have no gatekeeper, publisher, or agent stopping you from telling the kind of story you want to tell.

Thomas: Getting feedback from the people you’re writing to is critical. It’s also important not to implement every bit of feedback from people you’re not writing to.

If you don’t know what community you’re writing to, everyone’s feedback carries the same weight, but it’s all conflicting, and you’re overwhelmed. The more feedback you get, the more lost you become. The more edits you implement, the blander it becomes because it keeps getting changed without getting better.

There’s an old saying, “Don’t spend money you don’t have to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like.” The same is true for your brand.

Don’t make brand changes. You don’t need to impress people who don’t like you.

You can’t turn a hater into a lover. But you can cause people who like you to like you even more because you’ve served them well.

What happens when you try to please everyone with your writing?

Larry: Sometimes people aren’t giving you constructive criticism. They just want you to fail. They’re going to attack you. They’re going to find something to attack in your work. They will pick out some quibble to throw at you to make you feel bad and see if they can’t bend you to their will and shame you into compliance.

A giant contingent of our society enjoys forcing creatives to get in line. They’re not in it for the stories or the art. They’re in it to be bullies.

When authors kowtow to these people and bow down and say, “Okay, I’m going to do what you say because I don’t want you to be mad at me. Maybe if I comply, you’ll be nice to me,” it never works.

They’re never going to be nice to you. In fact, once you give in to them, you’ve just empowered them, and they will do more.

Write what you want and have fun. Don’t worry about the haters.

How do haters affect your sales?

Thomas: It helps to have those fanatical fans.

When bullies bother you, and you stand up to the bully, suddenly, your fans feel like you’re also standing up for them.

One of the best things to happen to Brandon Sanderson was that hit piece by Wired Magazine that totally trashed him.

Suddenly, people who were on the edge about Brandon were defending him. They identified with Brandon’s plight as a “nerd” who’d been bullied, and they stood up for him.

Brandon was very gracious.

Larry: Oh, man, far more gracious than I would have been. I would have lit that reporter on fire.

Brandon Sanderson was the first author to take the time to give me career advice when I was a newbie. He had just written Mistborn and had been chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s work. He gave me business advice and told me stuff he wished he’d known.

He’s genuinely one of the nicest guys in publishing. When Wired did a hit piece on him because he’s a religious family man who loves his wife, it was asinine. They were just dogpiling him.

Brandon is a gracious guy, plus he’d just completed a $47 million Kickstarter, so he was doing just fine. I would have responded with nuclear fire.

I have found that if you have a core group of fans with whom you can be honest, frank, and blunt when you get attacked, you can monetize your enemies’ hatred. Now, it doesn’t work if you’re disingenuous. I’ve seen writers try to emulate the tactic by picking fights and trying to be a lightning rod of controversy so they can sell more books. But that doesn’t work.

First, you must have your craft down. Your books have to be good enough that people stick around.

Second, the controversies have to be organic and truthful. If you go out of your way to be an antagonistic jerk, people will see right through that. Don’t fabricate pointless, fake drama.

If you’re going to make a stand on something, make sure it’s something you believe in. Then, when people attack you, your readers will take it personally. Because they identify with you, your readers will rally around you and tell their friends to buy your books.

But if you do it disingenuously, your readers will know.

You must be a storyteller, creator, and an artist first and foremost. Take a stand. Have a backbone. Believe what you believe and stand by your convictions.

Thomas: Don’t go looking for a quarrel, but once you’re in one, be in it to win it. Pick a hill you’re willing to die on and stand there. Courage in the face of adversity is inspiring to your readers.

Don’t go looking for a quarrel, but once you’re in one, be in it to win it.

Thomas Umstattd, Jr.

But none of it matters, and none of it will work if your book isn’t good. You’ve got to write a book that scratches the itch that your readers already have.

Does your craft get a pass if you convey an important message in your fiction?

Larry: We’ve all seen people who become overnight bestsellers for one book because they wound up in the news for some reason. They have one book, but it’s not a good book, so they never publish another one. Fame and controversy won’t help you if your books aren’t good.

One of my favorite quotes on this topic comes from Jim Butcher, who says, “Never preach harder than you can entertain.” Above all, you’re a writer. You’re an entertainer first.

Some people think I’m against message fiction, but I’m not. I’m only against message fiction that beats you over the head. I’m against message fiction, where the message comes first, and the story comes second. You have to tell a good story; if you want to weave a message in there, that’s awesome, but you have to prioritize the story.

Thomas: Clamavi di Profundis is a band I adore. They write fantasy ballads, and they have one called Dragonshore. It’s the story of the dragons attacking Hammerdeep where the dwarves are. The dwarves go on a revenge mission to clear the dragon shore of its dragons.

Last night, I was looking at the lyrics and realized the seven dragons line up with the seven deadly sins. I finally saw the song’s spiritual message that completely went over my head the first 50 times I listened.

I loved the story of the song, but now that I realize it has a deeper message, I love it even more. That’s what good craft can do.

If you want help with the craft of writing, I’d recommend Larry’s podcast Writer Dojo. Every week, he talks with authors. It leans toward fantasy and sci-fi, but he also talks with authors from other genres.

It’s an excellent podcast that gets into the nitty gritty of craft.

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Any final encouragement for authors?

Larry: Get out there and write. Have a good time. If you’re having fun, the reader will sense it, and they’ll have fun too. Put your butt in the seat and your hands on the keyboard. Get it out there.

Connect with Larry at his website, MonsterHunterNation.com.

Featured Patrons

C.L.R. Peterson, author of Lucia’s Renaissance

Only a suicidal zealot would even whisper the name of Martin Luther, because heresy is fatal in Renaissance Italy. But Luther’s ideas ignite Lucia’s faith, so she must choose—abandon her beliefs or risk her life. Journey with Lucia as she navigates the dangerous world of 16th-century Italy.

Related Episodes

• How to Make Your Book More Popular (Marketing Psychology: Social Proof)
• How to Use Scarcity & Ubiquity to Make Your Book Irresistible 
• Publishing Myths That Will Waste Your Time and Money
• Good Brands Vs. Big Brands 

The post How Larry Correia Became a Mega-Bestseller by Writing for Overlooked Readers appeared first on Author Media.

While most authors sell most of their books on Amazon, it’s not all roses and butterflies. Amazon takes between 30% and 75% of the profits, depending on what kind of book you’re selling, and that doesn’t include the price of printing or production! 

Another downside of selling books on Amazon is that you don’t know who buys your book. You cannot connect with your readers to get their feedback or let them know when your next book releases. 

If only there were another way to make more money from your book sales and connect with your readers at the same time! 

There is! You can sell directly from your website.

If you’ve listened to Novel Marketing for a long time, you know I was not a big fan of direct sales for most authors because it was expensive, required a lot of technical sophistication, and was usually a money-loser after authors accounted for their expenses and time. 

In fact, our plugin MyBookTable was designed to allow authors to add a bookstore to their website without having to sell any books themselves. It was a bookstore, but instead of a shopping cart, it had links to Amazon and dozens of other ecommerce websites.

But in the last ten years, the cost of selling directly to readers online has gone down. It’s now much easier to sell directly to readers from your website, and more readers are willing to buy directly from an author’s website.  

Direct sales now make sense for many authors, and it is time we talked about it with Joanna Penn.

Joanna writes nonfiction for authors and is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. 

What was it like when you started selling directly to readers through your website?

Thomas: You’re famously an early adopter. You don’t wait for things to get easy to try them for the first time. Describe your first experiences of selling directly.

Joanna: I started selling directly from the beginning. I can’t remember the stores I used because the tools change over time. I started selling ebooks as downloadable PDFs and downloadable MP3s.

In those days, I used to put a cassette tape adapter in my car to listen to audio.

In 2009, we had a few tools, but they were complicated to use.

Over the years, I’ve tried different tools for selling direct. The most recent one that worked better was payhip, which I recommend for people who want a smaller store.

Then, about 18 months ago, I moved to Shopify because now we can do print.

Book people like us love beautiful books. In your study, Thomas, you’ve got beautiful print books on the shelves behind you. Authors have not been able to easily create beautiful books. Print-on-demand technology is amazing and has changed many indie authors’ lives, but print-on-demand books are not really beautiful. Let’s face it. We just haven’t had the option to produce beautiful books.

But today, authors can create beautiful physical books through printing companies like bookvault and Lulu. With bookvault I can print hardbacks with color printing, gold foil, and ribbons. And I can integrate with Shopify.

I have been selling directly from my website since 2008 or 2009 when I first started selling online, but it has recently become my major focus with Shopify and Kickstarter.

Now, I love Amazon. I’m a shareholder in Amazon. I believe in the company, but I want more control as an author and publisher. Selling directly gets me more profit per sale, customer data, and faster payment. When someone buys directly from my website, I get paid within an hour, or perhaps in 48 hours, but that means I’m getting paid every single day. The economics change dramatically when you aren’t waiting 60 to 90 days for a payment.

Selling direct has many benefits, but the biggest downside for many authors is the marketing, but that’s why we’re here.

Thomas: Exactly. You can have the greatest store in the world, but if you don’t have a plan to get people to your store, you won’t sell books.

I often see authors spend a lot of money to hire a traditional web design firm to build a robust bookstore with checkout pages and everything. But they don’t have a plan to get people to visit their store.

When people do visit, all they want is a button that will take them to Amazon so they can checkout with one click. Buying from Amazon is easier because you can paste the book’s title in the search bar and buy with one click. That’s easier than typing your address and credit card number into an author’s store on their website.

How do you get people to your website and motivate them to buy the book from you?

Joanna: The attitude shift is the magic we need because it doesn’t matter what marketing you do to your store. It’s about your attitude toward sales.

For fiction authors, the focus has been on selling cheap books or free books in KU for almost 15 years. That’s how we’ve trained our readers, and it has changed the author’s brain to think that readers will only buy cheap or free books.

You almost have to completely reeducate yourself if you want to sell directly. You have to understand that many readers are happy to buy print, audio, and ebooks from your store, on the Shopify app, through your website, and through social media. What’s more, they will pay for shipping.

People ask me, “But why would someone shop that way?” And my answer is that you just have to put it in front of them and educate them as to why they should buy from you. Remind them their purchase is supporting an independent author and publisher.

We’ve had enough of cheap eBooks already! We have to change our view.

In terms of marketing, pretty much anything works for selling direct except for Amazon ads.

Thomas: And many of the marketing tactics work better for selling direct. If you’re running Facebook ads, you can pixel people when they visit your website and then retarget them. That’s a very advanced strategy, so don’t worry if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

But that very powerful technique is almost impossible to use on Amazon. Whereas if you’re doing it on your own website, it’s easier and more powerful. Some of the tools get better.

Joanna: Yes, and with Meta ads, you can optimize for conversions, which we cannot do on Amazon or any third-party store like Kobo or Apple because we don’t have access. But because we have access to the sale when selling direct, the Meta ads can be optimized for conversions.

But you don’t have to start there. Start with an easier marketing tactic.

What’s the first step for selling directly?

Link to Your Own Store

Joanna: If you are committed to this mindset, the first step is to change the links on your website. Probably 99% of authors link their buy buttons to Amazon only or Amazon first.

I and many other authors have started to change all the links on our websites to redirect everything to our own website store.

We found amongst the sell-direct community that the more you sell on your own store, the more you also sell on other stores. Even if you turn off your Amazon ads, for example, and redirect your marketing to your own store, lots of people will see an ad or hear about your book, and they’ll still buy it from their favorite online retailer.

You’re not giving up those sales. You can almost amplify them by changing all the links on your website to point to your store.

Utilize Content Marketing

I have 15 years’ worth of great content on my website with many links and backlinks. I’m changing all those links to point to my store. You don’t need to jump straight into advertising. Content marketing has been the basis of my business for 15 years, and it’s still the basis of my business.

Paid ads are the cream on top. They are not the bulk of my business.

Creating new content through blogging and podcasting is another way to use content marketing. One tip for podcasters is to make sure you can say your links out loud. For example, CreativePennBooks.com is my store for my nonfiction, and JFPennBooks.com is the store for my fiction. I can easily say those web addresses out loud. I don’t need to say slashes and dashes.

Good for SEO

Thomas: The other benefit of changing all those links to point to your internal store is that it’s good for search engine optimization. If your internal page has book club resources or a map for your fantasy novel, and all your buy links point to that page, you may be able to outrank Amazon for your book title. The more links you have pointing to your store, the higher you will rank.

If you outrank Amazon, people who Google your book title will suddenly start buying from you because your website appears first in the search results.

Good for Readers

Joanna: Another tip is to post a reading order. You know which book to read first, but your readers may not. Including a reading order list on your store with links to all the books is helpful. Then, you can update the back matter in your books to point to your reading order list on your website. It’s a brilliant strategy because it means people will go there and might click through and buy your other books.

Shopify integrates with Google, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Shop, and Instagram, so you can actually embed your book’s buy links. It’s like a shop within the platforms.

On my Instagram, for example, you can click through and buy the book straight away. These powerful integrations mean it’s much easier to buy direct.

Thomas: I love that because you do need to make it easy for customers because by default, the checkout process on your website is harder than checking out on Amazon. Amazon has one-click checkout. The more steps you can remove from your checkout process, the better.

I love your reading order suggestion because, as an audiobook reader, Audible is the worst for helping me know which book to read next. It rarely shows the series or the series number. If I want to binge-listen to an author’s books, I have to google the reading order.

Whether you sell directly or not, a series order page on your website is an absolute must. It’s easy to put together. If your books are only listed on Amazon, simply make a reading order list linked to your Amazon affiliate links. It’s better than nothing, and you can always change that page later to link to your own store when you have one.

Joanna: We can use BookFunnel for ebook and audiobook sales and bookvault or Lulu for print. Everything is delivered automatically. Once somebody buys, I don’t have to mail anything.

Email Marketing

Shopify can also integrate with your email marketing service.

For example, I use ConvertKit, which allows me to trigger an autoresponder based on a purchase, and it brings the buyer onto my email list. It’s a great email list builder, which we don’t get when we sell in other stores.

That autoresponder feature also allows you to

• offer automatic discount codes
• track where people have clicked from in your autoresponder series
• upsell people from free books
• upsell people to bundles

Speaking of bundles, the bigger the bundle, the more money you’ll make.

Selling Bundles

For example, I sell a 12-book bundle. If you spend $0.35 to get a click from an adand upsell readers to a $16 or $30 bundle, it’s much easier to make your money back.

Again, change your perspective from cheap or free ebooks to bundles and an average order value of $15 to $100. That’s where the proper income comes from.

Thomas: As Seth Godin says, “The problem with a race to the bottom is that you just might win.” Many authors have been frantically trying to figure out how they can race to the bottom in terms of pricing, and they’re barely making pennies by offering entire bundles for $0.99.

Brandon Sanderson wanted to try something entirely different. He wanted to sell his book for $250. He told his publisher that the people who buy his books also play video games. Collectible edition video games cost $100 or $200 and come with figurines.

His publisher blinked at him and said, “Nobody’s going to pay $250 for your book, Brandon.” But Brandon thought they would. He sold a collector’s edition of the first book in The Way of Kings series for $250, which was the cheap version. You could also get it for $500.

I was happy to buy that $250 version of his book. He raised $6 million from that Kickstarter campaign. He made $40 million on his next Kickstarter and broke all the records. He has proved to the industry that a certain kind of reader wants to buy those books.

Direct-Only Products

Joanna: Direct-only products are an important part of selling direct. For example, you can only get some of my books through my stores. They’re not available.

That’s what Brandon did. His readers could only get that version if they bought it directly from him.

Direct-First Products

If you don’t want to go that far, you can offer an ebook for sale on your store first for a few months. Take as much of that money as you can, and then publish it on the other stores.

Thomas: When you combine all these motivations, it becomes magical for sales.

Motivator 1: Support the Author

Tell your readers that when they buy from your website directly or back your Kickstarter, they’re supporting you as the author rather than Jeff Bezos.

Amazon has plenty of money, but you, as the author, need money more than Amazon. That’s the basic pitch, and it works best if readers already love you or if you’re connected with a cause or religion they support.

That pitch doesn’t work as well if you’re just some random romance author they don’t really care about as a person. The help-me-make-more-money pitch works, but it doesn’t work on everyone.

Joanna: What I’m talking about is primarily for our fans. I’m focusing on educating my existing audience to buy direct first. We’re not trying to guilt anyone. We’re encouraging a healthy ecosystem approach where independent authors, publishers, and printers are supported.

Motivator 2: Early Access

Offering early access to products might motivate a stranger to buy direct, but it works better for fans because they care more than anyone about getting early access. A stranger may prefer to see reviews before buying, so early access may not be a motivator.

But, if the only place to buy your book for the first three months is on your website, suddenly, the hassle of typing my address on your website is no hassle at all compared to the hassle of waiting for a book that all my friends are reading now.

Motivator 3: Bundles

Bundles work for fans and strangers. You might offer multiple books in a bundle. You could also say, “If you buy the hardcover for $50, you’ll also get the ebook and audiobook.” That adds a ton of value to their purchase, but it costs you almost nothing to deliver. It makes the print book seem cheaper.

Most Kickstarter campaigns bundle digital editions into all the paper editions because it makes them more appealing.

Motivator 4: Special Edition

The final motivation is the special edition which is only available through Kickstarter or on your website. It’s probably leather-bound with gold foil letters and special full-color maps. It’s expensive, and when you offer it directly, readers are motivated to buy directly from you.

Joanna: As a creator, I want to make beautiful books. I want people to have them on their shelves like you do. I’ve never been able to do it before in an effective way. This motivator is almost changing my perspective on being a creative.

I’m an author first, but I’m also an amateur photographer. I buy a lot of special hardbacks, and I have so many ideas for what I want to create. I’ve started doing spiral-bound workbooks to go with my nonfiction, which you can’t do with print-on-demand through KDP Print.

The last 15 years have focused on driving people to a big store. We’re at the beginning of the next 15 years, which will be focused on a very different business model.

Many marketing tips we share will still work with that different business model. We’re just pointing customers to a different store.

Thomas: That’s right, and it opens the playbook. It’s not hard to set up an email that triggers a month after someone buys a book and only if they have not bought the next book. That email could offer a 10% discount on the next book in the series.

You set it up once in ConvertKit, and you’re done. It only goes to people who didn’t binge your books. The only people who receive the email are those who are interested. That email can be very effective, but you can’t do it if you sell on Amazon or Barnes and Noble’s website.

Joanna: You can’t do it because you don’t have the customer’s email address.

At the moment, most of your email list is made up of people who have clicked on a link at the back of a book that’s been sold in another way. They came to your website to sign up for your free reader magnet.

We’ve been pushing reader magnets for years, and suddenly, by selling direct, I can get them to get my free book on JFPenn.com, and now I have their email. The reader magnet is actually the book itself. Thinking through why we do things is an important part of this scenario.

What about BookBub?

Joanna: You can point BookBub ads to your direct store. That’s what I’m doing now. I’m testing out BookBub ads that direct people to my Shopify store. And that’s been really, really good. You have many options for paid ads as well.

Thomas: And part of the reason it’s good is that you’re making so much more money per sale. The click-through and conversion rates don’t have to be as high for the net profits to be high. As a direct seller, you’re getting the publisher’s cut, the author’s cut, and the retailer’s cut.

You’re getting most of the bites of the apple, so you can share more of the apple with the advertiser and still have enough apple for yourself.

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Joanna: Yes. We should be transparent about costs, though. All the platforms have a cost to set up. BookFunnels is reasonably cheap, but you do need to pay for certain things. Services like Shopify and ConvertKit will cost you.

But there are a lot fewer costs than there were originally. And I find that the speed of payment and getting the customer data means you have to take a long-term approach. Many people say, “I started a direct store a week ago, and nobody’s bought anything.”

You still have to have a strategy and the determination to drive traffic to it. But if you think about the snowball rolling, every day, you’re getting new signups through your store. Every day, new readers get used to buying directly from you.

There’s also the rising tide effect. The more authors who sell direct, the more customers will get used to buying direct. It helps all of us.

What do the tools cost?

Thomas: Consider the costs when you’re putting together your strategy and choosing a tool.

Some tools have a monthly cost. Shopify has a monthly or yearly cost attached to it, which means you need to sell a certain number of books just to break even on Shopify.

Authors who do well with Shopify have multiple books and release multiple books every year. Customers constantly come to their store. With all that customer traffic, the monthly cost of Shopify won’t gobble up all your profits.

Shopify may be overkill if you’re a first-time author and haven’t sold a book to a reader.

Kickstarter will be so much better for a first-time author. It’s got all this wonderful marketing psychology built into it, and it’s a one-time thing. You sell to your friends on your list, regardless of how big it is, and then you’re done.

After that, you can be on Amazon for a while, and then you can Kickstart the next book. Once you get established, you can always set up Shopify later. If you’re looking for a bookstore tool that doesn’t have a monthly cost attached, consider Gumroad or payhip.

Those tools will take a slightly bigger percentage of the transaction because they’re not charging you monthly.

Joanna: You can also use Thrive themes on your website or WooCommerce.

The problem is if you start as a first-time author and put your books into KU until you build a following, you’ll build a following of readers who expect free books.

Much of this is starting again by reeducating our readers to buy differently. If you’re just starting, you have an advantage. I’ve been training readers for 15 years to go to all the other stores, and now I have to retrain them to come to my stores.

Thomas: And readers are changing. I used to only buy stuff from Amazon, but I’m finding myself going to Walmart.com more often, and I’m more open to buying from other kinds of sellers.

Joanna: That also accelerated during the pandemic as people learned to shop for everything online.

The brilliant thing about Shopify is that if you buy once on Shopify and your details are there, you can buy from anyone with a Shopify store, and all your details will be there. It gets closer to that one-click experience Amazon provides.

These behaviors change over time, and this is where authors need to give customers a choice. I will buy direct from authors if they tell me I can and provide a link.

Usually, authors email an Amazon link, and readers typically buy from wherever you send them. But I certainly shop a lot more on Kickstarter because there are so many cool things. I buy short story collections, whole books, games, and audio.

Don’t assume people’s behavior is stuck because they’ve always done it one way.

Thomas: Kickstarter is great because you also get the good feeling of knowing you helped make something happen. You get a feeling of ownership and contribution that you don’t get when you simply buy a book.

Joanna: The other thing I’ve learned about Kickstarter is the real power of scarcity. I hate fake scarcity. I hate it when people say, “You must buy this before the end date,” when I know they will keep selling it. That really annoys me.

But with Kickstarter, there is no fake scarcity. It is true scarcity. And I feel like it’s the first time I’ve been able to do that.

So for my next Kickstarter, Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness into Words, the Kickstarter special edition has gold foil on the hardback and a ribbon. I’ve never done gold foil and a ribbon before, and that particular version will only be sold with the Kickstarter.

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True scarcity is so important for motivating people to take action, but we haven’t had that apart from these crowdfunding platforms. They’ve been around a while, but they’re taking off for fiction since Brandon has had so much success.

How did you make a gold foil edition?

Thomas: Most indie authors only know how to make a book through Amazon KDP, and there’s no gold foil option.

Joanna: Bookvault is a company located here in the UK. I met the guys at the London Book Fair, and when I saw how amazing their stuff was, I visited their plant in Peterborough. Now they’re starting to do these other options, so I’m doing my first gold foil and ribbon because that’s what they’re starting to offer.

Again, the benefit of Kickstarter is that you know the number of books you want to order. If you have a good relationship with a printer who’s agreed to print the books when you want them printed, it can work.

I’m going to the plant to sign the Kickstarted books, and I rarely do signed editions.

I’ll sign them all at the factory, and then they ship them out. Not everyone can do that, but you could do an unsigned edition. They’re looking at offering those metal corners on books, and they’re exploring other options authors might want for beautiful books.

Thomas: For special editions, I have been recommending working with a local printer for years. I have gotten incredibly positive feedback from authors who’ve fallen in love with their local printers. It’s amazing how much better you get treated when you’re interacting with a human being rather than interacting with an impersonal website.

A five-minute phone conversation is way better than reading a million FAQ pages on a website trying to figure out one technical detail for your book. And you may be surprised to learn there is a printer near you. The company that prints direct mail can also print books on the same machines.

Joanna: My goal for the next few years is to get deep into how to make beautiful books.

Let’s face it: we’re in an age of AI. How can you stand out in an incredibly busy market? It’s been busy for years, and it will get much busier. I’m sorry to say having an ebook or a print-on-demand paperback is no longer special.

How can you give your readers something beautiful and special that stands out? What can you provide that they can give as a gift? What will become a conversation piece? We have to think of original ways to stand out.

Marketing is about giving people things they want. It’s not about shoving stuff at them. It’s about attracting people and saying, “Look, you want this book for these reasons. Look how beautiful it is.”

So many people have emailed me to say, “Oh my goodness! You’re doing a ribbon in your book? I love a ribbon.” That’s book lovers for you.

Two beautiful books lie on the couch in the background of a beautiful bedspread.

Thomas: It’s not just book lovers. We got my four-year-old a CD player because we want to control what kinds of things she listens to. We didn’t want to give her a tablet with access to the internet. But the ritual of taking the CD out of the jewel case, putting it in the player, and punching the buttons is a delightful experience for her. A certain kind of person will pay money for a vinyl record because they love the ritual of taking the vinyl out and putting the needle down. Interacting with it in that real way is valuable.

As more things go digital, people will begin to treasure the real and tactile.

For example, younger readers often want paper books. You probably think that young people want the high-tech thing and older people want paper, but, in general, the opposite is true.

Somebody with old eyes wants the large font on the Kindle so they can read it. Younger readers prefer paper. They’d rather pay a bit more and own fewer but nicer books and have them as artifacts they can put behind their camera or show off in their apartment.

You’re not adding foil just because it makes you more money. You’re adding it because it makes the book beautiful. It makes the world a more beautiful place, and everybody wins.

You’ll still have the ebook people can buy and read on their Kindle. But more people are choosing something special.

Joanna: I have a bookshelf downstairs in my house where I like to display my books. I try and buy hardbacks that I want to keep because they last longer and I like them. I often listen to an audiobook, and if I want to keep it, I’ll buy the hardback edition even though I might not touch it for years.

I want to remember that book, and I don’t remember all the digital stuff.

Hopefully, we’ve given people loads of reasons to move away from free or cheap eBooks and into a world where our work could be more valuable again.

I hate to think of how we’ve devalued our work, especially as fiction authors. We’ve done it for good reasons, and many of us have made good money that way. But we’re in a new world now, and this is the first step.

How do you do fulfillment?

Thomas: One thing that keeps people from selling direct is fulfillment. If someone buys a copy of my book from my website, I have to take it from the shelf, put it in a box, drive it to the post office, and wait in line for 30 minutes to mail it.

Suddenly, making an extra $5 selling it myself doesn’t seem worth it.

So, how do you navigate the fulfillment side of things?

Joanna: I use BookFunnel for ebook and audiobook fulfillment and bookvault.app for print fulfillment. When someone orders a print book from my store, the order goes to bookvault. They print it and mail it, and I get the money. I don’t do any shipping.

Bookvault prints in the UK and the US. You can also look at Lulu.

Shopify, WooCommerce, and many others are apps you can plug in. You can do print-on-demand merchandise and print-on-demand books. With KDP, if someone orders your book on Amazon, they’ll print one book and send it to the customer. Bookvault’s print-on-demand works the same way, so there is no issue with fulfillment.

That’s what made the difference to me. I was never going to do anything that involved the post office. So, as soon as I learned bookvault would print on demand and ship, it became the missing link for Shopify. I was all in.

Thomas: I don’t recommend doing your own fulfillment, except for maybe after a Kickstarter, when you buy some local high school students pizza and have them help you package books for a day.

But fulfilling orders on an ongoing basis can be a real drag. You can’t go on vacation, and you’re tied to the fact that orders can come in at any time, and you have to pay to warehouse your books.

But bookvault simplifies the supply chain because the book is printed and shipped, and the warehousing piece is eliminated.

What are some mistakes that you see people make?

Overengineering the Store

Joanna: One is overengineering the store.

For my first store, I used the same basic theme I’ve always used from WordPress. It doesn’t have to be that hard, but you do need to have a desire to run a business. You’ll have to work out some kinks and spend time upscaling, but once you’ve built it, it’s a machine. You can feed your new books into the machine.

Authors can check out my blog post, Selling Books Direct With Shopify: The Minimum Viable Store.

Failing to Make a Marketing Plan

The other mistake is failing to understand that you must market those books. You have to think about how to get traffic to your store to sell books.

Disregarding Sales Tax Regulations

Thomas: Another potential mistake is not paying attention to sales taxes. I know this differs in the UK, where you have VAT taxes. In the United States, we have over 500 taxing jurisdictions for sales tax.

Joanna: Yes, that is a massive hurdle. People say, “I don’t want to deal with the tax,” but most global jurisdictions have a threshold, including your sales tax in your different states.

For example, it’s very unlikely you’ll hit the threshold for sales tax in India. If you do, that means you sold a lot of books, so celebrate and pay your tax!

You have to be doing some pretty big sales numbers to pay taxes in some countries. And that’s why I said you have to decide you’re running a business.

I deal with European digital VAT laws, and they’re pretty bloomin’ annoying. But you can set it up and run a report for your accountant.

Do your research. I probably spent about four hours researching my tax-specific situation, and now it’s done. All of these things are figure-out-able.

Make a decision, learn how to do it, and then upscale.

Thomas: If you’re concerned about the taxes, some ecommerce stores will become the seller of record, which means they handle the taxes. Gumroad and payhip do that.

If you’re using a tool like Shopify, WooCommerce, or TaxJar through Stripe, they will calculate the taxes and possibly file the tax returns for you. In the US, some states don’t have sales taxes, and others have complicated sales taxes.

If you’re in California, pay for Stripe’s tax service. It will be easier than dealing with California’s sales tax laws, which recently underwent some sort of change.

Don’t let the tax question keep you from selling direct. It’s just a cost to work into your budget. Remember, you have more bites of the apple, so you potentially have room in your budget to pay for tax help.

Any final tips or encouragement?

Joanna: Selling direct gives you more control as an independent author. Who would have thought we’d finally be independent? You can get more profit per sale, more customer data, and faster payment.

You don’t have to stop doing everything else, but for me, my focus has changed to Shopify and Kickstarter. Everything else comes under that.

I’m a fan of all the big online partners, but ultimately, I’m the author. We are creators, and we are independent businesspeople. We have to look after ourselves.

This is how we look after our readers and think ahead for the next 15 years. Who do you want to be in control of your author business?

Thomas: Well said. You are an adult. It’s a free country.

You’re responsible for your own actions in taking responsibility for selling directly. You don’t have to do it, but if you do, some really cool rewards can come from it.

Check out The Creative Penn Podcast. Joanna has been interviewing guests for over a decade. You can listen to my interview on that podcast. It’s a great place to get started.

If you want to go indie, listen to Joanna’s podcast. She’s not afraid to get into the nitty-gritty details of the technical parts of going indie, but she also talks big-picture stuff. It’s an excellent podcast.

• The Creative Penn Podcast
• The Creative Penn Website

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Related Episodes

• How to be a Healthy Writer with Joanna Penn
• Content Marketing With Joanna Penn
• Productivity Tips for Authors
• How to Diversify Your Income as an Author

The post How to Sell Books Directly to Readers with Joanna Penn appeared first on Author Media.

Success in publishing requires more than just writing a great book. It requires people. 

• People to talk about your book
• People to buy your book
• People to publish your book
• People to give you feedback about your book
• People to recommend your book

People. People. People. 

Some authors struggle in their careers because they are isolated. They sit alone in a room typing away, hoping the internet will magically find them people to read their book.

But the internet won’t do that. The internet will bombard your potential readers with a million distractions to keep them from reading or even hearing about your book. 

How do you connect with people who can help make your book a success? 

My grandparents’ generation called this “winning friends and influencing people.” My generation calls it “networking.”

One key tool of networking is your pitch. Your pitch is a short summary of what your book is about and why it would be interesting to read. 

So, how do you win friends and influence people? 

How can your pitch help you network?

I asked Lindsey Hughes, a pitch master. She helps writers craft compelling pitches that allow writers to connect with people who can help them succeed. She is a former Hollywood development executive, who began her career reading scripts for Robert Zemeckis and Kathryn Bigelow, worked under Michael Eisner at Walt Disney Feature Animation, and developed projects for John H. Williams, producer of the billion dollar Shrek franchise.

How would you define networking?

Thomas: Networking is such a corporate buzzword. How would you define networking?

Lindsey: Networking is simply “making work friends.” You don’t get anywhere without people helping you, and you can’t find people to help you if you’re not out there talking to people.

I can teach you some tools that will help you feel less nervous about talking to people, regardless of the person or subject.

Thomas: I find it helpful to think of networking in terms of what I can give the other person, not what I can get out of the relationship. If I’m thinking about networking in terms of how it benefits me, the relationship feels weird and manipulative.  

Instead, I focus on getting to know the other person. I’m an ideas person, so I love to talk about ideas and discover which ideas interest people. I subtract myself from the conversation, at least initially, or find a way that I can help the other person.

Sometimes, you can help someone simply by making an introduction. One of the best ways to use networking is by connecting one friend who needs something with another friend who has that thing.  

Lindsey: We call those people connectors. I am a connector, and I love getting people jobs or introducing them to agents because I like helping people. We can approach networking thinking, “I’m going to work on connecting this person with something they need or want.”

The flip side of networking and connecting is listening.

When you meet someone and introduce yourself, you talk about yourself for a minute, but then you flip it around and start asking them questions.

Thomas: One of the easiest ways to serve someone is to truly listen and be interested in them. It seems so basic, but most people go through an entire day without having anybody really listen to them.

As a society, we are the loneliest we’ve ever been. Statistics show that something like 40% of people don’t have a single close friend. It used to be the circle of friends was getting smaller, but now, for a lot of people. They have no circle. They have zero close friends.

Be someone who listens to others and asks good questions. Then, ask good follow-up questions that demonstrate you’re really listening.

Lindsey: You don’t know what a difference a three-minute conversation might make in someone’s life. Maybe it’s no big deal to you, but being a kind listener is a big deal to others.

This weekend I was in a restaurant with my dad. As he’s gotten older, he’s become chattier. He wants to talk to everyone in the restaurant, and he especially likes talking to the fathers of little blonde girls because they remind him of me when I was little.  

We were out having a father-daughter meal, and there was a dad with a blonde little girl. My dad stopped and talked to them. That dad came up to me later and said, “Your dad is so sweet. He just made me feel so much better. My wife passed away in June, and I feel so overwhelmed. He made me feel so much better about being a father.”

That conversation where my dad was just being friendly might have changed that man’s whole trajectory of his life.

Honest conversations build relationships. I love people and find them interesting, so I’m excited to find out what makes them tick. I love hearing about their lives and screenplays because I’m a story geek.

If you approach things that way, you’ll be surprised at the results, and you’ll feel more confident talking to people as well. You’ll enjoy it more, and it won’t feel like a chore.

Thomas: Some people find it scary to talk to strangers in a restaurant. Most of us still have a bit of those insecure middle school feelings that make us afraid that people are judging us. We haven’t fully grown out of that yet.

Lindsey: If you are networking, you’re probably at an event like a writers convention or meetup, and everybody is there to meet people, so it’s far less scary.

I’m not negating anyone’s real fear. I know that overcoming that fear requires practice, but talking with strangers becomes slightly less frightening at an event where everybody is there to meet people, and everyone feels nervous.

People are naturally more friendly in that environment.

What is a cocktail pitch?

Lindsey: I teach people how to make a cocktail pitch. Other people call it an elevator pitch. I think “cocktail pitch” sounds more fun because it’s what you say to someone at a cocktail party when they ask what you do or what you’re working on.

Writers are notorious for answering the question, “What do you do?” with “I’m a writer,” and they’re half apologetic or embarrassed when they say it.

I used to work in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, where you can’t throw a rock without hitting five writers.

I was attending these networking events for writers and creators, and I’d see writers say, “I’m a writer,” and they’d be embarrassed and look down without making eye contact.

Thomas: And here you are, the person who takes the pitches for screenplays, the very person that they’re at the event to talk to!

Lindsey: Yes. I never met a writer who said, “I’m a writer, and I write these kinds of stories.”

I encourage all writers to craft a confident answer that tells the person you’re a novelist and then briefly explains what you write. My favorite example is from a writer named Ines Johnson, and she says, “Hi! I’m Ines, and I write kissing books.”

I love the way she says, “kissing books.” She didn’t say romances.

It doesn’t have to be elaborate, but your answer should tell a bit about

• What you do
• What you write
• Your sass/personality

That short sentence will help me remember you, your personality, and what you write.

The easiest way to figure out your answer is to look for commonalities in all your books. If you’re not published, just look at all your ideas, even the ones you don’t think you’ll have time to write.

Next, look at the connective tissue between your books or ideas that make all of them work together, even if they’re in different genres.

Maybe there’s a theme. Come up with a description about what kind of writer you are based on the theme or common denominator in all your books and ideas.

That is how you introduce yourself. Your brief introduction will take you from conversation killer to conversation starter because people will want to know more about your stories and how you got started.

Thomas: It’s not enough to just say your genre. You want to say what makes your books different from others in that genre. The descriptor “kissing books” is a great example. In the romance genre, there is a continuum from erotica on one end to clean Amish romance on the other, where the couple waves at each other at the end of the book.

Ines Johnson’s description specifies where her books are on the romance continuum, which then helps readers know if she writes what they like to read.

The reader makes that decision. You, as the author, don’t make the decision, but you help them discover whether they’ll like your books.

For example, if you want to get my attention, put the word “dragon” in your pitch, and I’ll say, “Keep talking.”

Your pitch will resonate with different people, but you want to give them a little bit more than just the genre. Be as specific about your genre as possible.

However, if you write a really specific genre, like LitRPG, that may be enough to make people curious.

• “What’s LitRPG?”
• “I love LitRPG!”
• “I hate LitRPG.”

Those are the only three factions people fall in.

Lindsey: The secret to pitching is selling, not telling. You’re trying to sell your story because you want people to read your book. But you don’t need to tell every single detail. That would make their eyes glaze over after a minute or two.

Tell them enough to get them excited about it.

The secret to pitching is selling, not telling.

Lindsey Hughes

Thomas: If you tell too much, you’ll spoil the book. The purpose of the pitch is to convince someone that they want the book, not to tell them so much about it that they don’t need to buy it.

Lindsey: Right. And that’s a difficult task for writers because they love their stories, and they’ve lived with their characters for years. They want to tell you every detail of the magic system and explain the whole family tree.

Thomas: Stick to telling about the protagonist and maybe the antagonist. If it’s a romance, you get to talk about the two main people in the romance. Keep the number of characters (and their names) in your pitch to a minimum. Don’t mention the quirky friend character in the pitch.

Project Cocktail Pitch

Step 1: Format and Genre

Lindsey: Less is more when you’re pitching. The first step in crafting your cocktail pitch is your format and your genre.

Your format is a novel, but you can still remind people that it’s a cozy mystery or a twisty political thriller. Mentioning the genre before you launch into your story automatically grounds the listener or the reader in your story.

They automatically know where you’re going, and they have expectations. They’ll be able to follow what you say next because they know the tropes.

If they tune out or say, “It’s not for me,” don’t take it personally. Instead, ask, “What do you write?”

Thomas: That’s the right approach. If somebody is bored listening to you, stop talking and ask a question. You don’t want them to see you as a boring person. Stop talking and ask a question about them.

Your goal in a conversation is to serve and bless the other person. If their goal is to serve and bless you, the conversation goes back and forth in a beautiful way.

If you’re both trying to serve yourselves, then it falls apart. All of society falls apart!

In networking, you’re trying to connect to the other person as a human. Maybe that person isn’t a good fit as a reader, but they might still be a great friend. I have friends who don’t think Brandon Sanderson is a good writer and don’t like his books. But we’re still friends.

Lindsey: It’s actually a good idea to have author friends who aren’t in your genre. You can always learn from other kinds of stories. Include a wide variety of people in your author circle.

Thomas: Yes. You want at least one friend who’s nerdier than you and one friend who’s more personable than you.

Step 2: Touchstones

Lindsey: One film and entertainment business trick is to use touchstones. You’ve heard people say, “This movie is X meets Y.” It seems a little cliché, but the technique is still used in Hollywood because it works.

Think about the touchstones for your book, but choose TV and movies for comparison instead of other books. Sadly, people are more familiar with movies and television. We all share a wider collective experience with TV and movies than with books.

Brandon Sanderson is huge in some circles, but many people don’t know who he is. However, everyone’s heard of the Avengers, even if they haven’t seen an Avengers movie.

Choose universal touchstones.

How do I use touchstones in my pitch?

There are three main ways to use touchstones.

X meets Y

One of my favorite examples is “Frozen meets the Avengers.” That makes me think of fairytale superheroes. That’s cool, and I want you to tell me more.

Change the Setting

The other way is to take a touchstone and put it in a different setting.

For example, “Frozen in high school.” Again, I know what you’re describing.

Use Other People’s Audiences

You can describe your book using audiences. For example, “If you liked Frozen and The Princess Bride, you’re going to like my book.”

Frozen is a fairy tale about two sisters, and The Princess Bride is a romantic comedy. I like both of those, so I want to hear more about it.

Step 3: Emotional Hook

The emotional hook is the hardest bit of a cocktail pitch because it seems a bit amorphous, but you must think about it. Emotion sells, and you want to make your character’s struggle relatable to your audience.

There are three ways to make your character’s struggle resonate with your audience. You can establish a metaphor or an archetype or ask a question.

A good example of a question that facilitates resonance is, “Do you remember when you were afraid of the dark as a kid, and you didn’t want to look under your bed?”

Anyone who hears that will answer “yes.” We’ve all experienced those moments when we were young, thinking something scary was in our bedroom. That’s the emotional hook.

Now, notice we’ve already covered a lot of ground, but we haven’t even gotten to the concept of your story yet, and people are already intrigued.

Step 4: The Main Character

You’ve given a lot of information about your story, and we know a bit about your book. Now, we’re finally getting to the nitty-gritty, which is your main character and their emotional drive.

My favorite example of all time is Katniss from The Hunger Games.

“Katniss is an ordinary 16-year-old girl whose selfless sacrifice to save her sister’s life starts a revolution.”

I hear that, and I actually don’t need to hear the rest of the pitch because I’m already curious about at least three things:

• Why did she have to save her sister’s life?
• Did she save her?
• How did the revolution start?
• Did she win?

At that point, people want to know more.

Thomas: The power of curiosity is in the tension between what people know and what they don’t know. Your pitch must be poised at the edge.

If you’re talking about something they already know, they’re not interested. On the other hand, if you’re talking about something so unfamiliar that they have to learn new things to become curious, then they’re not interested.

If I asked, “Do you know who Magneto’s daughter is? It’s actually the Scarlet Witch.” If you said, “Who’s Magneto? Who’s the Scarlet Witch?” then I’d know you weren’t familiar with X-Men or Avengers.

You have to know your audience. No pitch works for everyone. The key is to find the place where you can make somebody curious.

Touchstones, as you mentioned, force you to connect your book with something familiar that people already understand. Touchstones help close the curiosity gap, which leads to “tell me more.”

Lindsey: You may get to stop your pitch there, but there are two more parts you can use if necessary.

Step 5: Story Appetizer

The story appetizer is three or four more sentences about your main character that describe what they’re trying to accomplish and how they do it.

Don’t list every character or overburden your listener with a bunch of details. Give just enough. I would avoid adding other characters in this portion. Focus on Katniss, if you will.

Even though Gale is an interesting character, and there’s a romantic triangle and an evil emperor, you don’t need all that in your pitch. Focus on limiting the details, because the moment you start giving more details, your listener’s eyes will glaze over.

Thomas: Picture your reader or listener as a glass. You’re pouring knowledge about your book into that glass.

If you’re just talking about Katniss, you can fill up the whole glass with information about her, which makes your listener curious to learn more about Katniss.

But if you start pouring a bunch of information about Gale into the glass, you’re using up space for information about Katniss. Just as a glass can only hold a certain amount of water, your reader can only hold a certain amount of information. The more you water down Katniss, the more you water down your pitch.

A good pitch focuses on the most interesting element.

Lindsey: Yes. Focus on the main character and the main emotion.

Step 6: Cliffhanger 

The end of your pitch should emphasize the emotional stakes of your story. I like to end with the question, “Can they do it?”

Can Katniss save her sister’s life? Can she win the revolution? It’s a great way to end your cocktail pitch and get to the “tell me more” or the “click and buy.”

Thomas: That question works best if you’ve done a great job demonstrating the stakes. What is the result of failure? Her need to save her sister’s life is emotionally more powerful than “saving the world.” You can’t visualize saving the world, but you can picture a dead sister and the impact that would have on a family.

This is also where you can include the element of “the ticking clock.” Not all genres have a clock, but if you can establish a sense of urgency in the pitch, the question “Can they do it?” becomes more powerful.

Lindsey: Every story can have a sense of urgency. Will the lovers get together? That can be life-changing and, therefore, urgent.

Putting it All Together: An Example

Lindsey: Here’s an example pitch I love:

“This animated movie is Dirty Dozen meets The Big Bang Theory. This is the age-old struggle of the geeks versus the jocks and how it feels to know you can be the hero and always be overlooked.

Our story takes place in the world of holiday icons, where Santa and the Easter Bunny are the cool kids. But when they’re kidnapped, it’s up to the unsung holiday icons, led by Earl the Groundhog from Groundhog Day, to save Christmas.

Will our ragtag group of heroes be able to rescue Santa in time and get him back to the North Pole?”

Thomas: I love the stakes for that target audience. I have small children, and the idea of not having Christmas is perhaps the greatest possible tragedy. That pitch demonstrates some really high stakes and a good sense of urgency.

Lindsey: I like to use this example because it’s got the archetypes of the geeks versus the jocks and the emotion we all know of feeling overlooked. Even people who were the jocks feel like geeks. It’s got all the urgency and hallmarks of relatability and root-ability. I can root for Earl the Groundhog.

Use Your Genre’s Tropes

People love genres for the tropes. You’re not selling out or being uncreative by using tropes. People expect and want the tropes of the genre. Use your creativity to put your spin on the expected tropes.

Thomas: Tropes are like ingredients. When you’re reading a restaurant menu, you see the name of the dish and a few of the key ingredients that give the dish its flavor.

If you try to write a story without tropes, it’s like saying you’ve cooked a dish without ingredients. A story has tropes. Use them on purpose because people are looking for certain tropes.

Just as people use a menu to choose which dish to order, people look for tropes to help them choose which book to buy.

Lindsey: You love your story, and you should be excited to share it. If it’s not someone’s cup of tea, that’s okay, but you might meet someone who will be your first forever fan.

The flip side of that is to be excited to hear other people’s stories and what they’re working on.

How would you advise a writer who’s afraid of ridicule and judgment?

Thomas: How would you advise someone who is shy and afraid of being judged or ridiculed? The echoes of middle school are pounding in their head.

Practice

Lindsey: Start with practice.

Practice the personal pitch about what you write, and then practice your cocktail pitch about the book you want to talk about at this event. After you hone both pitches, run them by a friend or two.

Thomas: One of the things that was helpful for me was realizing that nobody cares about me. When you walk into a room and sense that everyone is looking at you, criticizing what you’re wearing, you’re experiencing the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect is the tendency to overestimate how much other people notice about us.

In reality, none of those people are thinking about me at all. They are all thinking about themselves, and they’re wondering what I’m thinking about them. Most people think about themselves most of the time. Once you realize that, you can take comfort in knowing that no one is staring at you.

When you start talking to people and asking them questions, it puts them at ease, and you start to feel more comfortable, too.

Instead of thinking about yourself all the time, consider how you can serve others. If you’re focused on being a blessing, you’ll feel less nervous because it’s no longer about you. It makes things easier psychologically.

Lindsey: I always tell myself and others, “You may be the answer to someone’s prayers.” They may have been praying, “I need a fairytale vampire novel,” and you walk right up to them, and that’s what your story is.

There’s probably someone in that room who has been hoping to meet you, and they just don’t know it.

Thomas: And maybe you’re not the answer, but you know someone who is, and you can connect them. Then, you have the privilege of making an introduction.

Have Fun

Lindsey: Have fun, and don’t take yourself so seriously.

View every interaction as an opportunity to practice and improve and to become more confident and less shy. You’ll meet and serve more people.

Thomas: That mentality relieves so much pressure.

I’ve noticed authors often are really nervous at writers conferences when they’re trying to get an agent or an editor because they feel so much pressure.

I’ve also observed authors who are scheduled to go to a conference, and in the meantime, they sign a contract with a publisher or decide to go indie. When that pressure is relieved, they can enjoy the conference so much more. They can talk to agents as people because they’re not trying to get something out of the relationship. They no longer have the sense that “This conversation will make or break my career.”

The more you relax and enjoy the event, and the less pressure you assign to a single conversation, the easier it’ll be.

I encourage every author to attend a conference to meet other people in the industry. You’ll meet editors, agents, indie book cover designers, website designers, and author friends. The only way to get good at making friends and connections is to practice.

Go to a conference before you need to so that your first conference isn’t the one your book depends on. Don’t wait to attend a conference until your book is ready. Go sooner than that. Get some practice. Build friendships.

Lindsey: People can smell desperation, and it’s the biggest turn-off on the planet. People can also smell inauthenticity. If you’re up in someone’s grill because you’re trying to get something from them, it won’t work.

That’s another reason to just be yourself.

Don’t Wait for Conferences

Lindsey: You don’t have to wait for conferences because there are meetups.

I live in Houston, and I recently attended a meeting of the League of Romance Writers. I was so excited to find them in Houston.

It was a smaller gathering of 20 people, but there were opportunities to connect, serve, and practice. Smaller meetups are a great way to make author friends locally. If there isn’t a local group, start one.

Thomas: The other advantage of a regular group meeting is that you make deeper friendships because you see the same people regularly.

If you want to hone your personal introduction and your book pitch, connect with Lindsey Hughes:

ThePitchMaster.com

Lindsey’s Cheat Sheet for Crafting Your Cocktail Pitch

If you want a chance to practice developing your pitch and your networking, check out the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference.

Thursday night before the conference, we’ll host a special patrons-only ice cream social. You don’t have to have a conference ticket to attend the ice cream social. You just have to be a patron. It will be a great opportunity to meet other writers.

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Featured Patrons

Kamuela Kaneshiro, author of Legends from the Pacific: Book 1 (Affiliate Link)            

Looking for something spooky to read this October? 

Kamuela Kaneshiro has spent years collecting ghost stories and folktales from all around the Pacific. Confront the Philippine’s shape-shifting vampire, battle the dreaded Wendigo, and more! You may not want to read this book in the dark. You’ve been warned!    

You can become a Novel MarketingPatron here.

Related Episodes

• How to Convince Readers to Read *Your* Book Next
• How to Craft a Compelling Elevator Pitch for Your Book
• How to Create an Elevator Pitch So Good That People will Stop the Elevator to Hear More
• How to Pitch Your Novel
• Write Bestselling Pitches by Avoiding These 10 Copywriting Mistakes

The post How to Win Friends and Pitch Your Book appeared first on Author Media.

Thomas: This is Novel Marketing!

Jim: I’m James L. Rubart

Thomas: I’m Thomas Umstattd Jr. 

Jim: And this is the show for writers who want to become bestselling authors. 

Thomas Umstattd, Jr.: That’s how we began the first episode of Novel Marketing, and today, we are celebrating ten years of the podcast!

 If you’re new to Novel Marketing, you might not know that for many years, our podcast was cohosted by James L. Rubart (Jim) and me. Jim went on to become a bestselling, Christy Award-winning, audiobook narrating sensation, but he still occasionally joins me on the podcast. 

It’s important to celebrate these milestones and to look back on what has changed in the publishing and marketing industries in ten years. We’ve learned some lessons the hard way, and there are things we would have done differently. It’s easy to look forward and guess about the future, but a little reflection on the past goes a long way. Understanding where we came from helps us know where we’re headed. 

Listener Jenny Fratzke suggested we celebrate a decade of Novel Marketing by sharing highlights from the last ten years, and we thought that was a great idea. 

The first episode of Novel Marketing went live on Sep 30, 2013, and today, we’re looking back on the top episodes from each year of the last ten years. Jim and I have each selected what we believe to be the most important episode from each year of the podcast.

Jim: As I reviewed the episodes, I realized that some of them are completely irrelevant today, but others are as relevant today as they were when we recorded them.

2013

Quick Facts:

• 11 Episodes
• No Interviews
• 15 Minutes Long
• Weekly 

Jim’s Most Important Episode: The Secret to Getting People to Love You

Most people know that I’m a Jesus follower, and there’s a Bible verse that basically says you can have all the Facebook followers in the world, you can be a bestselling author, and you can have all the awards, but if you do not have love, you have nothing (See 1 Corinthians 13:2).

In publishing and marketing, you have to connect with people. If you want your career to be a success, you have to get people to love you. This episode explains how to make that happen. It was one of those episodes that’s still relevant today.

Honorable Mention: 7 Things Santa Can Teach Authors About Book Marketing (originally published in 2013.)

Thomas’ Most Important Episode: Do Authors Still Need Websites?

It was our second episode, and we were combating the marketing guru’s advice of that day, which said authors didn’t need websites. The reasoning went like this: Because Google+ was so good at ranking on Google and because Facebook was so good at connecting you with your readers, a website was a waste of time and money.

The marketing gurus were saying, “You only need social media,” but we were saying, “That’s terrible advice!” And we were right. If you built your platform on Google+ in 2013, somebody ought to be playing a sad violin for you.

2014

Quick Facts:

• 42 episodes.
• 6 Interviews.
• A tree fell through Jim’s roof, which facilitated a career transformation for Jim.
• Hosted our first Q&A Extravaganza, which now happens in our patrons-only episodes. 

Thomas’ Most Important Episode: How to Create a Breakthrough Author Brand: Step 1

This episode was the first in a series of three episodes that were the beginning of my branding system. The three steps eventually became:

1. Look in the Mirror: Identify your strengths, weaknesses, and uniqueness.
2. Look at Your Reader: Discover who your reader is and what they need and want.
3. Look Through Your Readers: Discover what your readers say about you.

There are now four steps (Step 4: Look in Your Reader’s Mirror), but in 2014, I hadn’t come up with the fourth one yet.

Jim’s Most Important Episode: What to Include in an Author Newsletter

If the first step to selling more books is loving other people and finding champions, then the second step is to communicate with them. To communicate with readers, authors need to start writing a newsletter. But what do we say to those people we’re trying to love? What do I write in a newsletter to people who don’t love me back yet?

You’ve revisited this topic over the years because it’s important.

Honorable Mention: How to Create an Elevator Pitch So Good That People Will Stop the Elevator to Hear More and How to Start a Mastermind Group.

2015

Quick Facts:

• 14 Episodes
• First “Bonus Episode”
• First Real Marketing 101 Episode: 5 Ps of Novel Marketing. (Thomas rebranded episode 1 as a Marketing 101 episode.)
• Thomas’ blog post about dating went viral.
• Jim was rebuilding his house and moving.
• This was the worst year for the podcast in terms of topics and quality. It was a tumultuous year.

Thomas’ Most Important Episode: Where to Spend Your Marketing Money

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That was a strategic episode about how to prioritize. I started teaching authors to stop asking, “Will this help me sell more books?” Because holding a cardboard sign on a street corner will help you sell a couple more books. But the real question is, “What is your best alternative, and what’s your next best alternative for selling more books?” I wanted authors to start comparing those and identifying which would provide the best ROI. 

Jim’s Most Important Episode: How to Grow Your Email List from 0 to 10,000

This was the year we started preaching the importance of building your email list. We wanted authors to spend most of their marketing time building a communication channel they owned, namely, an email list.

Honorable Mention: Powerful Marketing Lessons from Taylor Swift. I didn’t know she’d still be so popular in 2023!

2016

Quick Facts:

• 18 Episodes
• Thomas worked as the marketing director for a traditional publisher.
• We had a big Focus on making money and had lots of money-themed episodes. 

Thomas’ Most Important Episode: Enclave Files

In 2016, we almost had a theme of how to be a career author and how to make money with your writing. In the Enclave Files episode, I talked about what I was doing as a marketing director, what was working, what was not working, what experiments we did, and what lessons we learned.

Jim’s Most Important Episode:  Seven Website Visitors Every Author Needs to Thrill

I learned a lot from listening to Thomas on this episode. I was so impressed he was teaching us to think of distinct types of readers and to address their needs and wants on a website.

Honorable Mention: How to Write a Crazy Cool Author Bio

Second Honorable Mention: How to Use the Power of Video to Engage More Readers

Thomas: Video was just starting to explode in 2016. YouTube had been thriving for ten years, but the ability to go live on Facebook was in its heyday. It was a great way to elevate your platform. Live video, especially webinars, is still valid and useful for connecting with your readers. But disregard everything I said about Facebook in that episode because it has completely changed.

2017

Quick Facts:

• 25 Episodes
• Jim’s laptop died, and we wanted to buy him a new one.
• We launched the 5-Year Plan to Become a Bestselling Author
• Thomas purchased his SM7B microphone.
• Thomas and Margaret got married. 
• Thomas started hosting a radio show.

In 2017, we started improving the show’s quality. I got my first good microphone, and we started pivoting toward indie authors. When we first started Novel Marketing, we were squarely focused on traditionally published authors. Now, we’ve swung the other way. We do more episodes for indies than for traditionally published authors, but most of our topics apply to both.

Thomas’ Most Important Episode: 10 Things Every Book Cover Needs

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That episode has been popular. People continue to link to the blog post, and many new authors use it as a guide to create a good book cover. If you’re new to publishing, it’s hard to know what’s missing from your book cover. But readers notice subtle omissions, and they’ll immediately become suspicious of your self-published book.

Jim’s Most Important Episode: How to Write Bestselling Back Cover Copy

I’ve been in traditional publishing for most of my career, and I’ve discovered that even traditional publishers don’t have great back cover copy writers. It’s a skill you must at least understand so you can communicate with your back cover copy writer. 

Honorable Mention: 10 Things Every Book Cover Needs

2018

Quick Facts:

• 51 Episodes (First full year to release a weekly episode)
• Launched the Creative Funding Show
• Launched the Christian Publishing Show
• Thomas worked as a literary agent.
• Many episodes from 2018 have been turned into 91,000 words of blog posts.
• Recorded a Recap Episode. 
• Started our Patreon
• Thomas and Margaret had a Baby!
• First year of the Book Launch Blueprint

In hindsight, I had way too much going on, and I would not realize it until the following year.

Thomas’ Most Important Episode: Why Facebook is Overrated for Book Marketing. 

This episode marks the first time I started taking shots at Facebook. I wasn’t fully against it yet, but I was leaning that way. 

The more I used Facebook and the more I looked at the numbers, the less enchanted with Facebook I became. I discovered that Facebook wasn’t very effective, and people were giving it more hype than it deserved.

Jim’s Most Important Episode: How to Create a Reader (Lead) Magnet

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Creating reader magnets is a skill you will use throughout your career. It’s so important for building your email list and serving your readers. It can really set you apart from other authors. 

Honorable Mention: 127 – How to Connect with Anyone in the World  

Jim: When people like you, the rules change. You never know who you know that knows somebody you want to know.

Thomas: Learning how to make good friends with authors and industry professionals often separates successful authors from those who can’t figure out why things aren’t working out. It’s often because they’re not building relationships. Nobody trusts them because they don’t know them. 

2019

• 51 Episodes
• Year of Thomas’ breakdown.
• Jim left, and Thomas went solo.
• Shauna started doing blog post versions of the new episodes and select older episodes. 
• 102,000 words in Novel Marketing blog posts.

Thomas’ Most Important Episode: Focus, Pruning, and Why Novel Marketing is About to Change

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I was doing far too much in 2018. I was doing too many episodes and too many jobs. I was married, and we had a baby. We were starting to see great results from the Novel Marketing courses, but interacting with students and maintaining the courses was a huge investment of time. I tell the story of my breakdown in this episode, and at the end of that year, I pruned many of my responsibilities. 

Jim’s Most Important Episode: How to Create a Design Brief for Your Book Cover

Thomas approached this topic with his analytical mind and made the episode very valuable. We presented it to a highly intelligent, competent author we knew, and he said, “This is a lifesaver!”

Thomas: That was one of the first episodes that came with a worksheet. We started experimenting with creating documents that were attached to the podcast topic. People could download the document and fill it out like a worksheet. This episode has a design brief you can fill out and share with your cover designer.

2020

• 45 Episodes (Thomas started taking weeks off.)
• 12 Patrons-only episodes
• 57 Episodes in total.
• 161,000 words in Novel Marketing blog posts.
• Started the Marketing Psychology series.

Thomas’ Most Important Episode(s): 

• How to Make Your Book More Popular (Marketing Psychology: Social Proof)How to Price Your Book Using Marketing Psychology
• How to Use Scarcity & Ubiquity to Make Your Book Irresistible (Marketing Psychology)
• How to Create Urgency to Buy Your Book (Marketing Psychology)

It has been fun to focus on marketing psychology. Marketing gurus might tell you what to do, but they rarely share the reason behind why it works. If you don’t know the reason behind why it works, it’s hard to make it work for you. Understanding the psychology of book launches and motivating people to want to buy your book is fun.

Jim’s Most Important Episode: How to Pick a Strong Book Title

I was doing a lot of one-on-one consulting with authors, and I kept noticing that their titles were bad. It made me realize how critical it is to pick a strong book title. Having the right keywords in your title can make all the difference in ranking and ongoing sales.

2021

• 40 Episodes
• 176,000 words in Novel Marketing blog posts.
• Margaret and Thomas had their third baby. 
• 11 Patrons-only episodes.

Thomas’ Most Important Episode: The 10 Commandments of Book Marketing

If I could put one episode in a time capsule, this would be the one. It captures the Novel Marketing approach. I asked Jim to narrate the Ten Commandments in Charlton Heston style. 

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Thomas’ Honorable Mentions

• What Every Author Needs to Know About Cyber Security
• How to Use Price Pulsing to Supercharge Your Backlist Sales
• How to Get Endorsements for Your Book (Worksheets)

Jim’s Most Important Episode: 10 Classic Branding Blunders Authors Make (and how to avoid them)

I speak on branding often, and I’m surprised how many people come up to me and say, “Thank you so much! I’m really getting it now!”

Jim’s Honorable Mention: How to Publish Your Book Independently

So many people are discovering the benefits of independent publishing, and others should be going in that direction. This is a fundamental episode. Indie publishing changes rapidly, so stay tuned for forthcoming episodes.

2022

• 43 Episodes.
• 173,000 words of Novel Marketing blog posts.
• 12 Patrons-only episodes. 
• Officially launched Obscure No More.
• Started Recording the patrons-only episodes live!

Patrons used to send me questions. I’d read their questions and answer them in a recorded video. Now, I record those sessions live. You can still send questions for me to answer, but you can also tune in and ask your question on-screen. Live video allows for follow-up questions and coaching. 

We’re starting to experiment with bringing expert guests on the patrons-only episodes. Soon, we’ll have Evan Gow and a copyright lawyer joining us. It will be a great opportunity for patrons to ask email and legal questions. 

It’s not too late to become a patron! Join us today.

Thomas’ Most Important Episode: AI Tools for Authors (Just before the release of ChatGPT)

This episode has been one of the most popular blog posts. It ranks high for that phrase on Google. Many people use it to find tools. Ai and Chat GPT are very controversial, but the tools mentioned in this episode help authors with dictation and grammar. I compiled a list of the best tools, and some of them have even more power because they’re using GPT.

Jim’s Most Important Episode: How to Launch Your Book in 2022

In this episode, we promoted the course, but we also gave pro tips throughout. Even if you couldn’t afford the course, you could still walk away with some very practical tips to help you launch your book. 

2023

• 35 Episodes so far.
• 9 Patrons-only episodes (So Far)
• 127,000 words in Novel Marketing blog posts.

Thomas Most Important Episode: How to Build Hype for a Debut Novel 

This episode was an interview with CJ Milacci, a Five-Year Plan alumni. It’s been five years since we launched the course, and she’s had unbelievable success. 

Her episode was the culmination of years of work. CJ was listening to episodes, trying to turn her writing into a career. She was very transparent in her interview. She shared what worked and what she would do differently. Her Kickstarter campaign and book launch were very successful, and it was so satisfying for me to see the course and her career come full circle.

Jim and I both want to make a million improvements to the course, but the current version is working. Everyone is doing it at their own pace, but it’s working. 

Thomas’ Honorable Mention: How to Find Your Timothy 

Knowing who you’re writing for really changes everything. Instead of writing for yourself or vague, generic people or an imaginary persona, you’re writing for a real-life human I’ve named Timothy.

If you can thrill and serve that one person, you can thrill and serve many more. It’s a really transformative episode.

Jim’s Most Important Episode: How Karyne Norton Successfully Kickstarted Her Book in 1 Hour

I helped Karyne with her back cover copy and have watched her whole process. I’m on her email list, and she does a fantastic job with her newsletters. She has done the whole thing right. This episode is incredibly inspirational and instructive.

Jim’s Honorable Mention: How to Look and Sound Professional on Zoom, Webinars, and Podcasts

Thomas gives practical and easy-to-adapt lessons and instruction. In this age of podcasting, you must have that skill set. Even if you’re introverted, this episode can get you started on the right foot. 

Total Stats:

• 388 Numbered Episodes
• 8.2 Days of Audio or 196.8 hours.
• 204 with Jim as cohost.
• 184 episodes after Jim’s departure.

Thomas: When we launched the podcast, few people knew who we were. The podcast was not popular. Author Media had an email list, and Jim had a readership, but few of them were authors. It was a grind in those early days to build that following. Now, many of those early episodes are listened to more now than they were when we released them. So, thanks to Jim for those early days.

Thanks also to our listeners who make this show possible. Whether you tell a friend, leave a review on Apple, or support the show through Patreon, please know we could not do this show without you. 

Jim: I’ll give a quick shout-out to Thomas. I know the behind-the-scenes Thomas, and I know he truly cares for authors. I see his heart and passion, and I know how much he puts into everything from Obscure No More to the patrons’ Q&A episodes. He loves you guys.

We’d love for you to chime in and tell us about your favorite episode! Drop a link to the episode that’s been most helpful to you in the comments at AuthorMedia.social​.

Sponsor

2024 Novel Marketing Conference

If you want to meet other Novel Marketing listeners in real life, check out the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference. It’s our first-ever in-person event. We’re starting it off on Kickstarter, and there are a few days left to back the conference and make sure it happens.

This conference is focused on helping you sell more books. We won’t cover how to write and publish a book because this conference is for authors who have a book or are about to launch a book and want to get the marketing right.

Check it out and get in on the early-bird pricing before the Kickstarter campaign ends.

Featured Patrons

A special thanks to our Patrons who have been with us since 2018.

• Mary DeMuth
• Mary L Hamilton
• CL Peterson
• Eloise Whyte
• Jennifer Leo
• Timothy Wise
• Jim Kukral & Bryan Cohen
• Phyllis Wheeler
• Jered Gering
• Terri Picone
• Tom Golden
• James S. Rogers
• Johnnie Alexander
• Michelle Ule

The post The Most Important Lessons from 10 Years of Novel Marketing  appeared first on Author Media.

When you launch a book, your biggest fan pays the same price as the person who doesn’t know your writing but finds your book cover interesting. Unfortunately, that launch method keeps your staunchest supporters from supporting your book more.

A few years ago, Brandon Sanderson told his publisher, “I want to make a $200 version of my book for my biggest fans.” They laughed him out of the room and gave back the rights so he could do it himself. And he did. He presented to his fans a collector’s edition of his book on Kickstarter and raised $6,000,000.

At that time, it was the most successful publishing Kickstarter campaign to date. He showed the world that putting a book on Kickstarter and selling it at multiple price points could be very effective. Then he proved it beyond doubt when, a couple of years later, he raised $40 million on Kickstarter, selling high-quality versions of his book, as well as ebooks and audiobooks.

But many people still don’t know what Kickstarter is or how useful it is for launching a book. Kickstarter helps indie authors solve their biggest challenge: cash flow.

Most indies don’t have the money they need to launch their books. To count on uncertain future sales to cover a book launch is a huge gamble. You’ll make money when you sell your book, but future money is not the same as present money, and Kickstarter solves that problem.

What is Kickstarter, and how can you use it to help launch your book?

I interviewed Karyne Norton, who is smack dab in the middle of her Kickstarter campaign for her epic fantasy novel Blood of the Stars, which is doing well.

Why did you decide to do a Kickstarter campaign?

Thomas: What made you want to do a Kickstarter campaign rather than going straight to Amazon?

Karyne: It was because of you. I’d never heard of using Kickstarter until I took your Book Launch Blueprint course, which included your Crowdfunding course. That was the first time I considered it.

I also met CJ Milacci in the Book Launch Blueprint course, and together, we started researching Kickstarter.

We found two books on the topic, read those together, and made a plan. I let her be the guinea pig and do it first. Ever since then, we’ve been working back and forth together.

Thomas: Having author friends before you become a bestselling author is the key to success. You and CJ were both unpublished authors, and now you’re both successful Kickstarters. You both have campaigns that have been funded, and now you have a growing relationship that started while you were both unknown.

Becoming famous actually makes it harder and more complicated to make author friends. So, make your author friends early in your career before you become well-known.

Karyne: I’ve enjoyed working with CJ. We write in different genres to different target audiences, but we can still help each other.

Initially, I thought I wanted to work with an author who wrote like me, but you don’t need that. You just need someone who’s strong where you’re weak and can push you a little more than you might push yourself.

Thomas: If the other author is too similar, it’s easy to become envious. If you’re fighting for the exact same reader, it’s also possible to become jealous. Envy and jealousy are toxic for everyone, but especially authors.

You can still be friends with someone who writes for your exact same audience, but it is psychologically and morally more complicated to work together.

What did you notice about CJ’s campaign that you wanted to emulate or do differently?

Karyne: I wanted to do many of the same things because we researched and planned it together. However, I wanted to plan mine out further in advance so I could set up a pre-launch page where people could follow my campaign before it launched.

I set that up in March, so I’ve been encouraging people to follow the campaign for the last six months. I had nothing on my campaign page except a picture and a one-sentence summary, but people could click to follow. If they follow my campaign, they’ll get an email reminding them to check out the completed page when it launches.

By the time my campaign launched, I had almost 200 followers, which is unusual for a debut author. Published authors get high numbers like that, but for an unpublished author like me, it was critical to having a good launch right out of the gates.

Thomas: Inviting people to follow your campaign via your pre-launch page also forces them to create a Kickstarter account, which gets the biggest point of friction out of the way. Most people don’t use a password manager, so setting up another account is a burden. It takes time to convince someone to get a Kickstarter account.

I think all indie authors need a Kickstarter account so they can start backing books. If you pledge even one dollar, you’ll learn how it’s done. Even if you don’t run a Kickstarter campaign yourself, it’s important to know your way around Kickstarter and learn how the process works.

Karyne’s campaign for Blood of the Stars is one of the best-executed campaigns I’ve seen. She paid attention to the details and did it well.

This pre-launch strategy is a better strategy for most authors than the strategy I used for the Novel Marketing Conference Kickstarter campaign.

The Novel Marketing Conference has limited seats, so I wanted to give patrons and students of my courses early access to the Kickstarter, which meant I couldn’t do a big pre-launch campaign. If I had, anybody on Kickstarter could have backed it and purchased tickets.

I wanted my patrons and students to get first dibs on tickets, so I did the opposite of your approach, which is called the soft launch. In a soft launch, you don’t tell many people about the campaign immediately. You tell your best supporters and then tell a wider audience later.

The advantage of the soft launch is that you’re not sending anybody to a page with zero backers when you announce it. You’ve already told your core folks about it.

The downside is that you don’t get that surge of attention like the 200 followers you had.

How long did it take to hit your funding goal?

Karyne: It took me just under an hour.

Thomas: That’s great. You had a successful campaign within an hour, which probably relieved some pressure. That’s another difference between your campaign and mine.

The Novel Marketing Conference has lots of real expenses up front, so I had to set the funding goal much higher. As I’m recording this, the campaign is not yet fully funded.

The conference may not even happen, but I have a strange peace about it. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. The main thing I want to avoid is losing a ton of money on the conference.

But when you know you’re going to launch the book regardless of whether you fund, it makes sense to have a lower funding goal and to try to fund it quickly.

Karyne: Yes. I see two main strategies.

One strategy is to set the goal around $500, which is what I did so that I could fund quickly. That way, people know they’ll get the book.

On the other hand, if you’re creating a deluxe special edition, where you have to do a print run of 500 books and need to sell at least 300, you’ll need to set your funding goal around $10,000. Typically, only authors with a large audience of superfans who want the fancy books will start that high.

As a debut author, I knew I should use the smaller funding goal strategy.

Thomas: That’s the right strategy for you because you had no books published. People are pledging support for a book they have not read from an author they’ve never heard of. Maybe they’ve read one of your reader magnets, but this is your first book to sell.

How did you build that audience of 200 people ahead of time? 

Thomas: How did you get 200 people to want to pay for your book before they had a chance to read it?

Karyne: I was aiming for backer numbers with this Kickstarter instead of a dollar amount. That’s unusual even among people selling books on Kickstarter. As a debut author, I want to bring in readership versus money. Eventually, I want the money to come, but I want to build fans right now. So, I set a goal of reaching 250 backers with this campaign, and I’m almost there.

I set my pricing slightly lower than other authors, and I’m not offering swag or tuckerization, which is where people can pay to name a character. I wanted to make sure that people who backed the book actually wanted to read the book.

I went with Kickstarter and drew out this campaign over a long time because I knew I wanted to start publishing when my youngest child started kindergarten in the fall of 2023. I’m a planner, so I started working backward from that date.

I set smaller goals to get there. One goal was to start my newsletter list a year before publishing. Six months before my date, I sent out my reader magnet, and three months prior, I started my podcast. Each goal was meant to build that readership long before the Kickstarter campaign started.

Thomas: Dig your well before you’re thirsty. Many authors make the mistake of putting themselves in a frantic rush, and you did the opposite, partly because you waited for kindergarten to start.

You set a date deep into the future, but you didn’t twiddle your thumbs. You made the most of that time and built an email list.

How big was your email list when you launched your campaign?

Karyne: I had 3,400 subscribers.

Thomas: So that’s a 5%-10% percent conversion rate. We don’t know your exact conversion rate yet because your most effective email will be the one with the title “Last Chance” that you’ll send a week from now.

You had a good-sized email list when you launched your campaign. It’s a very achievable number for somebody following the Novel Marketing method I teach. My courses teach you how to build a list of thousands with a reader magnet and a little effort beyond telling a few friends.

You said your rewards were less expensive, but that’s only true for someone unfamiliar with Kickstarter. You’ve currently raised $8,523 from 224 backers, which comes to $38 per backer.

That’s less than the typical Kickstarter campaign, which is probably closer to $50 per backer. But it’s still way more than you’d be making per reader if your book was on Amazon. Indie authors typically make $3.00-$7.00 per reader. Traditionally published authors make $0.80 per reader.

By doing this on Kickstarter, you’re making a lot more money per reader. Your most popular reward is your $40 level, which comes with a beautiful hardback. The way you present it on the screen is pretty, and your graphics make it look like something worth buying.

So, how did you make such a pretty book?

Karyne: I hired a cover designer because there was no way I was going to do that myself. I used Canva to make the graphics. I searched Canva for free mock-ups for books. If I wanted to pay for graphic mock-ups, I’d probably use Placeit, which has hundreds of beautiful options.

Thomas: These mock-ups take your cover and place it inside an image of an iPad or an iPhone with little earbuds coming out. They can even wrap your book cover image around a hardback, allowing people to visualize what they’re buying.

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Mock-up images aren’t an option for the first Novel Marketing Conference. People wonder what it will look like, but we haven’t done it before, which is part of the reason this initial conference is so cheap.

This year, I will have photographers taking pictures of the small groups and presentations. Even though the presentations won’t be recorded, we’ll record B rolls throughout the conference. We’ll be shooting videos to use in the future to show people what the conference looks like. It’s a challenge because this conference won’t look exactly like other writers conferences.

Plus, it’s hard to make writers conferences look fun. People sitting and listening to a lecture does not make for an attractive photo. Even though our sessions will be interactive and fun, we haven’t done it yet, so we don’t have those photos.

However, when you’re launching a Kickstarter campaign for a book, it’s easy to use the book cover and another image on your campaign page, but you did more than that.

I’d encourage authors to check out your Kickstarter campaign for Blood of the Stars. It’s well done. You’ve done a great job telling the story visually.

You have a graphic featuring the tropes so that people looking for books get a sense of what’s inside. You want them to know what to expect because if they’re not going to like the book, you want to help them know they shouldn’t buy it.

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Karyne: In my video, I used a different strategy.

Typically, you’ll see two types of videos on Kickstarter.

One type has the author telling people about the book; the other is more like a book trailer, where there’s very little face time for the author.

I didn’t want the face time, but I also didn’t have the skills to make a book trailer. So, I recorded myself as if I was doing a face time video, but then I put graphics over the video and walked viewers through three reasons not to read my book and then three reasons to read it. My goal was to turn away the people who wouldn’t like it because that’s not who I want backing my Kickstarter.

Thomas: I thought that was a clever way of structuring it. I liked your video and found it very Broca-shocking. I’ve watched many Kickstarter videos, and yours felt very different, yet it didn’t have a fancy production design.

What did you use to make the video?

Karyne: I used iMovie and Canva.

Thomas: You made the graphics on Canva and dropped them on top of an iMovie video. Mac owners already own iMovie on their devices.

Did you memorize the script or use a teleprompter?

Karyne: I tried memorizing it because I wasn’t planning on putting graphics there, but I am an introvert. I got very nervous, and it didn’t go well. I read off the screen, which looked terrible, so I put the graphics over my face.

Thomas: It is difficult to discipline yourself to look into the camera because you want to look at your script or video. Covering your face with graphics allows you to hide video cuts.

What do you offer backers at your various reward levels?

Karyne: My reward levels build on one another.

Taste-Tester Level = $2

This first level includes my reader magnet in ebook and audiobook formats.

For my podcast, my brother and I record stories, and he recorded my reader magnet titled The Light that Takes. Being able to offer both formats made me feel comfortable offering it for $2.00. People can see what I’m like without committing to a full book.

Early Ebooks for Everyone = $10

This level added the ebook version of Blood of the Stars to the two reader magnet formats.

Paperbacks as Promised = $25

Every level builds on the level before, and this level added the paperback book to the previous rewards. It makes the higher price point (compared to Amazon) feel like less of a hit because they’re getting both the ebook and the paperback.

Plus, they get the ebook early, whereas they’ll have to wait for the paperback to be printed. This level allows people to read the book early in ebook format.

Thomas: I love that about Kickstarter because bundling doesn’t cost you anything extra. The variable cost is just the paper book. But by including the ebook, reader magnet, and audiobook for the reader magnet, it feels like people are getting a lot for their money. They’re getting all that plus early access, making $25 feel cheap.

Hefty Hardcovers = $40

Karyne: The $40 level is my most popular level, and adding it was a last-minute decision that stressed me out.

Hardcovers really sell on Kickstarter, especially if you offer a deluxe edition that collectors can get excited about. My hardcover wasn’t going to be anything special, but I had a stretch goal planned to offer a pretty hardcover underneath a dust jacket. But I only wanted to do that if we reached a certain level of funding.

I started looking at other book campaigns out there and decided fairly last minute that I needed to offer the hardcover from the start, not as a stretch goal. I needed a more expensive, beautiful option that attracts people interested in the fancy hardcovers. In the photos on my Kickstarter page, you’ll see the dust jacket, which looks just like the paperback, but underneath it, there is a fancier design. 

Thomas: It’s more complicated to print because you can’t get this fancy hardback through KDP. How are you printing the fancy foil-stamped cover?

Karyne: I’m planning to do it through Ingram Spark.

Give one, Get one! = $50

Karyne: I wanted to have a couple of higher levels so that people didn’t feel like they were choosing the most expensive thing when I directed them to the hardcover.

This $50 level comes with two paperbacks instead of one. I presented it as an opportunity to give a friend a gift or donate a copy to your local library.

Easy Gift Giving or Book Club Bonus = $150

The final and most expensive reward level includes six paperbacks and a bonus Q & A session with me for a book club. Someone might choose to give the six books as gifts. No one has gone for that level yet, and I’m not surprised. I’m okay with that. I just wanted to have a higher tier to make the hardcover tier not look so high.

Thomas: You’ve employed the marketing principle of anchoring. If you want your price to look like a bargain, anchor it to a higher price. This is why the grocery store places the $100 bottle of wine on the endcap of the aisle. They don’t intend to sell the $100 bottle because people buy $100 wine at a wine store.

That $100 bottle of wine makes the $30 bottles look cheaper. If $30 wine is your most expensive bottle, people will buy a $20 bottle. But when the $100 bottle is an option, that $30 wine suddenly starts to sell.

It’s okay to offer reward levels that no one backs as long as those levels still work for you financially if somebody does opt to back at those levels. Occasionally, somebody who really believes in you wants to back at those highest levels.

Just make sure you structure that reward in such a way that it doesn’t bankrupt you.

What have you been doing to keep people excited since the campaign went live?

Karyne: I started creating stretch-goal polls.

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When you set up a Kickstarter campaign, you set a funding goal. If you set a low goal of $500, you’ll probably make your goal, but you don’t want people to start ignoring your campaign because it’s funded. You don’t want people to think, “Oh, she’s funded. We’re good. We don’t need to help her. We’ll wait for it to come out in retailers.”

You want to encourage people to help you raise more. You set that higher goal in your head, and then you create “stretch goals.” A stretch goal is that next-step funding goal that helps you reach the final goal in your head. Stretch goals are a breadcrumb trail from that low funding goal to the ceiling amount you truly want to reach.

Everyone offers stretch goals of some sort, but I created polls for my stretch goals. For each stretch goal, I offered two options, and I send people to my website to vote. The option in the lead at the time we funded that stretch goal is the one everyone gets.

Thomas: I love that. I’m going to use that if we do stretch goals for the Novel Marketing Conference. I love the idea of voting because it does several things. One, it gets people more engaged. Two, it helps you select stretch goals that resonate with your audience. You might offer something you think they’ll like, but they might not care about it. Voting allows them to tell you what they value.

It only takes one demotivating stretch goal for people to let off the gas when it comes to helping you promote your Kickstarter.

The other cool thing about Kickstarter is that if you have good stretch goals, the people who’ve backed you are motivated to spread the word and share your campaign with their friends.

It allows your backers to become your advocates.

Karyne: My stretch goal polls have had surprisingly good engagement. I’ve had over 100 votes for each of the last two polls, and people are messaging me when the results come in. They’re either excited about the winner or ask if I will put the loser in the next stretch goal.

I offered stickers as an option in two stretch goal polls, but no one wanted those, and that was a great way for me to see that backers didn’t want stickers.

Thomas: Plus, it saved you the cost of printing stickers, only to discover that people don’t want them.

Karyne: I’ve also personally thanked every backer to keep people engaged. That’s considered best practice, but most people don’t do it, so it stands out to the backers. I get a lot of responses thanking me or telling me why they backed me.

I’ve gotten several emails from people who said they’d read the sample chapters and are excited to read the rest of the story. So that’s also been super encouraging for me to hear that people aren’t randomly buying it because they think it looks pretty. They’ve actually read the sample chapters and are excited about the book.

Thomas: Your sample chapters are available to everyone. One of your headings in your campaign is “Sample Chapters,” and it links to a BookFunnel page where they can load the sample chapters straight onto their ereader.

This is a good practice for all authors, but it’s particularly good for debut authors. It helps put people at ease. And gratitude is powerful. It changes the nature of what’s happening.

In some ways, Kickstarter is a preorder platform, but it’s more than that because people feel like they’re contributing to helping the book exist.

When I Kickstarted my book, I featured the names of many backers in my book’s credits. My book is a little controversial, so I didn’t require people to list their names, but people felt a sense of ownership.

Will you list backers in your book?

Karyne: Yes, that’s in the lowest ebook level because it doesn’t cost me anything, and it’s fun for a lot of people.

Thomas: Backers get to be immortalized in a book, and it doesn’t cost you anything extra.

What would you do differently now that you’re a grizzled veteran?

Karyne: Oddly enough, I might do a shorter campaign next time. I was glad I did 22 days for this first one. Running your first campaign for 22 to 30 days is good because there is such a huge learning curve for running a Kickstarter.

I kind of regret doing it for my first book because, on top of learning Kickstarter, I was learning how to get a book printed and formatted. There’s a lot to learn at once, but it’s still worth it.

Next time, I would probably do a 17-day campaign because this middle week we’re in right now is super slow.

They call it the dead zone, and while that’s fine, there’s an awkwardness that makes it drag. Getting rid of that middle week would make the whole thing feel more energized.

Thomas: Your second book will be easier in some ways. It’ll be easier because you can sell a two-book series. Some people backing your next campaign won’t have backed the first one, and your Kickstarter campaign will likely be the only way for people to get the collectible hardback.

It will also be easier because you’ll have done this before. On the flip side, your friends and family, who are backing you because they love you, probably won’t back your next campaign because they already helped you. You’re up and running. The next campaign lives or dies based on your readers.

For the Novel Marketing Conference, I didn’t do a short campaign.

One of the main ways I spread the word about the conference is through my Novel Marketing podcast, and people don’t listen to podcast episodes right away. I wanted a longer window so that if somebody is two weeks behind on the podcast, they will still hear about it in time to back the campaign.

Your primary way of spreading the word about your campaign is through email. No one will read an email you sent three weeks ago. They’ll either read it immediately and act on it or they won’t. For that reason, a shorter campaign makes more sense from an email perspective.

You always have something to announce in an email.

• The campaign is live!
• We funded!
• We have a stretch goal!
• We reached the stretch goal!
• Vote on the next stretch goal!

If things are proceeding at a rapid clip, there are a lot of fun emails to send. A shorter campaign makes sense, especially if you have a lot of people who followed it on Kickstarter ahead of time. They probably already decided whether they’re going to back it or not.

More time won’t bring in more backers. It just adds more psychological stress.

One of the downsides of Kickstarter is that you can check the campaign every few hours to see if any new backers have come in. That’s distracting. Your productivity takes a hit during a Kickstarter campaign.

I’m using Kickstarter to see if people want the Novel Marketing Conference to exist. Since it’s not funded yet, I’m still wondering if it will happen.

Many people have been glad about the conference, but they haven’t backed it yet.

I need to know if people want me to do it for them or if they want me to do it for other people.

You’re using Kickstarter as a preorder tool. If your campaign had failed to fund, you would have found a way to make the book happen. Probably not the hardback, maybe not the audiobook, but you would have done the paperback. I am using Kickstarter to find out if people want the conference.

So far, you’ve had over 200 people say, “I want to give this book a shot,” even though there are no reviews on Kickstarter.

Karyne: Well, I do have three endorsements. I have two critique partners who are already published, and I got endorsements from them as well as my editor, who is a New York Times bestseller. Endorsements can be valuable and lend credibility to debut authors.

Thomas: Karyne’s Kickstarter campaign for Blood of the Stars ends on September 26, 2023, but the campaign will forever be on Kickstarter if you want to see how she structured it and told her story visually.

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What tips and encouragement do you have for indie authors considering running a Kickstarter campaign for their book?

Karyne: Find a buddy who will do it with you. Don’t do it alone.

Do your research. I see a lot of people saying, “I’m thinking of doing this next month,” because they see other people’s success. But it’s a lot of work and takes time to build a readership. You need to view it as a way to build a readership rather than a way to make money.

Allow yourself the time to do it well.

Sponsor

2024 Novel Marketing Conference

Our Kickstarter campaign ends on October 6, 2023. When the campaign is over, that link will take you to a webpage with more info about the conference

Bonus!

One bonus for the conference that I haven’t mentioned yet is the food!

If we’re going to host an event in Austin, we must enjoy the local food. Austin has one of the most vibrant food scenes in the country due to our “Keep Austin Weird” slogan. That slogan is all about supporting local businesses.

Local Austin restaurants have been known to put big national chains out of business or at least put pressure on them. Sometimes, the Austin chains will go national.

Breakfast

For breakfast, we’ll have breakfast tacos. If you’ve never had an Austin-style breakfast taco, you may get ruined for all other breakfasts. Consider yourself warned.

Lunch

On the first day, we’ll have Mighty Fine Burgers, which won the Malcolm Baldrige Award for quality. We studied this award in college. It’s like the Nobel Prize for business. Only two companies in Austin have ever won the award, and the other is a hospital.

For Saturday’s lunch, there’s no other option than Rudy’s Barbecue. Their barbecue is so tender you can eat it with a flimsy plastic fork. You know it’s real Texas barbecue when it melts in your mouth, and you don’t need a metal knife or a metal fork.

If you have dietary restrictions, we will do our best to accommodate you. Rudy’s Barbecue is amazing, but not if you’re a vegan. If you’re gluten-free, dairy-free, or vegan, we’ll do our best to accommodate you, but it may be different from the meals I just mentioned.

Dinner

For dinner, you’ll be out on the town with a chance to choose from one of Austin’s many unbelievable restaurants. People come to Austin just for the restaurants. You’ll get to carpool with some of your author friends and enjoy Austin’s finest food.

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Featured Patron

Patricia Hartman, author of Drugged

Heather Blanchard came to her sister’s house to recover from a broken engagement. But her sister betrays her, leaving her reeling in pain. Fourteen tequila shots later, Heather flees down a dark road, where she catches a ride with a man she shouldn’t trust. And becomes a target of both the FBI and a Detroit drug gang.

Related Episodes

• Kickstarter Tips and Tricks With Chris Fox
• How to Crowdfund Your Book
• How to Run a Kickstarter Campaign for Your Second Book with Jonathan Shuerger
• Announcing the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference Kickstarter 

The post How Karyne Norton Successfully Kickstarted Her Book in 1 Hour appeared first on Author Media.

It is my pleasure to announce the first-ever in-person Novel Marketing Conference! 

The Novel Marketing Conference will be held in Austin, Texas, on January 26th and 27th, 2024, and will be unlike any other writers event you’ve attended. 

How is it different, and why are you hosting a conference?

I see a couple of recurring problems for authors that the Novel Marketing Conference can solve.

First, podcasts are a great way to communicate knowledge, but the more you learn without putting that knowledge into practice, the more overwhelmed you become. Knowledge alone is not enough and can be overwhelming.

Second, success in this business has a lot to do with who you know. 

Nowadays, we have more access to more knowledge than ever before but fewer opportunities to connect with people in real life. 

I know you’ve been wanting to connect with other Novel Marketing listeners. You’ve arranged meetups of Novel Marketing listeners at various conferences and writers events. Sadly, I’ve missed those meetups because I don’t travel to other cities for conferences at this stage in my family life. 

Although our online AuthorMedia.social community is very cool, there is something special about connecting in real life. I would love to meet you in person!

One advantage of in-person conferences over virtual summits is that in-person events help you make real-life author friends. The biggest thing holding most authors back in 2023 is a lack of real-life connections. 

I don’t know a single bestselling author who became successful without first developing a friend group of authors. Novel Marketing listeners take their writing seriously and are exactly the kind of authors you want to connect with. 

Why host the Novel Marketing Conference in January?

Flights and Hotels are Cheaper in January 

You can find nice hotel rooms for $99 in Austin in January. Flights are also easy to book and inexpensive compared to December or April. 

Balmy Winter Temps

Austin, Texas is in a sub-tropical zone and often has amazing January weather. Our default January weather is 60 °F and sunny. That’s roughly 16 °C for those of you across the pond. 

Fresh Start 

January is a great month for planning your year. Our goal is for everyone to leave the conference with a plan of action to make 2024 your best year ever for book sales. 

Fewer Options for Writers in January

Many writers conferences are held in the spring and summer. In January, fewer writers conferences are competing for writers’ attention.

What is the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference? 

The Novel Marketing Conference will be a unique, hands-on experience where you’ll learn by doing as much as you will from listening to speakers on the stage. 

This interactive conference will not be recorded, and it will not be like listening to an in-person Novel Marketing Episode. The sessions will not be a series of recorded lectures you can listen to later. Sessions will be packed with fun, interactive elements. You won’t want to miss a minute!

You’ll be working on your marketing right there at the conference. While you work, you’ll get coaching and support from me, the other instructors, mastermind coaches, and your fellow authors. You will leave the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference with a written plan to make 2024 your best year ever as an author.

What are the session topics? 

You will learn:

• How to spend less time on marketing. We will talk about productivity and how to avoid time-wasting superstitions. 
• How to create an irresistible brand. I am excited about the interactive elements of this session.
• How to quickly get more email newsletter subscribers, featuring a guest speaker.
• How to confidently ace TV, radio, and podcast interviews. Trust me, live TV is not where you want to learn lessons the hard way. 
• How to advertise your book on Amazon, Facebook, and others. 
• How to present your book in a way that makes readers want to buy it now and start reading it right away.  

And so much more…

Many people get overwhelmed with marketing because they do what doesn’t need to be done at all or what doesn’t need to be done now. 

If you know what to work on next, marketing suddenly becomes easier because you have one task to work on next.

I will be presenting most, but not all, of the sessions. Stay tuned because I’ll announce our guest speakers in the next few weeks. 

Secret Sauce of the Novel Marketing Conference

Our secret sauce will be the ongoing interaction between you and other authors. You will be part of a writer’s group of seven authors who are similar to you. I will personally assemble the writers group to try to make the best matches possible. You can also request to be in a friend’s group if you want.  

During the hands-on breakout sessions, you will work with your writers group to help one another hone your pitches, brands, and promotions. I’ve never seen a writers conference use this group-based approach before, and I’m excited about it. 

Don’t worry, if you’re extroverted and want to meet everyone, you’ll have many chances, but even if you’re shy, I’m hoping you will leave the conference with seven new author friends. 

The small group-based model is inspired by my time in Boy Scouts. Boy Scout troops are broken into patrols, which make a big troop feel smaller and give the boys more opportunities to practice leadership.

Some universities have similar small groups during welcome week. 

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How many tickets are available?

We are trying out many new things at this event, so I want to keep things small. We’re limiting registration to just 160 authors. For some comparison, Novel Marketing has twice that number of patrons. There’s a good chance tickets will sell out. So, grab your ticket now before it is too late! 

Purchase your ticket today.

If any tickets are left, we’ll sell them at NovelMarketingConference.com (coming soon!) without a discount.

Two Kinds of Tickets: Early-Bird Pricing!

There are two kinds of tickets for the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference.

$399 Ticket (early-bird price)

Includes:

• Admission to the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference 
• 2 Breakfasts 
• 2 Lunches

$799 Ticket + Pre-Conference Website Workshop (early-bird price)

Includes:

• Admission to the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference 
• 2 Breakfasts 
• 3 Lunches
• Admission to the Pre-Conference Website Workshop

Where is the Novel Marketing Conference held?

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The Novel Marketing Conference will be held at the Fickett Center, a conference center owned by the Boy Scouts of America, but it’s no cabin in the woods. The Fickett Center is a fancy conference venue on Interstate Highway 35 and is covered in solar panels. It’s within walking distance of half a dozen hotels and within a short drive of hundreds of others, most of which will offer deals in January. 

The Novel Marketing Conference will be a big room conference where you will be seated at tables so you can write. You can bring a laptop, but you may need to provide your own power since we will have limited outlets.

What’s the Pre-Conference Website Workshop?

If you want help with your website, bring your laptop to this hands-on event. Work on your website while my team and I answer your questions and offer advice. 

I’ll also talk about search engine optimization and how to make your WordPress website more appealing to readers. But most of the time, it will be hands-on, interactive website building and improvement.

If you need to update your website, this workshop will be the perfect time to make that happen. To reach tech support, you’ll only need to raise your hand.

If you don’t have a website, we will walk you through building your first-ever website. You can start building your website now with the help of our free course on building websites. But wherever you are in the website building and improvement process, we will help you take the next step. 

Requirements

Authors who already have a WordPress website or want to build a WordPress website with our help will get the most out of this pre-conference workshop. If your website is on Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly, this pre-conference workshop won’t be as helpful. 

The pre-conference workshop is limited to just 30 people. Reserve your spot now by purchasing a conference ticket with the Pre-Conference Website Workshop.

Who is the conference for? 

The Novel Marketing won’t be for everyone. To get the most out of this event, you must already have a book for sale on Amazon or plan to launch your first book in 2024. 

This conference won’t replace a traditional writers conference. To learn how to write a book or get published, I recommend attending the Write to Publish Conference in Wheaton, Illinois. 

Why are you using Kickstarter for the Novel Marketing Conference?

Launching an in-person conference is a big financial risk. The speakers, venue, food, and staff cost tens of thousands of dollars. Since my work at Author Media is how I provide for my family, I can’t afford to lose money on the conference. 

Kickstarter allows us to test the waters and see if authors are interested in attending the conference. If the Kickstarter campaign fails to fund, no one will be charged for the tickets, and the conference won’t happen. As of this recording, the Kickstarter campaign is 16% funded. 

If it is 100% funded by Friday, October 6, 2023, I will see you in January!!

Kickstarter also has great transparency. Progress is very public, so you can see how many tickets are left. 

Writer’s Digest has repeatedly featured our website, AuthorMedia.com, as one of the most helpful websites for authors. But a great website is not enough. There’s something special about connecting in real life. When you take a break from screens, you can think clearly, and that can transform your book sales. 

So, sign up for the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference before tickets sell out. 

Is there anything special for Novel Marketing patrons?

Yes!

Thursday night, January 25th, the evening before the conference starts, I’ll host a patron-appreciation ice cream social. The ice cream social is for all patrons. That means you can come to the ice cream social even if you can’t attend the conference. If you are a patron in the Austin area, please join us! The ice cream social will be free for patrons, but you must be a Novel Marketing patron to attend. 

Check out our Kickstarter Campaign or purchase your ticket here.

Featured Patrons

Special thanks to our new patrons who joined in August. 

New August Patrons:

• Karen Brown
• Jaccii B 
• Andrew Lazar

The post Announcing the 2024 Novel Marketing Conference  appeared first on Author Media.

Can you believe it? Next month, the Novel Marketing Podcast will turn ten years old! What should we do to celebrate a decade of Novel Marketing? (Let me know in the comments at AuthorMedia.social.)

Over the last ten years of hosting Novel Marketing, I’ve interviewed many successful authors. For most of them, the inflection point in their author journey was when they attended a writers conference. Some got their big break at a conference. Others transitioned from hobbyists to professional authors after attending a writers conference. Still others met a new friend who changed everything. At writers conferences, authors find agents, learn how to go indie, or discover specific skills or tips that get them unstuck.  

You probably know that writers conferences are important and that you should attend one. But how do you determine what kind of conference to look for? 

Hundreds of writers conferences are available, and they fit into seven different types of events. While each conference can be helpful in some way, you can waste a lot of time and money attending a conference that doesn’t suit your stage in your author career. 

So, what are the seven different kinds of writers conferences, and how do you determine which is the best fit for you now? 

1. Local Meetups

What makes meetups special?

A local meetup is typically a monthly meeting attached to an organization. Sometimes authors gather around a certain genre, but other times, they gather because they’re in the same local area. The meetings often feature a guest speaker, and the group size ranges from 12 to 100 participants. 

I zoom into a lot of local meetup events as a speaker. At the in-person event, they usually make announcements, have snacks, and then gather to listen to the speaker.

Pros

Local meetups are probably the cheapest of all the writers conference options. Since you don’t have to travel, you don’t have fuel or lodging costs. It’s relatively easy to attend a local meetup, and over time, you’ll develop a sense of community because you’ll interact with the same writers every month. 

Many small writers groups or critique groups have been born from local meetups. It’s important to remember that critique groups are typically smaller than a meetup, topping out at 12 members. But if you’re looking to start a critique group, a local meetup is a great place to start building that group.

Cons

Unfortunately, local writers meetups are hard to find, and you may not have one in your area. Guest speaker quality is also hit-and-miss. The quality of the speakers depends on how much effort organizers invest in booking and finding speakers and how big the organizer’s personal network is. 

Local meetups rarely provide the opportunity to connect with agents or editors. If you’re hoping to be traditionally published, a local meetup isn’t the place to make agent and editor connections. You’re mostly networking with fellow authors in your local area. 

One meeting per month is a slow climb up the learning curve. While some conferences feel like drinking from a fire hose, local meetups are like sipping from a straw.   

Bottom Line

I recommend starting with a local meetup or local conference if you can. The cost is low, and the benefits are high. If you don’t have one in your area, I have a guide on how to start one. 

2. Multi-Track Conferences

What makes a multi-track writers conference special?

When people say “writers conference,” they typically think of a multi-track conference. Speakers at a multi-track conference tend to be mid-list authors, agents, and editors. The conference is focused on education over action. You won’t come to a multi-track conference to do large chunks of writing. You attend to learn.

At a multi-track conference, many workshops happen simultaneously. You’ll often find separate rooms or tracks for

• Beginners
• Novelists
• Nonfiction writers
• Teenage writers
• Indie authors
• Sci-Fi writers
• And many more, depending on the conference.

Pros

Multi-track writers conferences tend to have a great selection of speakers covering a wide variety of topics. You’ll probably find that one class you were looking for. If you’ve always wanted to learn how to write picture books for toddlers, there’s probably somebody teaching that class.

It’s easier to connect with agents and editors from traditional publishers at a multi-track conference. Agents and editors are there to meet authors, and between hearing pitches, they teach classes.

Cons

But every rose has its thorn, and multi-track conferences are expensive and long. The program features an overwhelming number of simultaneous workshops. 

After just a few days at the conference, attendees will say it’s like “drinking from a fire hose” or “watching a three-ring circus.” The information overload is often called “conference brain.” Multi-track conferences are overwhelming. Authors and speakers need several days after the conference is over to physically and emotionally recover. 

One conference I attended had early-bird sessions starting at 7:00 a.m. and night owl sessions starting at 10:00 p.m. It was nonstop, with very little time to sleep.

Another drawback is that not all agents and editors are good teachers. An excellent agent isn’t necessarily a great teacher. Some agents are excellent teachers, but some aren’t. Regardless of their teaching ability, the conference directors book them because agents draw writers to the conference. People still pack the room for any agent because they want to be friends with or sign with the agent, whether they’re a good teacher or not. 

These conferences tend to be focused on traditional publishing. The conference directors may attempt to accommodate indie authors or create an indie track. Still, indie authors are often made to feel like second-class citizens at some (not all) multi-track conferences. 

Bottom Line

If you plan to publish traditionally and want a literary agent but don’t know any authors who can introduce you to one, a multi-track writers conference is a great way to connect and take your next step. 

3. Big-Room Events

What makes a big-room event special?

As the name suggests, everyone gathers in one big room together. There’s one stage for one speaker at a time, which makes it somewhat less draining than a multi-track event. 

Pros

Speakers at these events tend to be bestselling authors and industry professionals who are focused on education over action. Every talk feels like a keynote. Speakers encourage you to be ready to get to work after the conference is over. The information encourages you to get ready to start writing again on Monday.

The high production values make the event feel less like a circus and more like a concert, with one amazing band after another. The size of the events and production values vary widely. Some of them are quite fancy.

Cons

One speaker at a time means you’ll have fewer topics to choose from. The conference agenda will tell you whether the selected speakers will answer your questions. 

If you’re hoping to publish traditionally, it’s important to realize that fewer agents and editors attend big-room events. 

Big-room events are a little impersonal. You may find yourself amongst strangers, which makes networking trickier, especially for shy authors.

Some of these events are a long sales pitch for a big-ticket program you can buy, and they are common in the coaching world. Coaches (life coaches, health coaches, etc.) attend a conference to learn how to be a coach, but the entire conference sells a program the attendees must buy to learn to be a coach. If the price of the conference is too good to be true, realize that it could be one big, long sales pitch. However, I haven’t seen many conferences like that in the author world. 

4. Writers Workshops

What makes workshops special?

Writers workshops are focused on interactive education and provide a balance between action and education and are one of the best types of writers conferences. You will learn new skills at a writers workshop, but you’ll also work on writing your book, editing your proposal, or building your website. The workshop teachers are available for questions, feedback, or encouragement. They will also challenge you.

It’s a much more interactive experience than the other events we’ve discussed.

Pros

Writers workshops tend to have fewer attendees in smaller settings. They are far less overwhelming and provide the greatest immediate outcomes of any event on this list. You’ll leave the workshop with an edited manuscript, a ready proposal, or a live website. 

Workshops tend to be focused on what you will get if you attend. You’ll be challenged but not swamped. They’re a great place to connect with other authors who are in your same “graduating class,” so to speak. You’ll move through the stages of your writing career together, from beginner to journeyman to professional, with the authors you meet.  

If the workshop is about how to write a book, it will attract a basic or beginning author. If it’s about how to improve your author website, it will attract a more advanced author. And if it’s a workshop on optimizing your Facebook ads, it will attract more professional and advanced authors. 

Plan to connect with authors at your level rather than with industry professionals like editors or agents.

Cons

Workshops have lower production values. You won’t find a fancy stage, concerts, or DJs. They’re not a particularly great place to meet agents and editors. Occasionally, editors and agents will attend to hunt for potential clients, but industry professionals tend to gravitate toward big-room or multi-track events.

You’ll connect with authors at your same career stage, but you probably won’t meet people who are ahead or behind you on the publishing journey. 

Bottom Line

Writers workshops are less overwhelming but still provide a great education.

5. Writers Retreats

What makes a retreat special? 

A writers retreat is a small gathering of about 12 writers who already know each other. Groups usually rent a cabin, Airbnb, or Vrbo in an inspiring location such as the beach or mountains. For convenience’s sake, some groups may rent something near the airport. 

The goal of the retreat is to make progress on your writing, relax, and fellowship with other writers. It’s not focused on learning new information.

Pros

Retreats are the most relaxing event on this list. They’re small and intimate and focused on fellowship. These retreats are meant to fill up your emotional bucket. When you leave, you’ll feel fired up and excited because you’ve had energizing encounters with your book and fellow authors.

Cons

Retreats aren’t the time for expanding your network since you already know everyone. You won’t learn a lot of new information because people are typically chit-chatting or writing. But you can make deep connections with the people who are there and catch up on your word-count goals.  

Bottom Line

I’ve never met an author who regretted spending a weekend writing with fellow authors in a cabin.  

The main reason authors don’t do a writing retreat is because they wait for someone else to organize it. Scheduling the retreat, securing the venue, and arranging meals requires a lot of time. Usually, all the writers split the costs evenly, so the organizer isn’t really compensated for their hard work. 

If you attend a writer’s retreat organized by a fellow author, buy her a box of chocolates, get her a spa gift certificate, or send her a gift because it’s a lot of work.

6. Mastermind Retreats

High angle of cheerful multiracial people in casual clothes discussing work on general business project while sitting at table in cozy contemporary office

What makes mastermind retreats special?

Mastermind retreats are sometimes confused with writers retreats because they’re similar. The group size is usually around 12, and they gather in a cabin in an inspiring setting. But unlike a writer’s retreat, a mastermind retreat is focused on education over action. 

Each mastermind brings their best idea and expertise and teaches the other masterminds. 

Pros

Mastermind retreats are small and intimate. You get exclusive training. Sometimes, people will share secrets or techniques they’ve learned that they won’t teach anyone else. 

These events often feature a hot seat, where each person gets to talk about their work and where they’re stuck. Then, the group brainstorms ways to help each person get unstuck or achieve better success. 

I’ve seen unbelievable breakthroughs for authors who’ve shared their challenges in the hot seat. Books and series have been birthed in the hot seat. Podcasts that now have millions of downloads came as a result of a hot-seat discussion.

Mastermind retreats offer the power of 10-12 people putting their brains together to solve your problems.  

Cons

By the same token, that small group doesn’t allow you to expand your network since you probably know everyone at the retreat. Plus, it’s hard to find a good mastermind group. If you find one, realize that they tend to work best for authors who have already tasted success and can share their tips with those who have a similar drive to succeed.

Bottom Line

If you are part of a mastermind group, attending a retreat is worth your time. If you want to learn more about how to create your own mastermind group, check out the following Novel Marketing episodes:

• How to Start a Mastermind Group
• Why Mastermind Groups Give Bestselling Authors an Edge and How to Start One
• How to Work with Fellow Authors to Sell More Books
• A New Social Network for Authors

7. Fan Conventions

What makes a fan convention special?

Fan conventions have the highest number of attendees and are focused on connecting authors and readers. They tend to have panels rather than presentations. Imagine multiple big-room events all happening at the same time.

Pros

A fan convention is lots of fun, especially if it’s focused on a genre you’re passionate about. It’s a great place to sell your book in person and offer SWAG to fans. You’ll have opportunities to connect with authors who wouldn’t attend a multi-track conference or teach at a big-room conference. Authors at a fan convention want to interact with their fans.

Cons

A fan convention is most beneficial for authors with large followings. If you don’t already have fans, you’ll just be watching other authors interact with their fans, and you’ll end up feeling sad. 

However, if you’re there as a fan, you can fan-girl out and get as many autographs as you want.

It’s probably the least educational event on this list. You’ll learn more at a writer’s retreat chatting with authors than you will at a fan convention. Author panels will be informative, but the questions they answer will be from fans and readers, not from other authors. 

You’ll also find them more focused on the fan experience than helping authors become better writers. While it’s a great place to expand your network with artists, actors, authors, musicians, producers, or comic book artists, you’ll also be competing for their attention because of the large number of attendees. 

It’s easy to feel like a small fish in a big pond. Few agents or editors attend fan conferences. 

Bottom Line

If you’re just getting started, a fan conference is the least useful event for you. However, if you are a fan, these conventions can be fun. If you’re extroverted and good at networking, you may have a chance to meet some of your heroes. But if you do, remember that how you start a relationship can influence how that relationship progresses. You won’t be meeting your author hero as a fellow author; you’ll be meeting them as a fan, which will influence how they see you.

Sponsor

In the spirit of innovation and celebration of our tenth year, I am trying to create an entirely new writers conference category. It will be a cross between a big room event and a writers workshop, with elements of a mastermind retreat. But it will be unique in its focus on book promotion. 

That right! The Novel Marketing Conference is in the works! We’ve secured the venue, and we’re almost ready to launch the Kickstarter. Assuming it funds, I’ll look forward to meeting you in person in 2024. 

• WHEN: January 26-27, 2024
• WHERE: Austin, Texas

Registration is limited to 160 people. For comparison, Novel Marketing has twice that many patrons, so I expect tickets will sell out. We’re keeping our inaugural conference small because we’re trying new things. I want to host the first conference with a small group so I can meet everyone.

Please know this writers conference will not be like listening to a live podcast. Some podcasters host events where they record live episodes before a live studio audience. While that is cool, and I might try that someday, that is not what this conference will be. The Novel Marketing Conference will be super interactive and won’t be recorded.  

To learn more, listen to next week’s episode or subscribe to the Author Media email newsletter for early access. 

Featured Patrons

Michelle Levigne, author of Dancing on My Grave: Book & Mug Mysteries #2 

Becca Sheridan thought she knew what was up, but a series of mysterious events make her question everything. When her square dancing club is abruptly kicked out of their meeting place, and her rival from middle school gets involved with Conrad, Becca is thrown into a tailspin. Conrad’s strange behavior, his estranged relatives trying to take over the family business, the sudden death of his grandmother without a body to bury, and an uncle who vanishes all add to the confusion. 

But it’s the discovery of a dead body in a nearby creek that makes Becca realize the truth is closer than she ever imagined. With the help of her friends from the Book & Mug coffee shop, Becca must piece together the clues to arrive at a shocking answer. If you enjoyed Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, you’ll love this thrilling mystery filled with powerful emotions.  

You can become a Novel Marketing Patron here.

Related Episodes

• How to Start a Mastermind Group
• Why Mastermind Groups Give Bestselling Authors an Edge and How to Start One
• How to Work with Fellow Authors to Sell More Books
• A New Social Network for Authors

The post Workshops, Retreats, and Pitches: How to pick the best writers conference for you appeared first on Author Media.