Anything CAN Happen With Your Book (But That Doesn't Mean It WILL)

When you create something, it's possible that this is the one that breaks big. Maybe your novel gets people to really pay attention to you as a writer, and it becomes a major sensation. Perhaps the next video you put out goes viral, and you end up with millions of views, and an overnight audience. Maybe this episode of your podcast, or audio drama, just happens to explode, and it puts a lot of cash in your pocket.

However, the keyword here is possible. The problem arises when you, as a creator, operate on the belief that just because something can happen, then it's going to happen. Because that is where you start getting tripped up, and running into serious problems.

17 Black... what were the odds?

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!

Better To Have A Plan You Don't Need

We've all had those daydreams where we imagine ourselves as massive successes. We contemplate how many copies we could move at a convention, and we fantasize about how nice it would be to just write all day without worrying about bills. Those of us who treat our writing as a job will take it a step further and research keywords, marketing strategies, trends in the genre, and we'll put together plans for how we're going to reach our target audience. And a lot of us will try to build momentum by putting out small samples of our work, building our audience, and trying to snowball interest.

But even if you workshop your plan, massage your metrics, and come up with a plan that looks perfect on paper, that's no guarantee that it's going to work. And that is important for you to acknowledge.

Well, it's not quite what I was expecting...

Just because you have an interview with a prominent YouTuber or TikToker, that's no guarantee their audience is going to buy your book. Just because you have a large newsletter, that doesn't mean it will translate to large sales. You could have amazing artwork on your cover, a prominent booth space at a convention, and so on, and so forth... none of these things will guarantee that your creation is going to find the audience you need, or that you'll make enough sales to turn this into your career.

As such, it's important to use the Cheese Cloth Method when it comes to actually selling your book.

Think back to when Covid first became a pandemic. Social distancing was one of the first methods to avoid transmission and spread. However, it wasn't always possible, and even then there were people who still got infected. Masking was also used as a way to prevent the spread of the disease, as well, stopping the infected from exhaling germs, and preventing the uninfected from taking in a viral load with their next breath. When the vaccine came out, it represented another way to prevent people from getting infected in the first place.

Individually, any one of these things might fail. But the more layers of protection that were put in place, the more defenses one had against the sickness. Consider your marketing strategy the same way. Because any one aspect of your strategy may fail, or simply not get the results you want. However, if you put together a layered approach then you're more likely to get the results you want.

But it's important to remember that more likely is also not the same as guaranteed. Even if you put in the work, and do your best to come up with all the possible angles, there's still a chance that you don't get the results you wanted... but you've got a better chance of getting there if you have a plan.

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. 

"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 Don't Have an Author Newsletter Yet, You Really Should

There are a lot of tools out there for authors to try to reach readers, and it can sometimes feel overwhelming. Most of us are on a handful of different social media platforms, we're usually running our own websites, and trying to maintain networks of reviewers and contacts, so adding even one more thing to juggle can feel like it's overwhelming.

With that said, I'd highly recommend all authors start a newsletter of some variety. Because while it does take time, effort, and energy, it can generate some pretty positive results when you're on a shoestring budget.

Don't spend money if it won't make you money, after all.

This is a piece of advice that I resisted for a long time, because it just felt like so much work for a minimal amount of return. Now, of course, you can sign up for my weekly newsletter to make sure you don't miss any of my fresh releases!

Why the change? Well...

It's a Free Way To Avoid The Algorithm

At its core, a newsletter gives your readers a way to earmark your content, and to get it sent straight to their inboxes. This helps you form a supply line from your keyboard to their eyeballs, ensuring that they don't forget about you, or miss anything that's going on with your new releases, your convention schedule, etc. Because whether I've released a new book like my short story collection The Rejects or a novel like my cat noir mystery Marked Territory, or I've written a new article like 5 Tips For Creating Better Fantasy Towns and Cities, everyone on my newsletter finds out about this shiny new content in my weekly wrap-ups.

At least 4 releases a week, every week.

While my newsletter isn't the only place I talk about these things, it is the only place that's a direct line from me, to the audience. Social media and search engines are good tools to use to get discovered, but when you're at the mercy of the algorithm and random page refreshing you might find that only a small percentage of people actually see the posts you make. Which means either the posts fall through the cracks, or you need to repeat yourself pretty often. Whereas those who opt-in to your email list get a clear message right in their inbox to be certain they didn't miss anything.

I use Mail Chimp for my newsletter, and I'd recommend it as a good starting spot. It's free up to the point where you have several thousand people on your list, and at that point your newsletter should be generating enough revenue to more than pay for itself.

The Key is Growing Your List

As with anything else meant to boost your signal, the key is to get people to actually sign up. Sounds easy, but as we all know it can be anything but.

So how do you do it?

I don't have ALL the answers... but here are some of them.

First things first, promote that list on your existing platforms. If you scroll down the page, you'll see I have a static sign-up box below. I also linked the subscribe feature above in this very post, and it tends to show up in most blogs I write. If you have a blog, a YouTube channel, or anywhere else you share content, put this front and center so people can easily sign up. You can offer them an incentive as well, like a coupon or short-term perk, if you really want to drive your numbers.

Something else you can do from the comfort of your own home is that when you send out an existing newsletter, you'll get a link to display it. Share that link far and wide on your social media channels, and remind people who see it they can just hit the Subscribe button to sign up from that page. This is basically treating your newsletter as a piece of fresh content, and you'd be surprised at how often it works to bring new readers into the fold.

With the end of the pandemic in sight, you can also take your sign-up list to conventions and similar events once more. So if someone comes to your table and buys a book, or gushes about your setup, get them to leave you their name and email address. After a few days of networking, it's pretty common to have half a page to a page of new subscribers just waiting to be entered into your list.

Why You Need a Big List

You're going to need a big list. First and foremost because the more people you can reach out to, the further your signal travels, and the more attention your work gets. However, another reason is because while some folks are going to be active readers who devour everything you put out, others won't be. Some folks will honestly forget why they signed up, finding it easier to just delete your messages unopened instead of unsubscribing. Some will get caught in the spam filter, and go unseen. My personal experience is that 25-30 percent of folks on your list will be active readers, with a few folks getting caught by various shots as time goes on.

There doesn't seem to be a way to target only the rabid fans with this method, either. So cast that net, catch as many fish as possible, and understand that there's going to be occasional tires, license plates, and plastic bottles in there along with all the fish you were aiming for.

It might be frustrating, but the fish you did catch are still good. Throw that net enough times, and you'll soon have a hold full of readers ready and eager for more!

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, 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!