As writers, we’re all trying to fight against obscurity and outside distractions, but it’s a tough battle. We are fighting not just against our contemporaries, but against centuries of great art for an audience.
I love books. Probably too much for my own good. I’ve written eight, edited countless others and also had my fair share of success helping turn books into bestsellers (cumulatively, the books I’ve worked on or advised have sold well over ten million copies).
And I’ve written two books on this topic: Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising and Perennial Seller: The Art Of Making And Marketing Work That Lasts. As I defined it in GHM, marketing is anything that gets or keeps customers. That’s what we must do now that our work is finished: sell and promote it to the audience we think it deserves.
Marketing is both an art and a science and must be mastered by all creators who hope their work will find traction. Without it, how is anyone going to hear about what you’ve made? Why should they choose it over any of the amazing other work that’s out there? Especially if the makers of those works are themselves hustling to spread the word?
Knowing how hard authors work on their books and how far out of their element many are when it comes to doing the sales and marketing, I am going to explain everything I think authors need to know about marketing a book.
Bear with me because this isn’t a short post, but it’s important. There is a lot of bad advice out there and it takes time to knock it all down.
Now, let’s get into how to market a book and how not to market a book.
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The most common error I see authors make is they think of marketing as a separate and distinct animal from writing. They go into a cave for two years and write their book and only begin to think about marketing when they emerge. You have to understand that as an author you’re competing for attention with so much other media—you can’t afford to just sit on your ass and pray. Book marketing is such an essential part of the process. Seth Godin—and this might be an extreme view, I understand—says you should start marketing your book THREE YEARS before it comes out.
Writing is marketing, you need to realize. Too many books fail because it was written in a vacuum, without ever considering anything beyond your own immediate tastes and needs. You wrote without ever thinking: How the hell are people going to hear about this and why would they care if they do? You thought about why you wanted to write it, but not why anyone else needed it. Without product-market fit, a book will never succeed. Significant research has to go into the potential reader, their needs, your abilities, your message, your desires and how to connect all those things. Of course, art and vision has to dictate what you produce, but other considerations must have sway as well.
The most important marketing phase of a book actually comes while you’re writing it. If you don’t realize that now, it’s a big missed opportunity.
Books take time. The single best marketing decision you will make is to take the time to write an amazing book. Don’t worry about beating someone to market—think about owning the market by creating an indispensable book. Like Paul Graham says, “Make something people want.”
By doing that, you create the only marketing that matters: word of mouth. And the great thing about ebooks is you can see if your writing resonates with people very easily by what they highlight on Kindle. Writing in a clear, concise and helpful way—a way that elicits the reaction “Oh, that’s great I need to highlight that so I remember”—is a marketing choice. You can tell just by looking at a book’s Kindle page whether the author accomplished that. Sadly, they often fail.
Writers should write books because they have something they have to say. Ideally, they should be the only person who can say it in their unique voice. Books last because they have a unique voice, solve a common problem, and stand the test of time, not because of something as ephemeral as a trending topic.
By “unique voice” I mean: what is the book that only you are qualified to write? Take GHM—Initially, my publisher wanted me to do a complete guide to growth hacking. Midway through my research, it struck me that this would not be an honest or authentic thing for me to do. I am not a born “growth hacker”—my background is in traditional marketing. I did some hard thinking and realized that the best and most marketable book I could write would be about the transition from traditional marketing to growth hacking. So I sat down and wrote a book about my journey, rather than pretending to be something I wasn’t.
Do yourself a favor and choose to write a book with a totally new and unexpected hook. This bakes marketing and word of mouth into the content and sets you up for a perennial seller. The first place to start is the thesis or overarching idea of your book. Especially for nonfiction books, your thesis has to be a simple, spreadable, articulable idea to generate word of mouth. If your thesis is confusing or unclear it makes it very difficult to market. An unclear thesis also makes it hard for your readers to talk about it and recommend it to other people, which is the main thing that drives book sales.
For example, my first book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, isn’t just another social media or marketing book. It’s a part-expose, part-confessional about our current media system and the role I played in it. But the material in the book could have easily been framed differently to make it like any other marketing book.
Ask yourself: What’s exciting about what I am saying? What will make people share my insights with their friends? How can I use that to get more attention? When I’m writing, I come back to these types of questions over and over because its essential to understanding marketing. Baking marketing into your content helps create word of mouth—the only marketing that matters.
But there are limits to this. Seeing a book pop up on Amazon and quickly writing something just to beat it to market? This kind of short-term thinking dooms many writers who cut corners in essential areas…like you know, writing a good book or not.
Professional editing is essential for self-published authors because it’s the easiest way to separate the professionals from the amateurs. Take it from the pros: “Without strong editors, writers are like cars with accelerators but no brakes.”
The distinction in the publishing industry today isn’t published vs. self-published, it’s professional publishing vs. unprofessional publishing. If your book looks amateur and doesn’t read well, it doesn’t matter how well you market or “growth hack” your book, it’ll be dead on arrival.
A great example of an author putting in the effort to professionally self-publish a book is James Altucher’s Choose Yourself. In contrast with some of his previous efforts, James hired professionals to edit his book ruthlessly, and design it from cover to cover. The results? Choose Yourself debuted on the WSJ bestseller list and sold over 40,000 copies the first month.
There is still a stigma around self-publishing because readers think your book wasn’t good enough to get published. Self-published authors have to clear this hurdle and the best way to do it is to make your book look like it was done by a big publisher and get social proof from credible people that the book is worth reading. You might not be able to get the CEO of Twitter to write the foreword to your book, but you have to form relationships with other successful people in your space. (Nils Parker is who I recommend for editing)
You’ve written something good. You’ve written something new and you’ve written it well. Who is going to sell it if not you? Even if you pay someone else a lot of money, how hard are they really going to work?
Nothing has sunk more creative projects than this silly, entitled notion that “I’m just the ideas guy.” Or that there is a difference between being an artist and a salesman. In fact, they are the same job.
Who should make the time if not you? What does it say that you’re not willing to roll up your sleeves to get to work here? Name one person who should be more invested in the potential success of this project than you. (If you can name someone, bring him or her on as a partner right now!)”
“‘If you build it they will come’ can happen, but to count on that is naive,” Jason Fried explained to me when I asked how he built 37signals, now Basecamp, into a platform with millions of users after pivoting from a Web design company to a Web app company in 2004. “In order for the product to speak for itself, it needs someone to speak to.”
It needs someone to speak for it, too.
As Byrd Leavell, a literary agent, puts it to his clients, “You know what happens if your book gets published and you don’t have any way of getting attention for it? No one buys it.” That can’t be what you want!
Marketing is your job. It can’t be passed on to someone else. There is no magical firm—not even mine—who can take it totally off your hands. While marketing is a job and it’s your job, it’s also a fun and worthwhile job. Remember, you’re selling something you believe in, that you’re invested in, and that you know people will like.
How do you find most of the things you like or consume on a regular basis? How did you find your favorite book of all time?
If you’re like most people, it’s not from advertising or even from PR. It’s because people you listen to, trust, or respect talked to you about it. We discover things by word of mouth. A friend says, “Hey, you should check this out.” A mentor tells you about the most influential book in their life. It’s organic, natural recommendations of products or ideas—and they are, without question, the single most powerful force in the life of any product. No one has the steam or the resources to actively market something for more than a short period of time, so if a product is going to sell forever, it must have strong word of mouth.”
As Jonah Berger, one of the leading scientists on viral sharing, has put it, “[Books] live or die by word of mouth.”
Our marketing efforts, then, should be catalysts for word of mouth. We are trying to create the spark that leads to a fire.
As Seth Godin has written, creating successful word of mouth begins with a single customer. “Sell one,” he says. Find one person who trusts you and sell him a copy. Does he love it? Is he excited about it? Excited enough to tell ten friends because it helps them, not because it helps you?
COVER DESIGN
Every content decision you make as an author has marketing implications. You spend all this time writing a book, and then get a shitty cover design? Don’t skimp on the book’s design.
You can bake marketing into the cover of your book like when Greg Smith used an eerily similar font to Goldman Sachs’ for his expose Why I Left Goldman Sachs.
The problem is that wanting a good design, and getting a good design, isn’t the same thing. I would not let one of my clients, and certainly not one of my own books, see the light of day with a cover like this. Why? It’s boring, but still busy, which is a major design flaw. Perhaps worst of all, it does not catch your eye as an Amazon thumbnail (the primary point of sale for this book).
TITLE
In addition to a book’s cover, the title is an essential aspect of book marketing. Bestselling authors like Tim Ferriss and Eric Ries relentlessly test the titles and subtitles of their books to ensure that their audience will respond to it once it’sits on the shelves. A subtitle is supposed to contextualize the main title, telling the reading what the books central promise is. More importantly, it should be active (“How to Become…” NOT “A Guide On Becoming…”).
This doesn’t only apply to self-published authors, publishers—like any committee—have a tendency to screw these things up too. (This is my favorite example of a publisher killing an awesome title, and worse still, the author doesn’t even realize what a mistake it was). For GHM, I looked to include every marketing keyword I could naturally squeeze in without sacrificing the authenticity of the work. I have “marketing,” “growth hacking,” “advertising,” and “PR”—every possible reading audience I could want. This helps with search traffic in a major way—and better, signals to many different prospective readers that the book has something in it for them. “Growth hackers” are a small crowd. Marketers are a much bigger audience.
Amazon as a distribution platform is pretty great, but most self-published authors think once their book is on Amazon their work is done. In today’s digital marketplace, you have to get your book in multiple channels to generate sales.
Marketing Is Art
Jeff Goins talks about the difference between a starving artist and a thriving artist — this is that difference. The desire and the ability and the initiative to get what you’ve made in front of people. Plenty of people can make great work. Not everyone has the dedication to make it and to make it work.
Marketing is an opportunity for you to distinguish yourself, to beat out the other talented folks whose entitlement or laziness holds them back. Creative marketing ideas are their own works of art. Wouldn’t your work be served well by applying your muscle and creativity to coming up with great ideas and cool ways to get your work out there?
Think about the results of the BitTorrent package I put together for the launch of Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Chef:
[*] 2 million downloads
[*] 1,261,152 page visits
[*] 880,009 Amazon impressions
[*] 327,555 Tim Ferriss website impressions
[*] 293,936 book trailer impressions
Using BitTorrent as a distribution platform opened up Tim’s book to a whole new audience and allowed them to share his content, which created viral attention.
Or look at what Paulo Coelho did in Brazil with his publisher running ads that featured the entire text of his famous novel The Alchemist. It’s a giant block of text in 4.1-point font, so it’s basically impossible to read, but it’s still a stunningly clever and brazen move.
The brilliant ad reads in part, “Thanks to the 70 million who read the book. If you are not one of them, read this ad…” The result was immediate coverage in outlets like Adweek and, of course, much love on social media. He had to do that — he had to lead those efforts.
Partnering with BitTorrent or running ads in the newspaper may seem out of reach, but something as simple as tapping into a friend’s email list can help drive impressive sales for your book.
RELATIONSHIPS
For Choose Yourself, James Altucher partnered with Porter Stansberry’s email newsletter and sold 20,000 copies through it. The point is to partner with other people in your space and give them incentive to work with you. James did a 50/50 profit split with Porter, making it a no-brainer for him. For GHM, I sent out an email to my own email list of, at the time, 10,000 people to announce my book, which I built by just recommending books over the years.
It’s also important that you reach out and incorporate other people’s platforms in your book. I went out of my way—even though I probably could have gotten some of the information elsewhere—to interview every single major growth hacker I could reach. Why? Because they were my potential audience and I wanted to make sure my book was great. But also, I knew that by interviewing them, they would be more likely to support and recommend the book to their friends, followers, and fans. Indeed they did. I got tweets from basically every major, influential growth hacker in the book which certainly helped sales.
INFLUENCERS
When writing your book look for influencers in your space that have a deep, passionate following. Working with them will drive way more sales than getting a review in the New York Times. Ramit Sethi, author of the bestseller I Will Teach You To Be Rich, agrees: “The Holy Grail is a single-author blog with a large audience that is highly focused, and the author loves your stuff. If you can make friends with them and show them that your stuff is great and relevant to their audience, that can really propel you from one level to the next.”
Build relationships as you’re writing your book and provide value to others in your space you can partner with them and their assets when it comes time to launch your book.
THE LAUNCH
Thinking short term and rushing your book to market also prevents you from coordinating a good launch. Velocity is crucial when your book hits the market, so you have to concentrate your sales push to the first week because this helps you get hit bestsellers lists (not just the New York Times but on Amazon and Goodreads), which drives even more attention. Because of the velocity, I was able to generate with my launch, GHM was #1 marketing bestseller on Amazon, which at one point put me at #1 on Amazon’s Author Rank in Business and Investing, above authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Sheryl Sandberg. I was then able to put a banner on my book cover with the #1 marketing bestseller designation, giving my book even more social proof.
PLATFORM
Being a #1 bestseller is good and all, but using Amazon rankings as your metric for success obscures some of the more valuable goals to work toward when launching a book. Authors should measure success by the assets they’ve accumulated via the platform they’ve built. This means emails collected, partnerships made with influencers in your space, speaking gigs, evergreen content placements on blogs, etc.
The question you have to ask yourself before starting a book project is: for what purpose am I writing this book? Is to grab some quick book sales with a subpar book, or to build a brand or business around it? I’d choose the latter.
Today, books are used as a tool for first-time authors to build a platform. It’s not enough to just write a book that sells some copies. In GHM, I put a page at the end that gave bonuses to all the readers who made it that far—transcripts of all my interviews with growth hackers, plus the first chapter of my other book. The result? Nearly 1,000 people signed up for my email list. (I do a similar version of this in all my books and that list now has more than 80,000 people).
AMAZON BIO
If you purport to be a “seasoned digital executive, entrepreneur, author, leader, and strategist,” but your book’s Amazon page has no bio, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity to build your brand. Authors should not make this mistake.
Your bio and your Amazon page are like business cards. Brand yourself, reinvent yourself, whatever. Just don’t waste the opportunity. You will be shocked at how often these self-descriptions are borrowed and repeated in the media until they become true.
AMAZON BLURBS
You’d think blurbs would matter less in 2018 but in fact, they matter more. There were nearly 800,000 self-published books released in 2017. So how do you differentiate yourself from the crowd? With social proof. One way to do this is with blurbs from established, respected individuals. Blurbs say: someone whose time is valuable read this book before you and liked it.
COVER COPY
Another big mistake I see plenty of authors make is they leave the job of writing the cover copy (the book description section on Amazon) for their book to their publisher or don’t put in the effort and do a crappy job, but this is critical to the success of your book. Amazon only gives you 2,000 characters to sell ebooks, so you better make sure every one of them counts because it’s your sales page. For this, I recommend doing the classic copywriting exercise: one page, one paragraph, one sentence to describe your book. Or even better, use Amazon’s “working backwards” approach, where product development people have to write the press release for the product BEFORE Amazon approves the project. This crystallizes your value proposition to the reader and helps you make decisions throughout the book marketing process.
PRICING YOUR BOOK
Remember, especially as a first-time author, discovery is your big hurdle. An eternity in obscurity is the fate for most authors. Why should people give you their cash? Why should they give you their time? It’s crucial that your pricing makes your book accessible, especially early on. Do not discourage people from taking a chance on you. Most ebooks are priced at $2.99 because you get a 70% royalty from Amazon instead of 35%. And while there’s a lot to be said for pricing based on value, when taken to an extreme you end up hurting sales. Lower prices bring more revenue, more new readers, and a better sales ranking. Since ebooks cost you nothing to distribute, price them lower to encourage discovery. Physical books can be sold at a premium because the people who have to have it will gladly pay.
I learned this lesson with my first book. I asked the publisher why, after my marketing campaign had made the book the most talked about marketing book of the year, sales did not explode (they did well, but they weren’t explosive)? They admitted that they’d probably priced it too high. James Altucher’s book—which was also self-published and debuted on the WSJ bestseller list—picked a great ratio with a $2.99 ebook version and a $9.96 paperback.
When an author signs with a traditional publisher, they think that their publisher will handle the marketing for them. Bad news: that’s still on you. Even if you hire a publicist, the creative part of the marketing efforts are your responsibility.
A SELLER’S MARKET
But that’s fine because the media is a SELLER’s market. It isn’t hard to get legitimate coverage. Blogs can publish an infinite number of articles and want good stories. In other words, when Business Insider writes about you, you are doing them a favor. You don’t have to orchestrate publicity stunts that I talk about below. But, what you pitch bloggers has to be interesting and provocative because they are incentivized by pageviews. The “Unknown Author Writes First Book” pitch will never work. So, find out what’s interesting or relevant in your book and pitch it.
But as a starting point, you have to understand how your marketing efforts affect sales. Don’t confuse correlation with causation. Reddit, for example, can be good marketing—I did a Reddit AMA for my launch. Getting on Reddit isn’t hard, all it requires is submitting a link to your work. Places like r/startups love great content and if you provide it, they’re happy to have you. However, putting your book up for free on Amazon does not cause you to get attention on Reddit, its the other way around, an important distinction.
NOT A ZERO-SUM GAME
Also, book publishing isn’t a zero-sum game. No author should look at other authors as adversaries—books complement each other rather than compete. In fact, I tell a lot of my clients that they should look for recent books like theirs and pitch them to do the media together. To a reporter, one book is an anomaly. Two or three is a trend piece.
DELIBERATE CONTROVERSY
Creating controversy—provoking a reaction—is only one way to create a discussion around your book, and often it’s counterproductive. It only works with some books when the material calls for it. For GHM, I deliberately positioned my book as an attack on traditional marketing. This helped drive attention to my book and created a media narrative that gave that attention some staying power.
For TMIL I created numerous media stunts for two important reasons. The first is the obvious one: to get attention and media coverage for my book. The second reason was to prove the concept of my book in real time as my book came out. For example, long before my book was to come out, I began a controversial experiment: signing up for Help A Reporter Out—a service connecting journalists with sources—where I was able to get quotes into numerous publications, even the New York Times, about subjects I had no idea about. I proved that the “experts” you see quoted in the news are often not really experts at all. When the story broke on Forbes it became their most popular story that week and I was able to stay in the news cycle for weeks with responses from both sides. (Thanks Peter Shankman, you did me a huge favor)
In my book, I also called out Irin Carmon for the role she played in creating controversy about women employees on The Daily Show, among other things, which generated a response from her in Salon and got even more attention for my book. Or the stunts I’ve done for my clients, like the Planned Parenthood stunt with Tucker Max that dominated the news for a week, or the Twitter stunt I created for the release for one of his other books. If you want to be in the news sometimes you have to create news yourself.
You may not think can pull off a big media stunt as a self-published author, but you don’t have to. You can do what this author did and turn your book release party into a game where fans take sides from characters from your book. Or turn your book into a dress and have an impromptu photo shoot like this author. You can even make waves by demanding that readers not buy your book on Amazon.
Whatever works for you—go for it!
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Mistakes in book marketing are very common. No one—least of all publishers—teaches authors how to market books, and the fact is, almost all the information out there about book marketing is either misleading, ineffective, wrong, or worse, counterproductive. It’s a tough gig and this lack of accurate information forces people to take wild guesses at what works. But we’ve got a lot on the line with our points—our life’s work in some cases—and we want them to succeed.
That’s why I wrote this piece, to try to help tip the scales toward better information.
Remember:
[*] When you’re thinking about writing a book, you have to think about marketing it in tandem.
[*] Write and market something in a way that generates conversation and word of mouth
[*] The content and design decisions you make in the beginning of the process fundamentally shapes what you are able to do with your book down the line.
[*] Concentrate your forces for the first week to create some velocity—to literally launch your book.
[*] Don’t make short-sighted decisions when marketing your book. You want to build a platform, not just get ranked on Amazon.
[*] Build assets that you can use for years to come to build a legitimate business.
[*] Hopefully this helps shed some light on the aspects of marketing a book people don’t talk about so we don’t make these kinds of mistakes in the future.
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