Trios: Devil’s Gold, by Julie Korzenco—Marketing The Book

Julie Korzenko, author of Devil's Gold, has been kind enough to arrange a trio of articles for me about the publication of her book. Two weeks ago Julie described how she found a home for her book; last week her editor at Medallion Press, Emily Steele, discussed the editorial process; and this week Paul Ohlson, Medallion Press's Marketing Manager, takes his turn in the spotlight. But first, a brief note from Julie.

My first book signing for Devil's Gold took place on March 7, 2009. I had appropriately threatened, er I mean invited, all friends and family to what I hoped would be a pleasant evening and not the nail-biting excruciating experience of being the only person to show up at my own debut. Much to my relief, it was a wonderful event. But what made it even more special was the additional effort of the book store owner. She had received her monthly copy of Book Page and was thrilled to find Devil’s Gold advertised. When I arrived at the store, right next to my stack of books, was a framed print of the advertisement. It made me feel special and loved by my publisher. So here’s a big shout out to marketing: thanks for being there on my debut night!


Everyone gets the general concept behind marketing, right? Advertise. You have a product; and in order for people to buy the product, they need to know it exists. Wait a minute, though. Is it really enough anymore just to advertise? Have you ever had this happen? You’re telling a friend about a commercial you like, and when they ask, “What company was that for?” you say, “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

We are so inundated with advertising that little of it is memorable anymore. How can it be when we see it every minute of the day? At some point, we’re bound to tune it out. But studies still show that you can’t just stop advertising altogether, because if you do, consumers will forget about you! Isn’t it odd that consumers can’t remember companies in advertisements, but if you stop advertising, consumers will forget you exist? So what can we do to stay at the forefront of consumer memory? Repeat, repeat, repeat! Consistently, too!

How does all of this relate to marketing books? Here’s how: Your book is a product. It doesn’t do any good for a product to have a big to-do when it’s released and then just drop off the face of the earth (and out of the minds of consumers, I might add).

Typically what you’ll find throughout the publishing industry is a publisher taking care of the big to-do when a book is released, but the author is then expected to take the reins from there and continue riding that big horse until it wins the race. But so many authors want to create this big push the same month their book releases, and then afterwards their efforts stop—and so do sales.

If you’re not an upper-echelon author or celebrity, then the success of your book is a marathon, not a sprint. This means as an author you must find ways to repeatedly and consistently talk about your book over a long period of time.

Luckily for you, the internet makes this all possible. Sign up for as many social media outlets as you have time to consistently update. Get involved in online groups, forums, and conversations. Arrange interviews with local papers and television stations. Join book clubs at local bookstores. Get to know the owner or general manager of the local bookstores, as a consistent patron of their store first; then several months down the line, if the relationship is good, ask them if they’ll host a signing for you. In other words, create relationships. Do this over a long period of time. How long is long? It’s until your next book releases.

And don’t forget to keep writing! You won’t only need to be consistent with your marketing; you’ll also need to consistently put out new products. This is just a continuation of the repetition. Think of it this way: if you put out a new book every year, then every year your publisher is creating the big to-do for you. In the meantime, you’re marketing that book all throughout the year until your next book releases with another big to-do from your publisher. Talk about consistently, repeatedly staying at the forefront of consumer memory!

My thanks to Paul Ohlson for contributing this piece: he might just pay us a visit at some point today, so if you have any marketing-related questions to ask, do please get them in as soon as you can. Thanks too to Julie, for organising this mini-series, and for offering to give away a free copy of Devil’s Gold: if you'd like to get your hands on it, just email her at “jkorzenko at gmail dot com” and answer this simple question: what is P3? You’ve got until 12 May to get your emails in to her: after that date, Julie will select one lucky winner at random from all entrants who answer correctly.

How To Write A Press Release

A good press release informs the media of an upcoming event, or of a reaction to something that’s already happened. The press release isn’t a finished article: but if it’s good enough it will be used as the basis of several articles, written by the journalists who receive it, and it might just get you on the telly too.

So, what should a press release contain? It must make clear what the news story is, and who should be contacted for more information: years ago, when I had to write a few week, I would top-and-tail each one with this information.

Between those two things I would write a short paragraph about what was happening, and why it was significant. New books are published every day so on its own a new publication is not particularly interesting: you need a hook to hang it on. When Mary Wesley’s first novel was published much was made of her advanced age (she was 70); little attention was given to the fact that she had already had a long and relatively-illustrious career writing for children; and there was a tremendous fuss when Erin Pizzey made her big career change from running a women’s refuge to writing commercial fiction. Similarly, you need to work out what makes you and your book so very special, and explain it clearly.

Make sure that you include information on why this thing is so significant: link to other events in the news where relevant, or to similar research. And take care to include several quotes which can be used in context by the journalists as they write up their pieces—if you supply just one, and four different publications use it, the coverage will end up seeming overly-familiar, and readers will get bored: if you supply three or four quotes of various degrees of seriousness and quirkiness, then that’s likely to be reflected in the articles which result.

Finally, remember that while a book’s launch provides a good opportunity to send out a press release, that should not be the end of your book’s life in the press. Try to see everything as a potential press opportunity, and learn to write witty and compelling press releases, and your press coverage is bound to increase.

Snowbooks On Marketing

Snowbooks is one of the UK’s publishing’s success stories. It’s a thriving independent publisher with a solid reputation for publishing strong titles and selling them in high numbers (the covers are beautiful, too). It's got a great blog, too. Here Emma Barnes, Snowbooks’ co-founder, discusses her very effective approach to marketing and promotion.


One of the interesting things about being a small publisher is that we can see the direct effect of every piece of marketing activity that we do. In larger companies, where there’s a medium-sized budget for a title, there might be a series of interviews and signing sessions, an online ad campaign, an SMS campaign, a series of ads in women’s magazines, a print run of in-store posters, a fund for co-op promotional spend, and a run of pre-publication proofs for endorsers, reviewers, reading groups and prize-winners to enjoy. If the book does well, who’s to say which bit of marketing worked? For our titles, most pieces of marketing activity are usually standalone. If something works, we can usually tell so easily, without the noise of other activities to confuse matters.

So, for instance, when we took out a £600 ad in a popular publication for The London Scene, a collection of Virginia Woolf essays featuring a never-before-seen sketch, it was easy to see that it had had no effect whatsoever when sales remained at a steady rate. When an extract from that self-same book scored a double-page spread in the Guardian’s G2 section, and sales remained static, we could divine the value of that, too. However, when the book subsequently featured in a high street retailer’s promotion, and shifted 4000 copies in a six month period, we knew that we were on to something.

Since then we’ve often experimented with ads and review coverage, because the received wisdom is that PR, reviews and coverage sell books. Maybe it’s just us, but we have yet to find much empirical evidence to support that proposition. Last summer, for instance, we were lucky enough to receive, as part of a deal we’d done, a free full page of ad space in a leading men’s magazine, worth £50,000 if you look at the rate card. I designed a perfectly lovely advert for a book perfectly tailored to that market. Sales didn’t budge at all. When that book got a core stock rating in a leading high street retailer, however, we sold 150 copies in one week.

My point? Retailers sell books, not marketing. Am I right? I’m right as far as Snowbooks is concerned – I have the data to prove it. There is, however, something in the idea that spending a sufficient amount of money will certainly get people’s attention. A Tube ad campaign, for instance, would have to be very poor if it didn’t sell some books. My question would be whether enough books are sold as a result of the marketing activity to pay for the activity in question. There’s also a strange phenomenon about having to spend money on consumer marketing in order to persuade retailers that you are serious so that they promote your title, although I’ve never come across the need for such complicated manoeuvrings myself. And even when PR does sell some books, the costs and time of hiring the PR agency or lunching contacts on a regular basis are often much greater than the promotional charges levied by retailers to achieve the same result.

By the way, when I make comments like these, the first response is always ‘but I buy books based on reviews and so on’. Yes, but look what you’re doing. You’re reading a blog about how publishing works. You are an interested party; someone with an above-average interest in books and the business of selling them. Your behaviour is not representative of the book-buying public as a whole.

If the findings for Snowbooks held true for the whole industry, what would that mean? It would mean budgets should be realigned away from ads and towards retailer activity. It means relationships with retailers should be seen as the most important part of the publishing process. It means the acknowledgement by agents, authors and publishers of the role of the retailer as gatekeeper to the reader. Who knows how differently we’d all behave if we took a fresh look at what retailers achieve.

Special Orders: Why You Have To Pay In Advance

Suppose that a customer walks into a bookshop and asks the bookseller to order her a copy of a book that the bookseller has never heard of: and that when the bookseller looks the book up, he finds that it was published by a vanity publisher which is notorious for publishing terrible books at horrible prices. What do you think he's going to do?

The well-informed bookseller is going to demand that payment is made for the book before he actually orders it—otherwise the book is likely to never be collected and could end up sitting on the shelves for years, at the bookseller's expense.

You can read about just such a case here.

Email Promotions

In the last five minutes I've received three emails from Bostick Communications offering me review copies of various books. According to its book press releases page, Bostick charges writers $175 to send out their press release to "our database of over 20,000 book reviewers, print, radio, television and internet media contacts". I wasn't aware that I was a contact of theirs: until I received these emails I'd never even heard of them before.

None of the books are in genres I read routinely: nevertheless I've requested review copies for my other blog but I suspect that the authors won't be too pleased with the reviews that they get. Not that I'll automatically give anyone a bad review: but if writers are naive enough to use services like this, then they're also unlikely to know their ARCs from their elbows. And that usually shows in the quality of the finished book.

Look: spamming is not a good way to sell or market your books. Most of the emails sent out get snagged by spam filters or deleted automatically; the few that get read do nothing to promote your book or your reputation. The books that get requested aren't usually asked for by people with any power to make a difference to your sales and at best they're considered a hit-and-miss way to get free books, as this thread over at Library Thing makes clear.

If you want to promote your books you need to target your promotions appropriately. By all means consider using a good publicist but please, don't pay for services like this: you won't see a corresponding return in your sales. The only money to be made in this instance is, I fear, all heading towards Bostick Communications, and not to the authors whose books are supposedly being promoted by them.



Edited to add: I have just received another email from Bostick in response to my request for review copies, which reads:

Where do you post your reviews? Thank you.

Shouldn't they have checked this out before they added my email address to their mailing lists? Or would checking out people on their list of "over 20,000 book reviewers, print, radio, television and internet media contacts" cut it down to a far less impressive number? I've emailed them a link to my review blog and suspect that the writers they represent won't want to be judged by my demanding criteria, and I don't suppose I'll hear from them again--unless they decide to send me more spam.

Book Reviews

Imagine that you’re an influential book reviewer, and each week publishers send you boxes of their books in the hope that you’ll sprinkle some of your fairy-dust over one of their titles and write it a wonderful review. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

How do you think that book reviewers reach such an enviable position? By reading widely and then writing honest, informed responses to the books that they have read, so that their readers know that they can trust them.

When a trusted reviewer praises a book, many of their readers will go out and buy it right away. If they enjoy the book, they’re more likely to buy the next book that the reviewer recommends. However, when readers don’t enjoy books that they’ve bought as a result of a reviewer’s recommendation, not only are they likely to stop reading that reviewer’s work, they’re also likely to avoid any other books that the reviewer recommended.

Book reviewers can only react honestly about books when their opinions have no impact on their financial health: if they’re paid by newspapers or magazines then their reviews will generally be candid and reliable; but if they’re paid by a publisher or writer, their reviews will be written with their paycheque in mind because if they write a negative review, that publisher or writer is unlikely to hire them again.

So, if you want a book reviewer you can rely on, make sure they’re independent. And if you’re looking for people to review your work remember it’s not normal for reviews to be bought and sold. If they’re not free, they’re not worth the paper—or pixels—that they’re written on and no one with any sense will take them seriously.

The Levels of Promotion

Promotion can be carried out on several levels, and it’s well worth considering which of those levels is going to be the most effective when you have a book to promote.

If you meet someone in a supermarket queue and get chatting, there’s a chance they might ask you what you do for a living. If you tell them you’re a writer, there's then the chance that they might subsequently buy your book. There’s also a chance that you will irritate them quite wholeheartedly if you are too pushy: I read an account a few weeks ago of a vanity-published writer who was thrown out of a restaurant for attempting to sell copies of his book from table to table between courses.

If you give talks, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to sell copies of your book at the end of the event—just remember that if your talk isn’t particularly informative or amusing then you’re unlikely to sell many copies as your audience will assume that it is as dull as you are.

The very best form of promotion, though, is when you recruit people to act as your books advocate. How? By finding groups of people who have some connection with you, or your book’s theme; by giving them a witty, empathetic, and informative talk and engaging them in conversation in some way, so that they feel involved in the event and connected directly to you; and by making them realise how grateful you offer the opportunity they’ve given you.

Marketing Your Book: An Author's Guide

In an ideal world, every publisher would hand a copy of Alison Baverstock's Marketing Your Book to every single one of their authors.

It's written from the assumption that your book has been published by mainstream house: and this is its great strength. While most books on the subject are aimed at the self-published and ignore or try to discredit the techniques used by mainstream publishers, Alison Baverstock’s book shows exactly how the mainstream publishers promote their works and achieve sales figures that most self-published writers can only dream of.

This book gives clear, detailed advice on everything that writers can do to publicise their own books, and gives a lot of advice on what to avoid. Alison Baverstock has worked for years in book marketing and promotion, and it shows. If you've got a book to promote then you need to buy this one, no matter how you're published.

Marketing, Publicity, PR And Promotion

There’s a lot of confusion about what these terms mean. This is how I’ve always separated them, but others’ opinions may (and do!) differ.

Marketing is the paid-for stuff: the catalogues, magazine ads and trade ads which position a product in the market with the aim of telling trade buyers and end-users that the product exists and what it is.

Publicity encourages debate: it gets a product (in this case, a book or its author) written about in articles, discussed or interviewed on TV or radio, or otherwise talked about through user-groups like book clubs.

PR (public relations) centres around improving and enhancing the target group’s perception of a person, a business or a corporation. The target group whose perception is being enhanced is sometimes the general public but it will more often consist of a far more specific group such as a company’s shareholders before an AGM, or parents when a new baby milk or disposable nappy is launched.

Promotion usually involves more legwork than the other three: for a writer, it involves book signings, giving interviews, and giving talks to interested groups. It tends to be focused on smaller groups (unless you’re JK Rowling).

These categories all depend on each other to work their best: you can’t hope to maximise your sales if you neglect any one area. An author can’t carry out a book signing (promotion) without the bookshop knowing about the book (marketing), knowing that the author is available for a signing (publicity), and caring enough about her to consider inviting her in (PR).

Marketing And Publicity: What Really Works?

Literary agent Nathan Bransford recently opened his blog up to a handful of guest bloggers in order to explore the issues involved in effective book marketing. One of the guests he invited along was M J Rose, who contributed this post in which she discussed what marketing and publicity actually mean, what works and what doesn't, and what sort of money has to be spent on a book to achieve the sorts of sales that we dream about. It's worth reading because in just a few hundred words she clarifies what everything means and what all that activity achieves--even if we don't have the budget to do what she suggests.

A Successful Writer's View Of Self-Promotion

Victoria Strauss is one of those writers that we all wish we could be. Not only has she published umpteen best-selling books, she's also extremely well-regarded in the writing world for her tireless efforts in exposing publishing scams over at Writer Beware which she runs with Ann Crispin, another ridiculously successful writer.

Both Victoria and Ann regularly contribute to the forums at Absolute Write and while I was browsing there today I spotted this little gem from Victoria: it's not long, but it's a very useful analysis of book promotion, and just a few of the problems that writers with small publishers will face when trying to promote their work. While she wrote it in response to one particular publisher, the information she gives applies to them all. I hope it's useful.