"Just Write Another Book" Is Not A Marketing Strategy

 If you spend any amount of time on writing forums, social media pages dedicated to helping writers, or if you go to writing and fiction conventions, you are bound to see an old head out there who is giving the same advice to every, single marketing-related question out there. And like so many pieces of advice, it might look good on the surface, until you stop and think about it. That advice

"The best advertisement for your current book is your next book!"

This might sound good. It might feel motivating to you. If you just keep writing, then success will eventually come your way! However, in the modern day where we're trying to write and sell books, it's pure horseshit... worse, it can make you dig yourself into a hole that you can't dig out of.

Take an entire spoonful of salt whenever you hear this.

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!

Some Reasons They Say This

The reason this advice always seems to come from older folks is that this advice was sort of viable when many of them started their writing careers. If you were a novelist several decades ago, for example, it wasn't uncommon for you to receive an advance on your book if you had a mid-sized or larger publisher. So even if you never sold a copy, or you only sold enough copies to cover your advance, you still got paid. Not only that, but you got paid when you handed in the manuscript and it was approved for going into production. So if you were a good writer with a fast turnaround, you could (at least in theory) earn yourself a pretty fat check at least once a year for a new book, even if your last book was sagging in sales. And if you did that often enough, usually royalties would start stacking up sooner or later.

Additionally, a lot of them come from an era where the marketing landscape was very different than today. Some of the really old writers (or those who worked with major publishers), actually had companies that marketed their books on their behalf. They would set authors up with interviews in magazines, or on radio and TV shows. They would run ads for new books, and ensure that periodicals talking about new releases mentioned their books. And even writers who only go back a few decades into the 90s remember a time when you could have a newsletter with a few thousand people on it, or a mildly active social media presence, and that ensured you had a vibrant, growing fan base. It wasn't a full time job that got in the way of you actually working on your next manuscript.

And in those worlds, yeah, adding a new title into the mix might just be what you needed to stir up the waters, and get people coming back to you. But not only do those worlds not exist anymore, writing another book was never a viable plan for selling something you already have on the market.

Why It's Full of Shit

Firstly, we need to talk about the gambler's fallacy. For those who aren't familiar with it, the idea is that if an event has happened less frequently in the past than average, then surely it will occur more frequently in the future to balance out the odds. Put another way, if your current book should have sold well according to projections, but didn't, then surely your next book will overperform, and that will be a net positive for you!

Unfortunately, it's a fallacy. If your odds of a book being successful are 1 in 10,000, and your first book didn't come up a winner, the odds for your second book aren't any better. More to the point, though, even if your second book does sell better, there's no guarantee that anyone who reads your second book will go back and buy your first book. So you could follow this advice, write a really successful second book, and then the needle doesn't budge at all for titles you already have in your archive.

More to the point, though, you already have a book you're trying to sell!

I need sales NOW, not in 1-3 years!

At the end of the day, this whole idea of writing another book to get attention on your first book is just hope. That's all it is. There's no data to back it up, there's no numbers to it, it's just a piece of homespun wisdom that worked out for a handful of people, so they decided to keep touting it. And even if it didn't work for them, they know it worked for other people, so clearly it's a, "60% of the time it works every time," kind of situation.

A real marketing strategy is a plan. It has steps, it has verifiable things you can do, and most importantly it is focused on selling the book you already wrote and have available on the market!

Some aspects of an actual marketing strategy might include things like:

- Run a digital giveaway to get attention on the title.

- Buying limited Amazon ads the first month of release.

- Getting your book into the hands of reviewers who will tell their audiences about it.

- Plugging it on social media, in blogs, or in videos that you make.

- Bringing the book to conventions, particularly if you are going to be on panels as an author.

Now, there is no guarantee that these steps will make your book a bestseller either. Perhaps the convention you go to is a bust, and the audience just isn't into your genre. Maybe your Amazon ads target the wrong keywords, or your book came out at a time when there was a boycott on. Maybe the reviewers you picked didn't like your book, or their audiences had a lukewarm response. Maybe the social media algorithm suppressed your signal so only a handful of your friends and family actually saw you post about your new book.

Nothing is guaranteed. However, think of your marketing plan as the cheese cloth method. While there are gaps in every individual layer, the more layers you have, the more likely you are to have some kind of success. Because each thing you do is likely ro reach someone, and if you reach enough someones, then your book will find an audience who will buy it, review it, and talk about it with their friends.

None of this is to say that you shouldn't get to work on writing your next book, or working on your next project, as soon as possible. But acknowledge that if you didn't do the marketing for your first book, writing a second book that you aren't going to do the marketing for just looks like you're doubling down on a losing proposal.

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)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

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, as well as my Rumble channel listed 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 sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, 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 Want To Improve Your Network, Offer People Genuine Help

Last week I experienced an incident that I wanted to share with folks out there. This is far from the first of its kind, but because it's fresh in my mind I thought I'd use it as the Ur example of a certain kind of behavior that damages you, your image, and your attempts to network. And then, once I've laid out the mistakes, I wanted to talk about how this could have worked better.

Names will be omitted. Because while I found this annoying, I don't want this to be read as a callout, but rather than as an object lesson.

I see you need some help. Have you read my book about successful marketing?

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!

I Was Minding My Own Business on Twitter...

As with most other creators out there, I'm active on as many social media platforms as I can manage. And though Twitter is by far the one I use the least at present (and it's experienced some, shall we say, trying times of late), I still try to get on there a couple times a week. I'm also not a stranger to unprompted messages, but like most authors, a majority of what I receive on that site is just slop and spam. The English is riddled with grammatical errors, the sender clearly hasn't read my book despite trying to praise it, and at the end there's a post laying out their fee to help me with promotion.

Those are easy enough to recognize, report as spam, and delete.

But sometimes I get a different type of message. These messages come from someone who has at least read some of my posts, figured out what my book is about, and they seem to come from a place where the sender does want to help. The problem is that their idea of helping is to offer me a copy of their marketing guide for selling more books, to ask if I'd like to write a guest spot on their blog, or something else that basically asks me to do some free labor on their part that might, possibly, potentially, if the stars align properly, maybe help me get more eyes on my books. Eventually.

I swear this will TOTALLY work... trust me!

This is its own, special kind of frustrating, particularly because I'm sure the other party thinks they're genuinely trying to help. So if you are someone out there who has been on the other end of this equation, I need you to understand in all seriousness that you are not helping. You are, in fact, making things worse.

What Help Looks Like

I want to clarify for everyone out there that, yes, offering help is a great way to expand your network. People like people who offer them a hand up, or who try to make their workload a little bit lighter. However, it's important to ask if what you're doing is actually helping that person, or just taking up bandwidth they probably don't have to spare... because if that's the case, you have likely burned a bridge before it was even built.

Huh... I wonder why it keeps falling down?

The questions you need to ask yourself go as follows:

Are You Offering A Specific Solution?

Generalities like, "You should try marketing on Blue Sky!" are not helpful. However, saying, "When you make a promotional post on FB, add a picture rather than just a link, because the site will suppress it if there's just a link preview," is an extremely helpful, specific solution to a problem. So is, "Hey, this subreddit/FB group/forum I post on loves welcoming writers. We have a three-posts-a-week promotion policy, so come over there and tag me in, and I'll help you boost your signal!"

The more specific the advice you're giving, and the more actionable it is, the more useful it will be.

Are You Asking This Person To Do One More Thing?

There is a simple truth among writers in general, and among authors in particular... most of us already have a full plate of stuff. I have 3 different social media sites I do promotion on every single day, with a 4th added into the mix every now and again. I run two different blogs, regularly turn out TTRPG supplements, make at least 1 fresh video a week, and a slew of other nonsense... I do not have the ability to add one more plate to spin among all this other nonsense I'm currently doing.

It is not helpful to tell a person who is already operating at their maximum capacity that they should try doing something else, or by giving them a homework assignment (suggesting they build a whole new platform utterly unrelated to their work, ghost blog for someone else, etc.). This is when stepping in and offering to do actual labor on their behalf is giving genuine help. Offering to share around a link to someone's book, blog, or channel, for example, is helpful. Even inviting someone onto a podcast, or to be interviewed as a guest on a YouTube channel, is helpful because you are offering them the use of your platform. Even if that platform isn't very big, this is an actionable, helpful gesture you can make.

Did They Ask For This Help?

Most creators are not shy about asking explicitly for what we need from people. Watch any YouTube video, and you'll see the host tell you to like, share, subscribe, and hit that bell. They aren't doing that for their health; it's because those actions are what tell the algorithm this channel is gaining traction, and it should be promoted to more people with similar interests. It's why authors ask you to please share their posts about new book debuts and sales, and why we all but beg people to review our stuff when they read it.

Before you reach out with an offer of help, ask if your help is on the list of things they asked for. Because even if you aren't making more work for them, and even if your solution is specific, there's a good chance they're asking for X, Y, and Z for a reason. So even if you can offer to do more, consider also doing these basic things as a sign of good faith. Authors are far more likely to listen to someone who followed their page, engaged with their posts, and shared some things to help boost their signal before trying to contact them than they are to respond positively to a random message in their inbox. Especially if that message isn't offering to help them shoulder their workload, or is demanding a fee we likely can't afford.

We Would Like Help... We Really Would...

Creators cannot, at the end of the day, make themselves successful. Every person out there who makes a living as a creator, whether they write novels, blogs, TTRPGs, make YouTube videos, or one of a thousand other things, is only successful because of the support of their backers. And for those of us who don't have big publishers, record labels, etc. helping boost our signal, we depend on people in our audience, as well as fellow creators, to help lift us up.

So, at the end of the day, you are never to big to accept a helping hand... but before you reach out, make sure what you're doing is actually going to be a real, material help, rather than unasked for advice, or a homework assignment from a stranger on the Internet. Because, and I feel I can speak for all creators on this, we are really tired of those things.

Support The Literary Mercenary

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

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

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

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

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, as well as my Rumble channel listed 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 sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, 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!

To Survive in Today's Markets Readers Need To Care About You (Not Just Your Books)

There's this weird habit that almost every writer I've ever met has where we put our work out on center stage while keeping ourselves in the shadows as much as possible. The idea, from what I've managed to gather, is that writers as a whole want to tell a story without ever actually talking to anyone. Unfortunately, that's a good way of shooting yourself in the foot in today's climate.

 

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Because when people make a purchase, they aren't just in it for your story. They want that, don't get me wrong, but it is equally important to readers and fans these days that they know their money is going to you, personally. And it helps if they like you as a person, before they get into whether they appreciate what it is you're making.

Don't Be Afraid To Step Out of The Shadows

I touched on this back in Your Brand is Just as Important as Your Books, but there's something that got lost in the messaging on that article. Because while it's true that people may choose to stop buying your books because of the positions you take and statements you make as a creator (Rowling, Card, and it's looking like Martin if things keep going the way they're going), what I didn't say is the reverse is also true. People may be drawn to you as a creator first, and then discover they like your books second.

I have found thee worthy of mine patronage, and skilled as well.

Part of this is about people being far more concerned with where their money is going, and what causes it's being used to support these days. However, another part of it is that when you establish a connection with your fans and readers they are more likely to want to invest in you. It sounds counterintuitive, and it goes against the grain for a lot of writers. We want to be rewarded because we wrote a good story, after all, and it feels somehow backwards if readers are supporting us because they like who we are and what we stand for instead of the thing we've created. We want to be paid for the art we made, not just because of who we are.

Something that's worth keeping in mind, though, is that the money is no less real or genuine because it came from someone who wants to support you as a creator. If someone hears about you in an interview and wants to sign up to your Patreon because they liked the vibes you were putting out, you still get that check at the end of the month.

At the end of the day the reason why people choose to support you is less important than the fact that they have chosen to support you in the first place.

Don't Be Shy

In a perfect world we could just write out books, put them on the market, and find our audience through the proper application of key words and hash tags. However, the idea that any author has ever actually gotten successful by just sitting back and letting their books do the talking is a fairy tale. As it's so often said, Dickens was constantly doing public readings to hustle his books. Shakespeare was a workaday pen monkey, rather than some brilliant mind setting the mold for centuries to come. And a majority of the well-known authors we see on the market today? Well, you should ask how large the apparatus is for getting them reviewed, interviewed, and out in front of the public, as well as how much effort goes into creating their social media persona.

Because writing good books is definitely important, but it is far from the only thing you have to do in order to be successful.

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 sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

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!