Writing Books And Selling Books Are Two Completely Different Skills (And You Need To Be Able To Do Both)

I've said this before, but it's always been in passing. Because of that I thought I would dedicate this week's entry to addressing this misconception that a lot of people seem to have. Because being able to write good books does not actually give you any insight whatsoever on being able to actually sell books, good or otherwise.

These are two separate skills... and while you can make money with the latter by itself, writing a book no one buys isn't exactly helpful if you're hoping to buy yourself some time to write more books. Or tacos. Or a house. Or anything else, really.

This is just a daydream, if you don't have a plan to make it happen.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

Addressing Some False Beliefs (So You Can Avoid These Pitfalls)

First of all, right out of the gate, you need to accept that the quality of your book has precisely dick all to do with how well it sells. Good books can go completely undiscovered and ignored, and absolute drek can achieve bestseller status and make the author fat stacks of cash. So before you do anything else, put the idea out of your head that writing a quality, entertaining book will magically guarantee you sales. It won't, and if we're all honest, it never has.

Alice went into a little more detail than I did, and you should subscribe to her channel at Alice The Author.

Secondly, if you're an author you need to realize that sales isn't just going to get "taken care of" by someone else. Unless you have so much disposable income that you can hire a publicist and a PR team (or at least a social media manager to run everything on your behalf), then you're going to have to get stuck in to do things yourself. Trust me, none of us want to do this part of the job, but it's kind of necessary if you actually want to sell books and make money.

Thirdly, sales isn't something you can just fire off in a few minutes before going on about the rest of your day. Honestly, the first half of my day is generally spent making social media posts for promotional purposes, and then a lot of my blogs, videos, etc. are made to get my books and other projects in front of readers. It's an exhausting process that's a never-ending wheel that you have to keep pushing like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first Conan film.

I have a video on this very topic over on The Azukail Games YouTube channel, in fact. I'd subscribe there, if you haven't.

You Need A Plan (And You Need To Be Realistic)

You know how the advice in writing books is that random chance can always make things worse, but it can never make things better? Yeah, that's the mindset you need to go into when it comes to actually selling books. To that end you need to figure out what you can do, and what you can afford, to ensure that you are doing everything in your power to sell as many books as you can... and that you are never expecting to just "get lucky" so you can come out ahead.

Now, I live in poverty, and I'm an author. So, I do not have a budget to throw at anyone, nor do I have a team of people from any of my publishers who handle sales and marketing for me. So, I will tell you all what I do, because I feel it's a solid basis for those who are starting from nothing.

- Social media posting (I use FB, Reddit, MeWe, and Discord as my primaries, with a few extras thrown in from time to time)

- Blogging (I write about a lot of my books on here and my gaming blog Improved Initiative)

- YouTube (I contribute to Azukail Games and The A.L.I.C.E. Files, and have appeared on other channels as well)

- Bi-weekly newsletter (every 2 weeks I put out a newsletter with all my latest releases)

In addition to those regular marketing efforts, I've also taken my books to a dozen regional conventions, and appeared on several podcasts and YouTube channels for interviews. What I have not done is taken out website ads, or paid for a book tour... and not because those things can't work, but because I just don't have the money to gamble on them.

If you can't afford to lose it, don't risk it.

This is the central thing to remember when it comes to selling books... everything is a gamble. You never know what will work, because things that look like a waste of time might net you big gains, and options that looked like certain moneymakers might end up leaving you with a bunch of extra bills and a big, fat goose egg on your earnings.

As an example, I could make a post on Reddit today, telling people to go buy copies of my tabletop RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic, and that post could just lead to a landslide of sales. Maybe it was a veterans' day celebration that I wasn't aware of. Maybe someone famous saw my post and thought the game was cool so they boosted the signal. Maybe I just so happened to start a flame war in the comments that kept my post relevant for days on-end, but whatever it was it got seen, and people bought copies. Or, alternatively, the post just vanished into oblivion, and no one saw it.

In the case of the former, a few minutes of work and zero up-front cost just netted me a big win. In the case of the latter, I didn't make any money, but I didn't lose anything except half a dozen minutes of time and effort, either.

The more a marketing endeavor costs you, the more pressure there is on it to succeed, and the more money you're going to lose if it doesn't. And you should always go in assuming that this isn't going to work, because if you start telling yourself that you're going to make bank, then you're going to start justifying expenses that you can't afford because it will be okay when you make all the sales that only exist in your head.

Don't pay a bunch of money to someone claiming they'll get you a lot of sales. Don't go into debt to attend a convention in the hopes that you can sell books. Don't blow a bunch of money on Amazon ads when you don't know how to build a campaign. And even if you are familiar with a convention crowd, an advertising platform, or anything else, you need to always have that voice in your head asking what happens if this flops... because sooner or later something is going to flop. And it's probably going to be sooner instead of later.

The advice I would close with is to start small, and build up. If your book is traditionally published, then contact your publisher and ask if they have any resources to help you market your book. Reach out to author communities online and start making connections. See if there are local events you could attend to a small fee, or no fee (I'd check your local library and farmer's markets). Reach out to your local newspapers and radio stations and send them a press briefing to see if they'll interview you about your book. Become active in any existing social groups you have, and stretch out to others as you can.

Marketing your book and making sales is not easy. It's grueling, often repetitive work, and it can feel like you're swinging a sledgehammer as you try to mine out a hidden vein of gold. You can't just throw money at the problem and fast-forward to being a bestselling author, though. Or, if you have that much money, you probably aren't concerned with your books paying your bills.

In the end, do the work, and approach selling your book with the same seriousness and purpose that you approached writing it in the first place. After all, you did the work to make it, now do the work to get people to read it.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (an audio drama channel I launched with Alice Liddell)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

No One Knows What They Want Until You Give It To Them

There is this weirdly pervasive idea among the general populous that authors are just allowed to do whatever they want with regards to their work. Whatever whimsical ideas come to them, they can just follow those ideas however far the muse leads, and then when the book is done they hand it over to the company, and they get handed a big fat check to go off and do it all again.

Oh, if only. Unfortunately, this is the made-up, manic-pixie-dream-girl version of being an author that only exists in TV shows and movies, largely as a way to make a very boring job look exciting to those outside the author's own head. In reality, authors who are trying to make a living are bound by the market, and even more explicitly, by the tastes of their audience. And I say this with all the love in my heart, and as someone who still has a lot of sensory issues surrounding food, but a lot of readers are particularly picky eaters. Until they aren't.

And that means we have no idea if what we're doing is going to work or not... which is frustrating, because we still have to try to predict the future like our lives depend on it.

Which we've found, time and again, is basically impossible.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

Nobody Knows What They Want Until You Give It To Them

I raised a lot of complaints a few years ago in my post Variety May Be The Spice of Life, But It's Often Too Risky (As A Creator), and it mainly focused on the issue of how so many people will find one thing that they like, and then stick with that one thing come hell or high water. And this takes a lot of different forms. You'll have readers who only read a very specific niche of books, or even a single series of books over and over. You see this habit in gaming where, as an example, you'll have players who enjoy the World of Darkness, but they only ever play 1 of the dozen interlinked games set in that world, and they don't even want to look at the others. Or you have people who played Dungeons and Dragons once, and decided that was the only game for them, they aren't interested in anything else.

And as a creator, this can be a truly double-edged sword. On the one hand, if you find something that resonates with an audience, then you have folks who will buy your books, watch your videos, listen to your podcast, etc. However, if you try to go off in a different direction, or to do something unexpected, you may find they aren't interested in coming along with you. It's the equivalent of people who only want to hear their favorite band play their greatest hits, but nothing else. However, even if you stay within that wheelhouse, people might get bored with what you're making, even if it's ostensibly what they want to see, and what they were asking for.

And you can get trapped into playing things safe, even if that's no guarantee that you're actually going to get the interest, attention, views, and sales that you want.

What floor was it supposed to be on, again?

I feel some examples might work best here to illustrate my point.

Consider the supplement 100 NPCs You Might Meet At The Tavern. This was my 11th supplement I'd written for Azukail Games, and it is one of the most generic supplements one could ask for. It was the latest entry in a rather crowded field, and judging by the numbers it should have sold all right, but not amazingly.

 

This is the best-selling supplement I've written, and it's currently Platinum on Drive Thru RPG.

Why is that? Was it the format? The subject matter? The fact it was general use for most high fantasy games? Was it the low cost? Was it that it hit the market before generative AI flooded everything so badly? Or did the preview just jive with enough Game Masters that they wanted to snap it up? There is, unfortunately, no way to know, or I'd be rich right now.

Trying to interpret those sales is maddening, but trying to read the tea leaves is an unfortunate necessity of the job. And I'll fully admit that while I've written dozens of NPC lists in the same vein as this supplement, none of them every did that well. And some of them, like my recent 100 NPCs To Meet After The Zombie Apocalypse, still haven't even cleared the Copper level requirement of 51 copies sold.

Unfortunately, audience input isn't usually any more reliable as a source for decision-making. As an example, a lot of readers have wanted me to write more adventure modules, particularly for my Sundara: Dawn of a New Age fantasy setting. However, for all the requests, my recently released A Night At The Slaughterhouse Inn hasn't received much in the way of interest. I have a vocal contingent of folks who enjoy the stuff I've written for Changeling: The Lost, but while 100 (Mostly) Harmless Goblin Fruits and Oddments To Find In The Hedge has hit Electrum status (one of my top sellers on Storytellers Vault), the follow-up supplement 100 Unusual Things To Find At A Goblin Market barely cleared Copper status despite members of my audience directly, and repeatedly, asking for it.

What makes this even more complicated, though, is what's riding on the outcome. Both my publisher and myself have bills to pay, and we pay those bills by writing games, supplements, and in some cases novels, and selling them to the public. If the things with my byline on them don't move copies, neither of us will be able to stay in the black. And since we don't have much of a discretionary budget, we need to make sure that, even if we don't put out hits, they can't be duds. Which means that when something seems to do well (even if the reason why it did well is a completely unreliable guess) it's a straw we have to grasp at because it seems like a better idea than closing our eyes and firing blind into a dark room, hoping there's a target, and that we can miraculously hit the bullseye on it.

When you've only got nickels and dimes, you can't afford to lose them.

So how do we avoid this damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't sort of situation? Well, that is where you all come in as the audience! Because you are the ones who have the power to actually move the target in front of the shot so that it lands.

The Power Is Yours (Literally)

While publishers, studios, and marketers know how to play the game when it comes to manipulating keywords and pushing their products out there so that as many people as possible see them, they don't have the ability to force something to be a hit. All you need to do is look at the number of huge blockbusters that didn't even make back their budget, or the number of books that were supposed to be bestsellers that left the reading public cold and indifferent (you know, like the Robert Galbraith novels before it was revealed what famous phobe was behind that pen name) to see this in action. It is you, the audience, who decides whether or not something is or isn't successful.

Because it doesn't matter who wrote something, or how much hype was put into it, if people collectively shrug and ignore it. And, on the other side of the coin, it doesn't matter how small an indie creator is if people collectively decide, "This thing. We like this. We're going to tell all of our friends about it!"

Let's have some fun with math. I've done this before, but for a laugh let's do it again. And the number we're going to use here is 10,000, because according to some of the folks I've spoken to over the years, 10,000 sold books was the standard for a New York Times bestseller. It's arbitrary, but possible when discussing something blowing up in terms of support.

 

- 10,000 copies of a full RPG like Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic? I'd be looking at something like $110,000 in my pocket, and I'd be immediately working on fresh supplements for it.

- 10,000 copies of a novel like my sword and sorcery tale Crier's Knife? I'd be looking at something like $30,000, which isn't buy-a-house money, but is absolutely get-started-on-that-long-promised-sequel money.

- 10,000 copies of an RPG supplement like World's Oldest Profession: A Baker's Dozen of Brothels? That would still be worth around $3,000, and that would be one hell of a weight off my shoulders.

- What about 10,000 reads on one of my Vocal.media articles? Well, that would be $60... not huge, but not nothing, and hey, it's free to all the readers out there!

- 10,000 subscribers on YouTube is 10x the number of people it takes to unlock monetization, and if all of those people watch at least half an hour of content on the channel, it becomes an earner overnight!

- 10,000 followers on one of my social media platforms? That's usually around the time the platform monetizes you as a creator, allowing you to make money for posting on Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Take a moment, and realize just how small 10,000 actually is, as a number. A decent weekend at a mid-sized convention has 10,000 people in attendance. I've met people whose high schools had nearly that many people in them when class was in session. There are college campuses that easily have 10,000 people on them. I'm a part of dozens of Facebook groups and subreddits that have FAR more than 10,000 members in them. Now ask what 20,000 people all acting together could do. Now think about 50,000. How about 1,000,000?

That's the point I'm making here, and it's the same point that every army and labor organizer has been making for centuries. Because any one person only has a limited amount of influence or support they can provide. But as the chain letter says, if you tell 2 friends, and they tell 2 friends, and they tell 2 friends, then 30 connections down the line there's going to be a massive word of mouth about a particular author and the things they make.

So don't be a passive consumer of content who lets the algorithm decide what to feed you. Go out there looking for new art to experience, and when you find something that you think is great, tell people about it, and support the creators however you can. Because at the end of the day, all we can do is make the art... we need you, the audience, to participate for it to actually allow us to make a living.

Spare A Moment, and Click A Button?

Speaking of the power of a mobilized audience, I wanted to tag a call to action (or a request for help, however you read it) at the end of this week's post. Because my audio drama series that I launched in partnership with Alice Liddell, The A.L.I.C.E. Files, has been struggling uphill, and we're on something of a deadline. We just finished Season 1 a little bit ago, and we're gearing up to push the story forward... but we need your help.

In order for a YouTube channel to be monetized at all it needs to have 500 subscribers, and 3,000 watched hours. In order for it to be fully monetized (which means you get ad revenue, as well) it needs to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watched hours.

Right now we have 380 subscribers, and just over 1,800 watched hours... and we need to get those numbers filled up by the end of the year, otherwise YouTube is doubling the requirements, which is going to effectively lock a lot of smaller channels and creators out of ever getting their piece of the pie when it comes to being paid for the traffic their free videos bring in.

I just outlined the power the audience has, and I talked about trying new things to see if something outside your usual shows, books, and games actually piques your interest. So even if audio dramas aren't usually your thing, give this one a few episodes to grow on you! We've got weird Westerns, collections of two-sentence horror stories, Victorian nightmares, and more, all of it wrapped in a sci-fi reimagining of Alice in Wonderland!

So give it a chance to surprise you. If you like what you see then give the videos a thumbs up, leave a comment or two, and subscribe to the channel! And if you make it to the end of Season 1, leave a question on the Ask Me Anything About The Carroll Institute.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (an audio drama channel I launched with Alice Liddell)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

Avoid Gimmicks In Your Writing (They Don't Help)

Have you ever heard of those movies in the 1950s and 1960s that used bizarre presentation or ridiculous premises (some of which bordered on threats) to get people to buy tickets to them? Perhaps the most famous of these is The Tingler, which had buzzers hidden under people's seats to go off during certain spots in the film as a way to frighten the audience.

As a marketing ploy, this over-the-top salesmanship sometimes worked to get people to come see what all the fuss was about. However, it was most notable for movies that were lackluster, boring, or just badly written which leaned on the gimmick to actually get people to come and check them out. And, unfortunately, writers are not immune to this when it comes to our work.

So if you're thinking of doing something outside the text with your story, ask if that actually improves the reader's experience, or if you're just trying to use a gimmick to distract from what's actually on the page.

The book bursts into flames when you hit page 451... you know, as a reference!

But before I get into the meat of today's post, remember, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.

Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!

The Key Here Is "Outside The Text"

I'm sure right now there are folks out there who are clearing their throats and preparing to name dozens of books that were commercially or critically successful that had bizarre forms of presentation, or which broke conventional rules that publishers balked at. However, before you start putting up counter-examples, the key here is that phrase "outside the text," and what it implies.

Is this thing you're about to bring up an actual part of the experience that is meant to enhance the text of the story as it's being written? Or is it something that exists outside the story whose inclusion won't actually change anything about the story itself, but it is merely meant to seem unique, interesting, or in some cases to distract from the story by being salacious or audacious?

Oh you knew this example was coming, didn't you?

While House of Leaves can be a divisive book (folks seem to either love it or loathe it), but what it does is not a gimmick, despite people accusing it of such. Because while this method of presentation is strange, it is an intended part of the presentation that is specifically meant to alter the experience the reader has while interacting with the text and the story. It is a necessity to that experience, because if you remove it, then you have truncated the book and its story.

So, before you decide to present your story in a strange or unusual way, take a moment to ask yourself why you're doing this. Is this secret code, pages printed backwards so you have to read them in a mirror, or having key pages with a bizarre indent an extra layer that enhances the story? Or are they just meant to be a quirk that shakes your reader out of falling asleep when they turn the page?

As an example, if you are writing a memoir of a spy, then the methods of disguising coded language and slipping in secret messages through the text that have to be decoded could absolutely turn the book into a puzzle that needs to be solved in order to get the full story. That is not a gimmick, but a part of the intended reading experience. Are you writing a fantasy story where the protagonist doesn't understand the language of an underground species of elves they've been taken prisoner by, so you make your own language in order for the reader to learn words along with the protagonist so they can then go back and re-read the parts they didn't understand before? That can be part of the intended experience.

So what is a gimmick, then? Well, a gimmick would be something like claiming there's a secret curse in the book, even if that curse has nothing to do with the story it's telling. Or insisting that the text be written with dialogue in red ink. Perhaps including fake bloodstains on the paper, hoping that will make the horror novel feel that much more gripping. A gimmick is something that exists outside the text, but which isn't actually necessary to the experience of reading that text.

At the end of the day, ask yourself two things:

- Is the text of my story good and polished?

- Is this other element something that enhances the story, and adds depth to it?

If this thing you're presenting as unique and interesting could just be ignored or removed without changing the reading experience in a meaningful way, then it's a gimmick. And, generally speaking, gimmicks are not something you want to use as a hallmark of your writing.

As always, you can do whatever you want with your story and your book... but consider if people are going to remember the story, or the gimmick. Because if the story isn't center stage, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (a channel full of short stories, many of which are mine)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!