Authors Hate Marketing Gimmicks Too (But Nothing Else Seems To Work)

There was a film I saw forever and a day ago. In this film a male character dresses as a woman, and so women (including a woman he's very sweet on) let their guard down around him and speak their minds openly. Our lead's crush says something along the lines of, "All this dancing around the subject is exhausting. I wish a man would just say to me, 'I think you're beautiful. Would you like to have sex?' Get it right out in the open and cut to the chase." Then, when no longer dressed as a woman, our protagonist says exactly what she told him she'd like a man to say to her. Rather than finding this forward, open way of speaking engaging and enticing, though, she slaps him for being a cad and stalks away.

This scene (which I believe is from the film Tootsie, but my search-fu has failed me so I can't be sure) comes back to me time and time again whenever I try to market my books to a broader audience. Because everyone says they'd rather have creators who dispensed with the gimmicks and just made a straightforward pitch as to why people should buy their books... until we do that, and get metaphorically slapped for being nothing but a bunch of crass, jaded sell-outs who are only interested in the money.

Seriously... what do you want from us?

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Trust Me, We Hate Marketing, Too.

Every writer I've ever met got into the profession because they liked writing. While many individuals have other passions, or other parts of the job they like, I have never met anyone who writes books just because they need something interesting to challenge their marketing skills.

Put another way, most of us like writing books. Most of us hate actually selling books.

Yeah, we like money. We just hate marketing.

Writers, by and large, are people who just want to tell our stories. Most of us are happy enough to be interviewed (rare as that seems to happen to a lot of us), and if we're feeling particularly bold we might be willing to go up to a microphone and do a reading. Some of us can even afford to get a table at a convention, trying to catch the eye of people walking by, judging on a split second from their conversation, tee-shirts, or cosplay whether our books are the sort of thing they'd like to read.

Then there's social media marketing... which is what those of us with little to no budget and a relatively small or niche audience can afford to do. And it is where the frustration of this mixed messaging cranks itself up to 11.

Because if you listen to the majority of people on the Internet, they tell you there's nothing they hate more than deceptive marketing ploys. They don't want creators using giveaways to get their information, they don't want articles and videos on one topic to act as backdoor segues to make a sales pitch, and so on. Those who acknowledge that creators are people with bills to pay (which isn't everyone, of course) usually say they'd rather have a creator just out-and-out pitch their project so they can make a decision on if they want to buy it. No elaborate promises, no big commercials, just say what it is, what the price is, and let them know what they're buying. If they want it, they'll buy it. If they don't, they won't.

In practice, though, nothing gets you more hate as a creator than just showing up and saying, "Hey, I wrote this thing! I think it's pretty cool, so check out the free sample, and consider buying yourself a copy if you like what you see?" It doesn't matter if you follow the rules of the group/forum you're in regarding how often you post. It doesn't matter if you just make a single post about your project. Even when you follow all the niceties and requests set forth in the rules, the surest response you're going to get is people calling you a spammer and demanding you be banned from ever darkening this corner of the Internet again. Because while they might say they just want you to be upfront with your intentions, that is rarely true in practice.

You Catch More Flies With Honey Than Vinegar

While this saying isn't technically true (as I pointed out in my How To Make an Apple Cider Vinegar Fly Trap for those who like DIY content), the metaphor works well enough when talking about marketing. Because as soon as you make it clear you're selling something, people will cover their ears and walk away (or berate you because you expect to be paid for the time and energy you put into creating something). Which means that we often have to pull an Odysseus, and wheel out the Trojan Horse in order to get people to actually consider what it is we're trying to sell.

This video is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I've spent the past year and change writing books for my "Sundara: Dawn of a New Age" fantasy RPG setting, but it can be like pulling teeth trying to get people interested in the project. Even if they play either Pathfinder Classic or Dungeons and Dragons 5E. Even if they've complained they wish they had a different setting to play in. Even if they're fans of my past work. As soon as you say, "Hey, I have a new setting for sale," they scroll on by like I tried to reach for their wallets through their monitors.

That's where this video comes in. It's content marketing, plain and simple.

This video lets the audience see me, the creator. It lets them hear my voice, and makes them acknowledge that a real person was behind this product. I kept it conversational and low-key, just like I was talking with someone around a gaming table. And while my purpose is to get people interested in the Sundara setting, and buy links are provided in the description, I focus on talking about how I removed alignment from the game, and on showing players the possibilities this creates, while also discussing how difficult this would have been to do in a setting that wasn't being built from the ground up. All of that because I want people to engage with the discussion about this setting, and to get them interested in seeing what it has to offer.

You could argue that's less than honest, as at the end of the day the goal is still to get people to buy copies of these splats. However, Shakespeare gotta get paid, son, and if just saying, "I made this cool RPG setting, please give it a look and consider buying a copy of your own?" doesn't move books then I have to do something else. And if that something else is learning how to make videos (a skill I am still trying to come to grips with) in order to come at my potential audience from an unexpected angle, then that's what I'm going to have to do.

Do I want to do that, necessarily? No, not really. It takes a lot of time, effort, and energy to write scripts, rehearse, set up my space, get my cat to be quiet, figure out my tone, edit out flubs, do reshoots, and so on, and so forth. If I had 500-1,000 people (not really a big audience) who were willing to buy a copy of every RPG splat, novel, or collection I released whenever it dropped, chances are good that I wouldn't be making videos on the topic. I probably wouldn't write as many blogs trying to boost my own signal, or spend quite so much time sharing links to all my stuff on social media hoping to bump my earnings high enough to pay my bills at the end of the month. Instead I'd be banging away on the next splat book, the next novel, etc.

But I don't have that audience. And since just showing up and saying, "I've written this book, this is what it's about, here's a free sample so you can decide for yourself if you like it," doesn't do the job, it's time to pull out a marketing gimmick. Because, and this is the truth of the matter, if they didn't get results then we wouldn't use them.

Incidentally, for those who did enjoy the above video, consider subscribing to the Azukail Games YouTube channel. It looks like I'm going to be putting up content their for the foreseeable future, and if we can hit that 1k subscribers and 4k watched hours of content in the past year mark then the publisher it going to be a lot more likely to let me do bigger, more involved productions than the relatively short videos I've been putting up there for the past little while.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing!

If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

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